Night after night, everybody is
there—cops, professors, bums, Wall Street customers' men, out-of-work
actors with Biblical haircuts, dye-blonde actresses with bright blue
eyelids; sailors in summer whites, girls in their summer dresses, girls
in slacks, pony-tailed skinks from Greenwich Village, and novice beards
with the Penguin Classics in the hip hip pockets of their
dungarees—fabricating laughter in all the archaic places. The crowd
begins on folding chairs around a large and multi-proned stage, then
spreads out onto bleachers and grass-covered slopes. About 3,500 turn
up in Manhattan's Central Park each evening to watch the New York
Shakespeare Festival's new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Against an airy backdrop of helical columns, twinkling lights, and
vegetation that might have been sketched by Fragonard, the repertory
group succeeds amply where most productions of A Midsummer Night's
Dream turn up shy, playing it with such insouciant broadness that the
steady laughter of the audience all but rubs out the lion's roar from
the zoo next door. Performances are uniformly first-rate, from Albert
Quinton's dolphin-eyed, full-fathomed Bottom to giant Negro Actor James
Earl Jones's Oberon, who as the fairy king somehow suggests Paul
Robeson on point. Joel Friedman's direction finds constant humor in the
play's profusion of rhymes, which, under less talented control, often
turn into a parade of stilts. A Midsummer Night's Dream emphasizes what
many East Coast Shakespeareans have long been saying: the best summer
Shakespeare in the U.S. is not in Stratford, Conn., but in Manhattan's
Central Park. Smooth, clear and professional, the Central Park group offers, in the
words of Elizabethan Scholar Marchette Chute, “bright, swift
Shakespeare, overacted, rather like a poster, as it has to be out of
doors; the great thing is that it brings Shakespeare back to his
original, wonderfully motley audience.” And it brings him back for
nothing. In six seasons, Producer Joseph Papp's Shakespeare Festival
has played to more than 600,000 people, never charging admission. Celebrated Feud. “If a public library is free, why not a public
theater?” asks Papp, whose schedule this year began with Much Ado About
Nothing and will end with Richard II. Meeting his production costs with
foundation grants and private contributions, attracting excellent young
actors with little more than the promise of Shakespearean experience,
Papp has managed to keep his plan alive against staggering odds—and
the biggest odd of them all was former City Park Commissioner Robert
Moses. Five years ago, Papp, a Brooklyn-born trunkmaker's son, then working as
a CBS stage manager, brought his Shakespeareans out of a Lower East
Side Sunday-school room and began drawing crowds to an amphitheater in
Manhattan's East River Park. He moved the following year to Central
Park with fine productions of Two Gentlemen of Verona, Romeo and Juliet
and Macbeth, settling down with apparent permanence and the blessing of
Moses. But before long, a celebrated feud arose in which the
commissioner tried to force Papp to charge admission, claiming that
festival audiences were damaging Central Park's crab grass. Papp took
the case to court and won.
