Free for All: Joe Papp, The Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told »

Kenneth Turan has been film critic at the Los Angeles Times for more than ten years. He can also be heard every Friday morning as film critic for National Public Radio's "Morning Edition." The director of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, he lives in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan takes you behind the scenes at the Public Theater and tells the amazing story of how Joe Papp made American theatrical and cultural history.

Free for All is the irresistible oral history of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater-two institutions that under the inspired leadership of Joseph Papp have been a premier source of revolutionary and enduring American theater. To tell this fascinating story, Kenneth Turan interviewed some 160 luminaries-including George C. Scott, Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols, Kevin Kline, James Earl Jones, David Rabe, Jerry Stiller, Tommy Lee Jones, and Wallace Shawn-and masterfully weaves their voices into a dizzyingly rich tale of creativity, conflict, and achievement. And at the center of this incredibly engrossing account of artistic daring and excellence the larger-than-life figure of Joseph Papp reigns supreme.

The New York Times Book Review - Charles Isherwood

Joseph Papp, the Brooklyn-born impresario who changed the face of the American theater by founding the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater, is unquestionably a hero of the complicated kind. His story is revisited in rich, rewarding detail in…Free for All…What it may lack in currency and novelty—the story of Papp and the Public has been told before, perhaps most notably in Helen Epstein's Joe Papp—it makes up in vividness, comprehensiveness and intimacy.