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From 1960 to 1978 he was Joseph Papp's top deputy at the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater.

This is Lincoln Center Theater's 25th anniversary. At the beginning, working with Gregory Mosher as artistic director — and, since 1991, with André Bishop — you took a theatre that had been almost completely dark for eight years, and that for 20 years under four administrations had been a consistent failure, and turned it into a major nonprofit stage organization. How did you do it?

First of all, there was something that helped that had previously been viewed as a detriment: location, location, location. Being at Lincoln Center gave the theatre a distinction and a place in the New York universe among the other constituents — long-running successes like the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera and the New York City Ballet. To have these colleagues is to create a set of expectations for yourself.

Then there's the theatre space — the Vivian Beaumont, which our predecessors considered difficult but which I love as much as or more than when I first started here. It's an excellent plant, a machine for the production of plays. I love its thrust stage.

And then there's the leadership. It's hard to talk about myself. I could say I've contributed. But there have been André and Gregory.

We didn't have a stodgy view. Institutional theatres often have a stodgy nature, with subscriptions and a planned season. When Gregory and I first sat down he was strongly opposed to subscribers. So we began with a membership plan, where people could come see what they wanted to see.

At first we didn't have enough money to open the Beaumont, so we did two one-act David Mamet plays in the Newhouse, the smaller theatre. They weren't a big hit, but following in their wake was John Guare's House of Blue Leaves. That was sensational. There were more customers than seats. So we thought, why not move it to the Beaumont? And we've gone on from there.

What were your goals when you started the theatre company?

The first goal of a theatre is to stay alive. That's an understood mission, and not to do so by inappropriate means. To have the passion, the aspiration, the vitality — to take into account existing mature talent but also be constantly in pursuit of the future, of a new playwright or a group of new playwrights that help define the theatre.

Lincoln Center Theater's successes have included John Guare's House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation, the hit musical revival of Anything Goes starring Patti LuPone, Thornton Wilder's Our Town with Spalding Gray, The Sisters Rosensweig by Wendy Wasserstein, Tom Stoppard's Invention of Love and The Coast of Utopia, Tony Award-winning revivals of The Heiress and Carousel, the 2000 Best Musical Tony winner, Contact, and the current Tony-winning revival of South Pacific. What do you consider your major accomplishment?

Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia inevitably has to rise above the crowd because of its scale, its ambition. He's one of the finest playwrights of this era, and this is the play of his that stands out because of its greatness — the achievement of the playwright, and of the director, Jack O'Brien, and the brilliance of the cast. It was a nine-hour work divided into three parts, and it had a success at the Beaumont that far transcended its success in London, including winning the Best Play Tony Award. Continued...