Robyn Goodman, the co-founder and co-artistic director of Second Stage, has announced her resignation, effective June 1.
Carole Rothman will now be the theater`s sole artistic director, and Goodman will join the theater`s board. Goodman says she has accepted a new position in the entertainment industry.
Goodman and Rothman co-founded the theater in 1979 and have produced 48 plays, including ”Coastal Disturbances” and ”Painting Churches” by Tina Howe, ”Spoils of War” by Michael Weller and plays by Lanford Wilson, Jon Robin Baitz, Harry Kondoleon and Steve Tesich.
– Larry Kramer, the writer and a co-founder of the Gay Men`s Health Crisis and the founder of ACT UP, is speaking out against the New York Shakespeare Festival`s fundraising show, ”Wednesday in the Park With Joe,”
scheduled for May 13.
Kramer`s ”Normal Heart,” the first major play about AIDS, was the longest-running play in the festival`s history. Since it opened in 1985, it has had more than 600 productions around the world.
What this means, under Kramer`s contract, is that 40 percent of all his earnings from ”The Normal Heart” goes to the Public Theatre. For better or worse, this keeps them business partners.
So when Kramer, who is still friendly with Gail Merrifield Papp, Joseph Papp`s widow, was asked to participate in the benefit and refused, it came as a surprise.
He wrote a volatile letter to the festival`s artistic director and Papp`s successor, JoAnne Akalaitis, which reads in part: ”I find it abominable that, hardly a scant few months after he has been buried, you should be using Joe`s name to raise money in order to continue what I and many consider to be your tragic mismanagement of the precious resources inadvertently placed in your care by a dying man. . . . It is dishonorable to raise money over the coffin of a dead hero when you apparently haven`t the vaguest idea how to serve his vision and keep it alive, or when you have presented no indication or manifestation of a worthwhile vision of your own to replace it.”
Akalaitis says that the benefit is an annual event at the theater and that it should not be confused with a memorial. Speaking of the Susan Stein Shiva Award, which will be presented to Papp posthumously, she says: ”It is a tribute to Joe. He also said that any event connected to his passing should benefit the theater.”
As for the letter, she says, ”I hardly know Larry Kramer, and I think the letter was quite irresponsible. He`s off-base. My vision here is a continuation and expansion of Joe`s. We have a three-part plan to produce new plays, classical works by visionary directors and designers, and to develop musical theater.
