COVER STORY : Forget Jelly, George is Jammin’ : George C. Wolfe is right on schedule with New York’s Public Theater. His first two seasons were trial runs. Now Wolfe tackles the critical third season--you know, the one in which the blossoming takes place.

Doors have of ten played a central role in George C. Wolfe’s produc tions. “Up for Grabs,” which he wrote and directed as a student at Pomona College, saw a young black man metamorphose from corporate executive to revolutionary to superhero as he moved through a revolving door.

“Jelly’s Last Jam,” Wolfe’s 1991 Broadway musical about Jelly Roll Morton, used an upstage door as a portal through which figures of the jazz great’s past are evoked to tell his bitter story.

In “Blade to the Heat,” Oliver Mayer’s new play that Wolfe directed as the season opener for the New York Shakespeare Festival at the Public Theater, he used a door as a kind of stylistic opening to the insulated world of a 1959 Los Angeles boxing ring and its battered Latino and black fighters.

“You know, there wasn’t a door in ‘Jelly’s’ when I did it in L.A.,” Wolfe said, referring to the 1991 production at the Mark Taper Forum that he wrote and directed before its Broadway appearance. The idea for the door, he explained, came about when he took a trip to Senegal and visited one of the main embarkation points where Africans were shipped out to America to become slaves.

“It was a very cerebral experience until I came to a door, what remained of a wharf on the site,” Wolfe said. “And suddenly I became very emotional. I got it. On one side of that door, those people were their own definition. They had an existence. But once they went through that door, they became all these other people’s definitions--slave, nigger, coon, African American--contrived, convoluted, negative-positive definitions of who they are.

“There is always a desire, but one can never ever go back through that door. And so you have this dramatic tension. It’s Jelly’s story but it’s really the story of America, the story of the immigrant experience, whether you’re talking about the pilgrims or the Irish or the Italians, or Latinos or whomever. That’s what theater can do: open the door on those experiences.”

Now that the Broadway production of “Jelly’s Last Jam” is finally on its national tour, West Coast audiences will have a chance to see Wolfe’s interpretation of one man’s life on the other side of that door. (The show plays Nov. 29-Dec. 4 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa before moving in January to the McCallum Theatre in Palm Desert, the Pasadena Civic and possibly San Diego.)

But capturing those stories of America has taken on an even greater urgency for the 40-year-old writer-director since he himself first went through the revolving doors into the Public Theater, in 1987, with his play “The Colored Museum,” a satire of black stereotypes. With that production he emerged as one of the hottest young talents in the American theater.

At the time, Wolfe was just the new kid on the block, a comer who was to score big on Broadway four years later with the musical “Jelly’s Last Jam.” He followed that triumph with multiple Tony-winning Broadway productions of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” Parts 1 and 2, after replacing Oskar Eustis, who directed “Angels” at the Mark Taper Forum.

And in March, 1993, he took on what is one of the most prized jobs in show business: the directorship of the Public, replacing JoAnne Akalaitis, whose stormy tenure there followed the death of the Public’s late, much-revered founder, Joseph Papp.

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Wolfe is now in the thick of his third season at the Public, but this year marks his first full test as producer.

At the time of his appointment, he was still rehearsing “Millennium Approaches,” the first part of “Angels in America,” on Broadway, with the second part, “Perestroika,” due to open the following fall. In addition, he had on his agenda directing the national touring productions of both “Jelly” and “Angels,” which will come to the Doolittle Theatre next summer. Now that these shows are touring, they can only heighten his already high profile as producer of the Public.

Expectations of the Public Theater are high because it is considered one of the most influential and powerful forces in American theater. Founded by Joseph Papp in a church basement 40 years ago, the theater first produced such acclaimed yet diverse musicals as “Hair,” “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” “Pirates of Penzance” and “A Chorus Line,” and it nurtured the early careers of now-famous playwrights such as Sam Shepard, Ntozake Shange, David Rabe and David Hare and actors including Raul Julia, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Kline and Meryl Streep. All that, while its mandate is still to be the preeminent producer of Shakespeare in this country--established by its traveling shows in the barrios in the early years to the continuing free summer productions in Central Park at the Delacorte Theatre, to its present mission to produce Shakespeare’s entire 40-play canon.

Wolfe’s challenge is to integrate the commercial and artistic agendas at a theater that, according to Larry E. Condon, chairman of the theater’s executive board, is facing a financial crisis which he describes as “daunting, but not fatal.”

“While last season was not as successful as we might have wished,” Condon said recently, “what George was doing was right on target: presenting daring new work, like (Suzan Lori-Parks’) ‘The America Play.’ There may be a lot of stress and strain and some things may not function as well as they might, but George is institutionally savvy and a fast learner. Sure, we’d like another hit like ‘A Chorus Line.’ But George knows, like Joe did, that our primary mission is in our name: Public.”

Looking at Wolfe’s lineup of the 13 productions slated for the 1994-1995 season at the Joseph Papp Public Theater and Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, there appears to be something for everyone.

In addition to the world premiere of “Blade to the Heat” by Mayer, a 29-year-old West Coast playwright and literary associate at the Mark Taper Forum, Wolfe is presenting the return of veteran Sam Shepard with his new play, “Simpatico,” featuring a glamorous cast that includes Ed Harris, Beverly D’Angelo, Fred Ward and Marcia Gay Harden; “Him,” Christopher Walken’s debut as a playwright in which the actor also stars as an Elvis Presley-like character; Broadway titan Harold Prince’s debut at the Public, directing “The Petrified Prince” by Michael John LaChiusa and Edward Gallardo; “A Language of Their Own” by Chay Yew, about a young gay Asian couple (seen at L.A.’s Celebration Theatre earlier this year); solo shows by cabaret diva Jenifer Lewis (who had a long-running hit engagement at L.A.’s Hudson Theatre) and downtown artist Danny Hoch, and, of course, Shakespeare. The 27th production in the ongoing Shakespeare marathon will be “The Merchant of Venice” with Ron Leibman. And that’s just for starters.

“The first season was to re-establish the theater,” said Wolfe, just before “Blade” was to kick off the Public’s new program earlier this month. “The second, to push it forward, the third to blossom into a vision. I think we’re on schedule.”

A reporter is ushered into Wolfe’s modest quarters half an hour after the appointed time, which appears to be par for the course. But then everything seems to be bobbing along in a state of mild-but-friendly chaos in the warren of administrative offices at the Public. “I’m the most democratic fascist you’ll ever meet,” said Wolfe. “I listen to everybody and then I make a decision.”

By his own admission, one of Wolfe’s chief failings as an administrator is his inability to delegate responsibility. “George, like Joe (Papp), is very demanding, but George is really much more accessible than Joe ever was,” said one staffer.

Dressed in khakis and a sport shirt, Wolfe is a curious mixture of aggressiveness and shyness, rather like a Mr. Peepers crossed with Ninja Warrior. He raises his voice only to issue reprimands to Chica, his Jack Russell terrier puppy, who is busy ripping apart a stuffed animal in the office.

Small-boned and bespectacled, Wolfe speaks in an amazingly fast patter--a torrent of ideas, images and concepts occasionally interrupted by a sharp, loud bark of a laugh. His staccato style reminds many people of Papp. In fact, the late founder of the Public had named Wolfe one of three resident directors in 1990, and seemed to be describing him when he talked about his ideal successor as someone with a good knowledge of the theater, music, fiscal responsibility and maturity. “Once people get past a certain age,” Papp once told the Village Voice, “a kind of cynicism sets in, a kind of worldliness. That’s OK, as long as they’re still idealistic.”

All that seems to reflect Wolfe, a romantic who speaks movingly of the transfiguring power of theater, a realist who has few illusions about being in the hot seat. No avant-garde snob, he can speak as enthusiastically about the film “Valley of the Dolls” as he can about German Expressionist theater. And he appears to integrate all the emotional contradictions and complications of a gay black man who grew up in a segregated world, achieved a cult following in inner-city Los Angeles and catapulted to fame as the first African American director of a non-black-themed Broadway hit--”Angels.”

Yet, despite the disarming facade, Wolfe is still one shrewd player. “Jelly” and “Angels” demonstrated he had the mettle necessary to create in the high-stakes pressure cooker of the commercial theater. But these uptown successes also made him suspect to the downtown not-for-profit theater crowd who, as he put it, has dubbed him “the whore of Babylon.”

“He talks the good talk and walks the good walk, but I’m not sure if he isn’t a triumph of style over substance, of hype over talent,” said one critic, who in deference to Wolfe’s power wished to remain anonymous.

Margo Lion, who produced both “Jelly’s Last Jam” and “Angels in America,” however, counters that Wolfe has been tempered in both the commercial and not-for-profit arenas, and she believes he can lead theater into the 21st Century.

“George brings a contemporary sensibility in terms of both his interests and his artistry,” she said. “He’s not somebody who wants to preach. He wants to thrill an audience, to provoke it, to stimulate it. And he does that quite bravely and daringly.”

I ndeed, Wolfe has rarely shied away from facing down the powers that be when he feels his artistic integrity is at stake. His smart and tough production of “The Colored Museum” aroused the ire of some black activists who felt that the parody was demeaning. And when he was directing “Jelly’s Last Jam,” he refused to accept pressure from the cast to tame some of the more negative and harsh aspects in the musical. In it, he unflinchingly examined the contradictions in the life of Jelly Roll Morton, a self-hating black who nonetheless drew on his African heritage to create some great music.

“There are a lot of people who will tell you I’m very ruthless,” says Wolfe. “I’m very fierce. If I feel I’m right, if I feel I’ve been violated, then I am like a warrior from hell!”

That gladiatorial spirit has come in handy in his task to bring direction and vision to a theater that was generally thought to be listing dangerously after the death of its charismatic founder in 1991. In fact, his accession at the Public came with a little bloodletting, when the board of directors fired Akalaitis, his Papp-anointed predecessor--on the Ides of March, no less--and offered Wolfe the crown. It came with the title of producer, which only Papp had held before him, creative power that Akalaitis never enjoyed.

Wolfe has brought in his own team, which now accounts for almost half of the staff. Among them is Donna Walker Collins as director of community affairs, a new department directly geared toward enlarging the scope and diversity of the Public’s audience. He has also added three new board members--Ken Lerer, Catherine P. Saxton and George W. Haywood, the latter two expressing his commitment to increasing the presence of women and people of color on the board. There have been setbacks, such as last summer’s fiasco of “Kiss Me, Kate,” which was canceled because of disagreements with the co-producers even after it had been advertised. And the Public Theater’s production of Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” had a very short run on Broadway, despite critical praise. But there is a kinetic energy on Lafayette Street that hasn’t been seen there in some time. Both donors and subscribers are significantly up over recent years.

The jury, however, is still out on whether Wolfe can combine intellectual depth with commercial savvy, as Papp did so well. “Blade to the Heat,” a boxing drama that opened earlier this month, was almost universally criticized for being short on substance, though the production itself was praised for Wolfe’s direction.

Shepard’s “Simpatico,” which opened last week, fared better with the critics, earning generally favorable reviews, though Shepard’s direction was faulted.

Yet Wolfe defended his choice for the season’s opener as exactly the sort of work to viscerally excite and stimulate the Public’s audiences. Playwright Mayer evokes the sweat-and-blood-stained boxing world of 1959 in his drama. Black and Latino fighters spar with their inner selves as much as with each other in this testosterone-soaked drama. And when the specter of homosexuality is raised, the taunting leads to murder.

“It’s a tale of fragility inside of this harsh, shifting landscape,” Wolfe said. “When I read it, I knew its power lay in its emotions much more than in its cerebral impact. But I loved what it was about, the boys’ club. When the rules of the boys’ club change--and what defines a man is constantly being challenged as we enter the ‘90s--then there’s a lot of disturbing and provocative stuff to deal with.”

A ccording to Wolfe, the Public has one overriding mandate: to present work reflective of the diverse community outside its doors. “Theater should address the stories of its communities or I don’t know why it’s here,” he said. “I want to create a theater that looks, feels and smells like America.”

As a producer, he feels that creating theater in today’s politically conservative climate provides opportunities as well as dangers. While he fears that a new round of censorship could come from the newly empowered congressional conservatives, Wolfe said that any efforts could be met by a re-energized and vigilant artistic community. He also feels that it is incumbent on artists to creatively fight against what he calls “a polarized, let’s-retreat-into-our-own-corner dynamic as a society.”

“I think it’s the last hurrah of the old order and they know it,” he said of the right’s re-emergence. “That’s why the fight is going on with such a vengeance. The question is how complicated and bloody the fight is going to be. But no matter what they do, I think there is a certain inevitability of the world spinning forward. You can’t retreat back. What are they going to do, kill off everybody that doesn’t fit into their picture of what is an American?”

Wolfe adds that another reason he wanted to direct “Blade” was because it is set in 1959, in a white Republican America in which everybody is “exactly alike--there was a distinct good and bad, a right and a wrong in the American thought process,” he says. “Now all those edges are blurring. You’ve got black people wearing blue contacts, white kids trying to become hip-hop. In America, everybody is an outsider, no matter what they might think or say.

“It’s a scary time, but it’s also an exhilarating one,” he added. “Because when ‘the party’ is falling apart, then you can help to reconfigure ‘the party’ in a very significant way. Now, all the stories that couldn’t be told before can be told.”

Wolfe’s two-fisted populism was forged early on as one of four children born to a father who worked as a state government clerk and a mother who was a grammar-school teacher and principal in Frankfort, Ky. A portrait of Addie President, Wolfe’s maternal grandmother, now holds a place of honor in his SoHo apartment, alongside cultural artifacts reflecting an interest in African spiritualism passed down by a grandmother who used to keep snakes in a jar of formaldehyde by the door.

“My grandmother made me feel safe as a human being,” he said. “If I’m an artist today, it’s because I was able to live within my childhood state for a very long time. Because I rarely left that world until I was 13 or 14, I grew up with no concept of racial inferiority.”

Addie President’s “pit-bull” energy, however, could not entirely protect her grandson from the trauma of segregation. As a black, the door of the movie house, the Capitol Theatre, in Frankfort was closed to him. It was, says Wolfe, “the defining event” in his relationship to the world.

“I don’t know what made a 7-year-old kid so threatening to the spiritual and moral fiber of the Capitol Theatre, but I’ve spent an entire life making sure that I got into any place I wanted to get into,” he says. “It was also a given that once I got into the room, I was supposed to open up the windows and doors and let in other people. I suppose if I stand still long enough, there is an incredible rage that I feel about that event, but a channeled rage can become a fuel.”

His mission as an “integration warrior,” as he describes it, took him to Pomona College in California, partly to get away from Kentucky’s cold winters and partly to immerse himself in the study of theater. His ambition was galvanized at 13, when his mother took him to New York and he saw productions of “West Side Story” at Lincoln Center and “Hello, Dolly!” with Pearl Bailey.

Wolfe now says that he is “disturbed” by the musical revival frenzy of Broadway (“Silly things done by really smart people are lots of fun; silly things done by not so smart people are really annoying”). But at the time he was hooked. “It was like, ‘People make money doing this?’ ” he recalled.

His closely held tenet that theater needed to have purpose evolved during his three-year stint at Los Angeles’ Inner City Cultural Center where, as he put it, he not only learned from “smarter, older people about theater,” but also expanded his definitions beyond the world of blacks and whites to include the Asians, gays and Latinos who were working with him there.

“I had a very hard time with Los Angeles,” he said. “I’m someone who responds very intensely to rhythms and I think you probably have to be in L.A. a long time before you get to know those rhythms peculiar to the place. I also thought that if I stayed too long I’d get much too comfortable. I had to get out of town before it became too seductive.”

Wolfe is circumspect in talking about whether the extended family that raised him in Kentucky fully accepted his homosexuality. But he does say, “for all my ambiguities and oddness, I’m claimed. That’s what I love about the black community. They’ll say, ‘Well, you know, we don’t know how we feel about that homosexuality thing, Junior. But take off that dress and come on in.’ The ownership is there.”

The sense of being Other and being claimed at the same time has given Wolfe confidence to test the boundaries of tolerance within his own circles. After leaving California, he kicked around New York for about five years before scoring with “The Colored Museum.” In the biting satire, he attacked such sacred cows as “A Raisin in the Sun.”

“I felt that what I was a part of was so strong that it could withstand my scrutiny,” he said.

The fact that Wolfe had a flop with the musical “Paradise” at Playwrights Horizons just before the success of “The Colored Museum” has only served to reinforce his pit-bull commitment to playwrights over the long haul. Oliver Mayer, who wrote “Blade,” said that he never felt hamstrung by his own background as a half-Anglo/half-Latino heterosexual to write as he felt. “George never told me what to write,” he says. “But he did encourage me to push the envelope, to be brave. He’s not limited by identity questions. He wants to know whether it’s a good play, not a black or Hispanic or Asian play. He’s interested in a good story.”

As idealistic as Wolfe is about finding and producing groundbreaking stories on the stages of the Public, he is pragmatic enough to know that money has a way of editing dreams--not only for new and experimental theater but also for Shakespeare and the classics, which are much more expensive to produce. For better or worse, the financial windfall that “A Chorus Line” provided for years at the Public has created the pressure for another cash cow to emerge from the downtown stable.

If it does, Wolfe says somewhat wearily, it will have to come from the “organic process” of presenting good work and letting the chips fall where they may. He acknowledges that taking “Twilight” to Broadway may well have been a mistake--”It was a bold move but I think it would still be running had it remained Off Broadway,” he said. However, it was the messy debacle of “Kiss Me, Kate” last summer that taught him the toughest lessons of trying to, as he put it, “graft on” relationships.

“I really thought we could get there,” he said. ‘So much of what I’ve been able to accomplish is my belief, ‘I can make this work. Full speed ahead. I can defy the obstacles.’ But sometimes you can and sometimes you can’t and it was a painful experience.”

His “warrior energy” may have been tempered by his experiences of last season, but it still appears to be at near-full throttle. “The biggest problem with this job is that it never stops,” says Wolfe. “People respond to the theater in the most personal way. It’s like a marriage between you and them and God help you if you let them down.”

While Wolfe has been praised for his “cinematic” productions, he says that he’s been much too busy in theater to devote much time to the film projects he had been developing before he was tapped for the Public. Among them were commissioned screenplays about a pygmy placed in a Bronx Zoo and a biography of Josephine Baker, which he says may first be a Broadway musical.

At present, Wolfe has a three-year contract with the Public but has initiated enough projects to keep him busy for the next decade. Though board chairman Condon says that new structures are being devised so that the Festival can run with or without Wolfe at its helm, it is clear that the producer and his fortunes are becoming almost as inextricably linked and identified with the Public as Papp’s once were.

That doesn’t leave Wolfe much time for himself, as was certainly clear from the events of last month as he turned 40. That same week, he learned that a friend had died of AIDS, a memorial service was held at the Public for Danitra Vance, an actress and close friend who’d been in the cast of “The Colored Museum,” and at a board meeting a donor had pledged what Wolfe called “a tremendous amount of money.”

Suddenly, Wolfe said, pressures and ambitions were put in the proper perspective. “You just keep going. Sometimes it rains, sometimes the sun shines. I wasn’t allowed the pure and extraordinary luxury of dealing with the emotion of it all. The stuff kept swirling around. And it will continue with or without you.”

* “Jelly’s Last Jam” runs Nov. 29-Dec. 4 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, (714) 556-ARTS, (714) 740-2000, (213) 480-3232, $19-$47; at the McCallum Theatre in Palm Desert, Jan. 20-22, 73-000 Fred Waring Drive, Palm Desert, (619) 340-ARTS, (619) 220-TIXS, $35-$55; and Pasadena Civic Auditorium, Jan. 24-29, 300 E. Green St., (818) 449-7360, (213) 480-3232. $27.50-$39 .