Joe created the Public Theatre & Shakespeare in the Park, which provided a suburb boy like me with great free big-city entertainment – he also gave great parties on opening nights downtown on Lafayette Street.

While working as a freelance script reader, I went to one of these parties (perhaps A Chorus Line?) after a motorcycle accident, which left my suit torn at the knees, & my right hand pretty torn up, so I put my cutlery in my jacket pocket as I was serving myself at the buffet. With a twinkle in his eye, & a glance at my pants, Joe quipped that though we were welcome to eat all we wanted (which came in handy on freelance pay), the knives, forks, & plates were rented, so he’d appreciate my leaving them for the caterers: A Chorus Line went on to receive very good reviews from the early edition of the New York Times.

John Wander, April, 2019

His performance in a Shakespeare-in-the-Park production of Hamlet had drawn praise from NY Times drama critic Clive Barnes as the arrival of classical Shakespeare acting in America: the production featured battleship-grey steel planks, angling up in a half-spiral to represent the battlements of Elsinore castle & the fragility of Claudius’s rule.

The play, presented at the open-air Delacorte Theatre overlooking a shower-dimpled lake, had been interrupted several times to dry off the slippery, quickly perilous set. Later that drizzly evening, at a backstage party, celebrating its last presentation, wiping the rain from his brow, Mr Keach, casting his eyes up at the sky softly mocked “This brave overhanging firmament, this majestical roof.”

John Wander, April 2019