Almost a great a tradition as attending Shakespeare in the Park, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this summer, is waiting in line to get tickets for Shakespeare in the Park.
In a strangely equitable fashion, the Public Theater has made the tickets free, a catch being that one must pick them up on a first-come, first-served basis on the day of the performance at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, which is where the shows are performed. (For the idle rich or handicapped, who won’t or can’t wait in line for hours, the theater sells a limited number of tickets, but assigns them to alternate rows, “to preserve the democratic character of Delacorte Theater audiences.”)
The tickets are passed out beginning at 1:00 p.m. and people arrive as early as 6 a.m., bearing determination and sleeping bags. Eric got there fairly early this morning, around 8 a.m., yet ended up a few hundred people back, near the Pinetum. When I woke up, around 10:30, Andie had left me a note stating that if I wanted tickets, I had to get on over there myself and wait with Eric—another catch is that each person is allowed a maximum of two tickets.
I threw on some pants and picked up some water, juice and bagels from H&H, walked over to the park and located Eric, craftily folding myself into line using the “hey man, I’m back with the bagels” gambit. Those who know me know I’m not typically the sort of dick that cuts lines, and in fact gets silently bitter when someone else does, so I compensated by penitently offering a bagel to the stranger in line directly behind us. She politely declined, as she was engrossed in annotating some paperwork involving flowcharts and long words. People brought all sorts of stuff with which to pass the time in line for Shakespeare: Frisbees, portable video game systems, musical instruments, lawn chairs, paperbacks, small dogs, iPods, a significant other to roll around with in a slightly naughty fashion on a blanket, their kids, their laptops, the trustily dense Sunday edition of The New York Times. The line snaked through the park, over grassy knolls, pathways and benches, and the weather was cool and breezy. I am certain it was the most relaxed queue ever in New York City. Me, I stretched out on the lawn and took a nap.
As in lines of this length, there was the usual rumor-mongering, that our position was too far back for tickets today and that we’d be mercilessly slapped with reserve tickets, which require you to return later and wait in line some more. But once we got to the front, we saw those fears were unfounded and we got our five tickets. (By this time, Andie had joined our party in order to secure tickets for Katie and Mark, who weren’t present.)
We all returned prior to the 8:00 p.m. performance to enjoy a picnic dinner of sandwiches, potato salad, chips and wine. We spread out on the southern fringe of the Great Lawn, within view of Turtle Pond at the base of Belvedere Castle. It was like Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (The Picnic), only with slightly less nudity.
Then, the play. I thought it was capital. The Delacorte is an open-air amphitheater, the seats in a semicircle around a pitched circular stage. The play was As You Like It so the venue was perfect—most of the play takes place in a forest, and the theater area is surrounded by real trees.
A draw to Shakespeare in the Park is that there’s often a token celebrity—I don’t know, Meryl Streep or someone—who has grown bored and dour with his or her movie career and wants to inflict some Shakespeare on the public. Then that line is really, really long. But I was glad there were’t any celebrities at all in this performance, keeping the hotdogging and fawning to a minimum. The closest brush we had with celebrity was directly before the play, when a recording of Liev Schreiber came over the PA to credit the event’s corporate sponsors and provide the ground rules for the audience during the performance, his stern voice implying he would personally kick the ass of anyone disrupting or illicitly recording the performance.
The regular readers among you with sharp memories will recall I already saw this play this year, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in January. But I liked that I could compare and contrast the performances. I’d say the Academy performance was more traditional and staid, more “theatrical,” with professional lighting and sets and vaguely fascist-looking costumes.
The performance in the park was more like fun for the whole family, with fake trees and stage decor that looked like some gradeschoolers whipped it up one afternoon with some papier mâché and poster paint. The costumes were bright with primary colors and breezy. The acting had more emotion in it and more closely resembled actual speech, which is the point, really. I got the feeling the actors knew what the lines meant as they said them, particularly the guy who played Jaques (he of “All the world’s a stage”-speech fame), allowing Shakespeare’s densely packed and oddly ordered phrases to flow more naturally and understandably. (Walking back home through the park after the play, I overheard a grandma-aged lady say, “To me, it sounded like it wasn’t Shakespeare. It was very clear. Did they change the words?” They didn’t, but I knew exactly what she was talking about and I think it was a great compliment to the actors.)
I noticed lines I hadn’t before because of the way they were read, laughing this time at Jaques’ line, “in his brain,/which is as dry as the remainder biscuit/after a voyage, he hath strange places cramm’d/with observation, the which he vents/in mangled forms.”
Also regarding the reading of the lines, I was reminded of what Mr. Moderick taught me in high school honors English: that while some people persist in thinking Shakespeare penned grand and hallowed verse, he in fact wrote large chunks of his plays to entertain the groundlings, the grubby blue-collar masses that paid their penny to get in, then gathered ‘round the foot of the stage in the hopes of catching some sex and/or violence, much like today’s fans of Oprah and professional wrestling.
For instance, when Touchstone the jester says “He that sweetest rose will find/Must find love’s prick and Rosalind,” he’s referring to more than one kind of prick, if you catch my drift. The Touchstone in this production added a carefully placed wagging finger to drive home this point and the audience laughed. Well done! As You Like It also contains a wrestling match, hunting, lesbian overtones, some annoyingly bombastic musical numbers (Shakespeare only wrote the lyrics, but both productions I’ve seen put them to song) and plenty of cross-dressing, so everyone goes home happy. I sure did.