The firing of Akalaitis, 55, one of the leading avant-garde directors, sent seismic tremors through the entire theater community. The quake seemed to reopen the fault line that divides the commercial from the noncommercial theater, the “uptown.” From the “downtown.” From the founding of the Shakespeare Festival in 1954 until his death in 1991, Papp had had the genius to unite both worlds: his production of “A Chorus Line,” conceived at the Public, moved to Broadway and became a lifeline of financial support for its birthplace. But now the Public, like most nonprofit theaters, has been hit with shrinking public and private support. Does its board see Wolfe, 38, who first made his mark at the Public Theater with such shows as “The Colored Museum,” as a new Papp, with the magic touch in both the nonprofit and commercial worlds?

That question draws a heated response from Condon. “Stop using the word commercial!” he says. “We are looking for good work. If that work turns out to be commercial, we are most happy.” Clearly, the board wasn’t happy with Akalaitis when she staged “downtown,” fare like Georg Buchner’s “Woyzeck.” “They’re yearning for a Broadway hit,” says Bernard Gersten, head of the Lincoln Center Theater. “Nobody says it but that’s the issue, not JoAnne’s talent, which is considerable.”

Condon wouldn’t specify why Akalaitis was dismissed. But clearly, after years of being a rubber stamp for Papp, the board chafed at inheriting a successor who was not its choice-and who was a controversial personality. Former general manager Bob MacDonald says: “We went from one of the greatest communicators of all time to the worst.” Others characterized Akalaitis as “aloof,” “undemocratic…… authoritarian.” But some of Akalaitis’s co-workers defended her. “JoAnne was railroaded,” says former staffer Pat Sosnow. “A man would have been given more time.”

“What’s abrasive in a woman is powerful in a man,” says Akalaitis, who defends her record at the Public. “A play like ‘Woyzeck’ is a world-class masterpiece, and we proved there’s a strong audience for such serious theater.” She says that “there were people on the board who said to me, ‘You have to do more happy plays or musicals’.” The success of “A Chorus Line” was, she thinks, “in some ways the biggest liability in the American theater. These boards began to think that you could figure out a strategy to win the Broadway lottery, and then you have all this money and you could do all this other ‘serious’ stuff. That kind of thinking is a disaster.”

But no matter what anyone thinks of Akalaitis, almost everyone agrees that Wolfe is an outstanding choice to replace her. He angrily rejects the label of commercial. “The implication is that I’m the whore of Broadway,” he says. “It’s horrifying and it’s stupid.” Wolfe has shown he’s a black artist who can reach a large general audience without sacrificing his seriousness or his social commitment. Now he’s rehearsing the most eagerly awaited Broadway event in years, Tony Kushner’s seven-hour epic of gay life, “Angels in America.” At first “terrified” by taking over the Public, Wolfe looks forward to a future in which all five of the theater’s stages are humming at once: “I see a brilliant, dangerous new musical on one of the main stages. Upstairs, a workshop of a play by a writer who failed last season but has come back with a marvelous play. On the top floor, a young director is staging his first Shakespeare. On the other large stage, I’m directing a Restoration comedy because by now the endowment is so large I can relax. And downstairs, there’s a series of solo artists, white, Asian and Hispanic.”

Like Papp’s, Wolfe’s vision is broad. Ironically, it’s the same vision that Akalaitis has. She has a 30-year body of work; he is very much a developing artist, clearly a brilliant one. She is right that the Broadway lottery view is a disastrous one for nonprofit theaters. But he seems to have the knack to take serious theater to the broadest possible audience. Finally, one believes she will be happier as a pure director, and Wolfe will leap to his utopian vision, which is the only vision worth having in the theater.