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

The son of vocal Communists, Eustis attended NYU. In 1978 he 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 Eustis joined San Francisco's lefty Eureka Theater Company as resident director/dramaturg, and by 1986 he was named 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.

As the Public's creative steward, Eustis walks a tightrope between the old and the new. He stages classics like Shakespeare while simultaneously promoting playwrights on the verge. Eusitis works to keep audiences walking in the door with big name celebrity actors, as well as advancing 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. [Image via Getty]