Who

Oskar Eustis is the artistic director of the New York Public Theater.

Backstory

The son of gung-ho Communists—his mother relocated from the Eustises' native Minnesota to East Berlin to show solidarity—Eustis went to college at NYU, then in 1978 ditched the city for the West Coast, where he fell in with the ardently anti-establishment Red Wing Theatre collective in San Francisco. In 1981 he joined San Francisco's lefty Eureka Theater Company as resident director/dramaturg, and by 1986 he was artistic director. At Eureka he became close to a young playwright by the name of Tony Kushner, whose very first play the company had staged. Eustis eventually commissioned Kushner to create what would become Angels in America, and after Eustis joined LA's well-respected Mark Taper Forum as artistic director in 1989, he co-directed Angels' world premiere.

But Eustis and Kushner's honeymoon was not to last. Long simmering tension eventually led to a split, and when Angels transferred to Broadway in 1993, Kushner picked George C. Wolfe to direct instead. The next year, Eustis accepted a position as artistic director at Rhode Island's Trinity Repertory Company, where he showed managerial flair, erasing the theater's $3 million deficit. Completing his transition from theater-world iconoclast to consummate theater insider, in 2005 he was made artistic chief of the Public Theater, filling the spot vacated by Wolfe. (The chair of the Public at the time, Ken Lerer, led the committee tasked with hiring him.) While Eustis sets the Public's creative direction, executive director Mara Manus is responsible for the Public's steadily growing annual budget, which now tops $18 million, and averting financial crises like the one that almost destroyed the Public in the late '90s.

Of note

As the Public's creative steward, Eustis walks a tightrope: He has to stage classics like Shakespeare but he also has to promote new playwrights; he has to keep audiences walking in the door to see celebrity actors, but he also has to advance the Public's diversity agenda. Many of the celeb-driven productions are staged during the summer at Delacorte Theater in Central Park as part of the Public's extremely popular Shakespeare in the Park series. (Theater diehards camp out for hours on the Public's sidewalk and in Central Park to score free tickets.) The edgier fare is usually staged in the Public Theater itself on Lafayette Street. Thus far into his tenure, Eustis hasn't scored a true homerun—no shows have matched the success of Wolfe-era coups like Savion Glover's Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk. One production that was supposed to be a big hit in 2006, the Wolfe-directed and Kushner-translated Mother Courage and Her Children with Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, met instead with a tepid response from critics and audiences alike.

Personal

The ursine Eustis and his wife Laurie live in a Cobble Hill brownstone.

No joke

The Communist-raised Eustis still refers affectionately to colleagues, staff and fellow actors as "comrade."