Gail Merrifield

GAIL MERRIFIELD PAPP was born in San Francisco into a family with a deep theater lineage. Inspired by parents who were editors and writers, Gail originally began a career in publishing, but then decided to reinvent herself by looking for a job in the theater.


Gail’s sole inspiration for this course correction was the fact that in the 19th and early 20th centuries five generations of women in her family had been actors – Aunt, Great-aunt, Grandmother, Great-grandmother, and Great-great-grandmother. She wasn’t an actor herself, but Gail felt that identifying in some way with their theatrical profession could restore her spirits after a traumatic year during which she’d been divorced by the young man she married in college.
New Beginning
With a bit of good luck, Gail managed to land a position with the new Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center that was due to open in 1965. Her very first job was reading and evaluating new plays for the experimental Forum Theater. It led to Director Harold Clurman enlisting Gail’s services on his production of Incident at Vichy.

After a year, when the entire staff at the Lincoln Center Theater was let go, it was on to the New York Shakespeare Festival in April, 1965, hired by Hilmar Sallee to write the biographies of dancers in the Rebekah Harkness Dance Festival. “They change their program every night,” he said, “so you’ll have to deliver your copy to the printer every day.”
Later that first week, Gail met the Founder-Producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival: Joseph Papp.

At the Shakespeare Festival and then at The Public Theater over the next years Gail’s role grew – finding writers for the new theater, working with Joe to launch The Public Theater, helping playwrights develop their ideas, watching Joe work so successfully with creative people at this ambitious start-up enterprise, knowing she had arrived at the right place: a theater led by a charismatic Founder-Producer inspired by social and artistic goals. As Assistant to the Producer in a one-person office, Gail’s work included every aspect of Producer Joseph Papp’s activities at the brand new Public Theater when they opened their first production, Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, a show which would go on to change musical history, but did meet a bit of blowback at first.

Gail was made Director of New Plays and Musicals Development for the Public Theater, and was responsible for some of its best-remembered productions. These include The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s Tony-Award play about the AIDS crisis in 1985, for which she received the Human Rights Campaign Arts and Communication Award, and Rupert Holmes’ Tony-Award-winning Best Musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
In 2017, the remarkable history of musicals at The Public was celebrated with a special “From Hair to Hamilton” gala with excerpts not only from those two shows, but also from A Chorus Line, Runaways, Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Pirates of Penzance, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Caroline or Change, Fun Home, and Here Lies Love.