Bold voice for the silent

An assistant bounds into George C. Wolfe’s office, the nerve center of the Public Theater in downtown Manhattan, to tell him that Harry Belafonte is on line 2. And by the way, is there anything he’d like from the deli on this chilly winter afternoon?

“Yeah, I need some crack,” the director-producer says, a provocateur’s smile spreading across his lips.

The “crack” comes in the form of a tall soy chai, a late-afternoon pick-me-up for a man who rarely appears to need infusions of caffeine or anything else. “Intense” is a word frequently applied to the Tony-winning director (“Angels in America,” “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk”) and powerful producer of the Public’s five intimate stages.

“George is one of the most intense artists I know, and we’ve had some very tough conversations,” says Mara Manus, the Public’s executive director and former L.A.-based movie producer who was recruited a couple of years ago to restructure the theater’s institutional vision and to prepare for its coming 50th anniversary. “But that intensity is always about the work, not about ego.”

Today, with Wolfe on the cusp of 50, that intensity seems to be on hold. The one-time boy wonder is relaxed, reflective, even playful, perched on a couch in an office decorated with show posters, the occasional Tony Award peeking out from the clutter. And why not? Wolfe is on a roll again after a rough period during which the high-profile, back-to-back Broadway flops of “On the Town” and “The Wild Party” robbed the not-for-profit of nearly $10 million of its endowment and led to severe media criticism of Wolfe’s judgment.

In recent years, the Public has rebounded with the Tony-winning shows “Elaine Stritch at Liberty” and Richard Greenberg’s “Take Me Out” as well as Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning “Topdog/Underdog,” a production of which opens this week at the Mark Taper Forum. Moreover, the Public’s production of “Caroline, or Change,” the new Tony Kushner-Jeanine Tesori musical, has announced a Broadway transfer in April.

About the same time, Wolfe will begin filming his first movie project: the HBO adaptation of “Lackawanna Blues,” Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s memoir of his forceful adoptive mother who operated a boarding house for lost souls in upstate New York. The play was developed at the Public in 2001 as a one-person show, but the movie will feature a cast of dozens. The call from Belafonte, in fact, came in response to Wolfe’s overture for the legendary black actor to participate in the film.

As the director of “At Liberty,” “Topdog” and “Caroline,” Wolfe has solidified his reputation as one of American theater’s preeminent showmen, in league with such giants as Harold Prince, Mike Nichols and, of course, the late Joseph Papp, legendary founder of the Public Theater, whose original mandate to nurture new artists was assumed by Wolfe in 1993.

As brusque and opinionated as Papp, Wolfe also inherited his predecessor’s bold -- if not always unerring -- instinct for the adventurous. That has attracted artists as variable as Nichols, who directed an all-star production in 2002 of “The Seagull” for the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park, to rapper Mos Def, who starred in productions including Parks’ “Topdog.” But some critics have accused Wolfe of having a sociopolitical agenda that has undercut the integrity of his choices.

Wolfe bristles at the criticism. “I happen to be a gay man, I happen to be a person of color. But when Joe [Papp] did ‘For Colored Girls,’ he was this evolved white man. When I do Suzan-Lori Parks, I have an agenda. When Joe did ‘Normal Heart,’ he was an evolved straight man. When I do ‘Take Me Out,’ I have an agenda. It’s not about circumventing or redefining anything that is white on the Great White Way but expanding the definition to include as many people as possible.”

Wolfe served notice that he would do that in unorthodox ways from the beginning of his career, making a splash at the Public in 1986 with his own play, “The Colored Museum,” a satire that took on many of the African American community’s sacred cows. He says that he looks for this same subversive quality in the artists he presents at the Public.

“I’m attracted to artists who constantly challenge themselves. I’m just wired that way,” says Wolfe, who graduated from Pomona College. “I was shocked when some black people wanted to protest ‘The Colored Museum,’ but I was also aware that when I was writing it, there was my little demon on the shoulder whispering, ‘Go ahead, go ahead.’ I still feel responsible to bring something else into the room -- whether the room wants it or not.’

That happened with “Topdog,” Parks’ atmospheric tale of two brothers, cruelly named Lincoln and Booth by their abusive parents, who act out a dark biblical tale in a ramshackle room. In the Taper production, Larry Gilliard Jr. and Harold Perrineau will portray the siblings, one a petty thief, the other a former con man who has taken a job as an Abe Lincoln impersonator (in white face) in a shooting gallery. “It’s a monster of a play,” Wolfe says, “and it demands virtuosity in every single line.”

Wolfe adds that the rave reviews and Pulitzer Prize that greeted “Topdog” in 2002 and accounted for its Broadway transfer and Tony nomination as best play were vindication for his early championing of Parks’ work. “Members were very hostile to ‘The America Play,’ ” he says of a Parks work he presented in his first season at the Public. “Now they can hardly wait to see her next one.”

An eye on the bottom line

For more than a decade, Wolfe has pivoted between art and commerce in a balancing act that is the boon and bane of every not-for-profit, but in his case is more in the public eye than most. For one, just before he was made producer at the Public, Wolfe had experienced the white-hot commercial Broadway arena with back-to-back successes of “Jelly’s Last Jam” and “Angels in America.” At the time of his accession, “A Chorus Line,” which had fattened the Public’s coffers by tens of millions of dollars, had just finished its long run as cash cow, thereby drying up that source of potential revenue.

Given that scenario, Wolfe has gained a reputation for having one eye always cocked on Broadway. “I don’t think he’s been excessive, but he hasn’t always been as wise as he could be,” says Charles Isherwood, theater critic at Variety. “Since he’s also directed the productions under consideration, he doesn’t have the distance to assess, as head of the theater, the commercial potential of these shows. The spectacular failures of ‘On the Town’ and ‘Wild Party’ made it look like he was fairly rash in that regard.”

When the two productions are brought up, Wolfe rolls his eyes and animatedly flicks the imaginary abacus in his head. “My two flops! My two flops!” he exclaims. “I would just like to point out that ‘On the Town’ and ‘Wild Party’ lost $9 [million] or $10 million. ‘Take Me Out’ moving to Broadway, ‘Noise/Funk’ moving to Broadway and going on tour, ‘The Tempest’ transfer with Patrick Stewart -- all these brought into this institution $7.5 million. So in terms of audience interest, a couple of Pulitzers here and there, Tonys here and there, and all the energy and excitement generated, I’d say that $2.5 million was well spent, thank you very much.”

Since those debacles, the Public has left the commercial transfers to other producers, notably Carole Shorenstein Hays, the San Francisco-based producer, known for presenting challenging drama on Broadway. “Topdog,” “Take Me Out” and now “Caroline” are among her projects, the latter two having been developed at the Public with sizable enhancement money from Hays. She has reportedly made substantial donations to the Public as well.

“My mission is to make sure the voices of American writers are heard throughout the country,” she says, “so it stands to reason to look to George and the Public. He’s absolutely relentless in that struggle.”

The announcement that “Caroline, or Change” would be transferring to Broadway raised a lot of eyebrows. The show by Kushner (“Angels in America”) and Tesori (“Thoroughly Modern Millie”) opened last December to mixed notices, though star Tonya Pinkins was widely praised for her performance in the title role. Most critically, Ben Brantley, writing in the New York Times, was unenthusiastic about the show, though that was ameliorated by Frank Rich’s admiring essay on “Caroline” on the following Sunday.

Nonetheless, few are sanguine that Broadway will be hospitable to the wildly original but modest chamber opera with no major stars and a plot revolving around a Jewish boy and his troubled, unsparing relationship with a dyspeptic black maid in 1963 Louisiana.

Yet shortly after “Caroline” opened, Hays and Wolfe mounted a fierce campaign to move the show, no doubt aided by “Caroline” opening just as the HBO movie of Kushner’s “Angels in America” was being received with rapturous reviews. In fact, HBO was enlisted to commit $1 million to the transfer, investing in Broadway for the first time and joining with two dozen other producers for the $6-million investment that is considered one of the riskiest bets of the season.

Colin Callender, president of HBO Films, notes that HBO’s investment in the Broadway transfer of “Caroline” is uniquely guided by its relationship with Kushner, whose play “Homebody/Kabul” is also being adapted into an HBO movie. “You have to take a leap of faith about the work,” he says. “Who’d have thought a six-hour ‘Angels’ would be a serious commercial proposition?”

That “Lackawanna” and “Caroline” -- also a possible HBO project, Callender says -- may bring Wolfe his largest audiences yet seems like a poetic justice of sorts. They encapsulate themes that first galvanized him growing up in segregated Frankfort, Ky., the self-described “golden child” raised by his doting elders to be “smarter and tougher” than his white brethren because of the skewed expectations of racism. Wolfe recalls that the power of theater came to him in fifth grade, when a teacher, Minnie J. Hitch, directed the children’s chorus to punch out words in a song they were to sing before a white PTA audience: “These truths we are declaring/ that all men are the same/ that liberty’s a torch burning with a steady flame.”

“She told us that if we did that, we would shatter the audience’s resistance to integration and black people,” Wolfe says, smiling at the memory. “And it was just so incredibly wonderful and ridiculous that somebody could tell you that the power of language and performance and your commitment to those two things could change the world. When Minnie Hitch died, I clipped out her obituary from the local paper.”

Breaking barriers

Wolfe learned two other valuable lessons at segregation’s door that have influenced his Public tenure: that once he got his foot in the door, he had a responsibility to open the door for the less-advantaged and that he had to tax his imagination to put himself, a young black boy, into the stories of the predominantly white characters emanating from film and TV. “I learned that it didn’t have to look like me to be about me,” he says.

Indeed, Wolfe’s mission to create a theater that reflects the world outside the doors of the Public has brought charges that he has lowered the bar when it comes to minority playwrights, presenting work that is simply not ready for prime time. “When I first got here, I admit that I was very naive; I was just so excited to find a really unique voice,” he says. “But our process has since become very rigorous. A play can be in development here for several years -- ‘Caroline’ was here for nearly five.”

Wolfe shrinks from the word “multiculturalism” as too inadequate and too loaded to accurately describe the Public’s mandate. “I don’t call it multiculturalism, I call it reality,” he says. “I’m perpetually intrigued when the theater does not reflect the world that we live in. There is no ‘diversity’ mission here, and I resent the fact that policies and grants are created to legitimize a kind of work that needs no legitimacy.”

Sept. 11, Wolfe says, has radically broken down these ethnic and socioeconomic barriers by making everyone vulnerable. “Viewing ourselves from one vantage point is no longer valid emotionally, politically or culturally,” he says. “When something like this happens, it creates two different impulses in you. One is to shut down -- make the weapons bigger, the walls higher. Or it can create this emotional and empathetic impulse to try to know others.”

Wolfe says the hard knocks of the past decade -- the death of his mother, a kidney transplant and the snipings from the press -- have served to make him “smarter and tougher.” Hays says she hopes it’s also made him mellower. When she is reminded that Wolfe failed to get a Tony nomination as best director for “Topdog” even though its success was in large part because of his sure theatrical touch, Hays says, “George does such strong work and is so outspoken and I think he pays a price for that. Maybe turning 50 will make him wiser. I just think of him as being very strong and very vulnerable at the same time.”

The director doesn’t seem to be buying the mellow part; it just doesn’t gel with what he calls his “warrior image.” But he does concede that his sense of play, the 2-year-old that he reverts to being in the rehearsal room, may be moving more center stage these days. He recalls that on a recent visit to his Kentucky home, he found an old magazine with a cover story on the Broadway revival of “No, No, Nanette,” a Depression-era musical featuring chorines balanced on beach balls. He was amazed, he says, that at a time when the world was exploding with political and social ferment and plays like Clifford Odets’ fiery “Waiting for Lefty,” that in another corner of the world audiences were flocking to see such a piece of fluff.

“Of course,” he says, with a wicked smile, “I’m that bizarre little creature who’d like to figure out how to put the characters of ‘Waiting for Lefty’ on beach balls, so that the audience would show up and in the process really hear what they were saying.”

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‘Topdog/Underdog’

Where: Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: Opens Thursday. Runs Tuesday to Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m.

Ends: March 28

Price: $33 to $47

Contact: (213) 628-2772