OSKAR EUSTIS was bleeding. He walked into the Noho Star restaurant in the East Village for an 8:30 a.m. interview, on time and smiling, and with a seeping gash over his right eye that had turned half his face and both forearms red. Bicycle accident on the way over, he explained, before excusing himself to go to the restroom. Multimedia Slide Show People.s Theater Related Times Topics: Public Theater Enlarge This Image Sara Krulwich/The New York Times From near left, Oskar Eustis, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jay O. Sanders and Margaret Colin rehearsing .Hamlet.. More Photos . When he returned, the gash was still oozing generously and his hands were still peppered with gravel and dried blood. But he was currently in the middle of rehearsals for .Hamlet,. the first of the Public Theater.s Shakespeare in the Park productions this summer and the only play he is directing this season; rescheduling would have been a near impossibility. And there was something, some glimmer in his eye, that made you suspect he got a kick out of it. The bearish and engaging Mr. Eustis, 49, is finishing his third season as artistic director of the Public, one of the most demanding jobs in the theater universe. The theater.s mission, as defined by its founder, Joseph Papp, is nothing less than .a theater for all New Yorkers.. For Papp that meant an institution that was as accessible to as many as possible, that engaged directly with the social and political issues of the day and that reflected the wide cultural, ethnic and economic diversity of New York on its stages and in its audiences. But in the 54 years since that mission was declared, it has gone from being a radical manifesto to standard operating procedure in the nonprofit New York theater world, at least in a somewhat watered-down form: cheap-ticket programs abound, major institutional theaters are adding black-box theaters for new works, and minority casting has become the norm. None of this has diluted the importance of the Public Theater, Mr. Eustis said. .You get these different institutions that do different pieces of what the Public is supposed to do,. he explained. .But the Public is the only place that puts all of them together.. In interviews with people in the theater industry inside and outside the Public . many of whom declined to speak for attribution because in the small world of theater there is a common fear of jeopardizing future opportunities . there was near-unanimous praise for Mr. Eustis.s energy and his stated goals. Agreement was less universal, though, on how successful he had been in acting on these goals, with complaints that his promises have fallen short both in dealings with individual artists and in pursuing the Public.s mission at large. Granted, it is impossible to do the job perfectly, and no one has. When Mr. Eustis came to the Public in 2005, it had just managed to steer itself out of a crisis. An economic downturn combined with a couple of bad bets on Broadway highlighted the theater.s deep-seated and nearly fatal administrative weaknesses. These problems had been allowed to fester for years, during which the nearly $50 million the Public took in from its Broadway transfer of .A Chorus Line,. gave it no pressing reason to put its finances in order. That crisis, which hit hardest in 2001, was due in large part to decisions made by the hyperkinetic George C. Wolfe, who ran the Public from 1993 to 2005. But it was also because of Mr. Wolfe that the Public Theater still managed to enjoy a healthy decade even after .A Chorus Line. closed in 1990. Mr. Wolfe almost single-handedly brought the theater out of the fiscal doldrums he had found it in, eliminating a budget deficit and almost quintupling the endowment that remained after Papp.s death in 1991 and JoAnne Akalaitis.s subsequent 20-month tenure as artistic director. Mr. Wolfe also aligned the Public with his stated vision of .a mongrel American theater,. championing new playwrights and turning the Public into what was probably the most racially diverse theater in the country. Naysayers liked to complain that he ran the Public as a production company for his own shows, but few disputed that in the mid-1990s the theater was a success. As often happens, however, bust followed boom. In the middle of Mr. Wolfe.s tenure two of his several Broadway transfers, .The Wild Party. and .On the Town,. flopped badly, losing $14 million of the Public.s money just as the country headed into a recession. With the endowment plunging and deficits increasing, Mr. Wolfe and his staff cut the theater.s annual summer Shakespeare in the Park two-show season down to one and laid off a fifth of the staff. At the same time the traditionally complacent trustees stepped up, bringing in an executive director to take control of fiscal issues so Mr. Wolfe could focus on artistic matters. After the first hire lasted less than a year, in 2002 the board hired Mara Manus, a program officer for economic development at the Ford Foundation. Post a comment copyright 2007 Expression Engine