Free Shakespeare

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.

Permanent Home. Some first-rate actors have emerged from the festival company, notably Colleen Dewhurst, who starred last season in Broadway's prize-winning All the Way Home, and George C. Scott (The Wall, The Andersonville Trial). The city has lately been at pains to reverse Moses. It has appropriated $60,000 to help pay for the current season, and next month a new 2,500-seat, $400,000 amphitheater will be completed on the shore of Central Park's Lake Belvedere, giving the New York Shakespeare Festival a permanent home.

Jets rising from Idlewild often drop their whining anapests into the flow of Elizabethan iambs. But Shakespearean effects can also be heightened by outdoor production. During one festival performance of Macbeth, deep grey thunderheads compiled themselves overhead as Birnam wood moved to high Dunsinane hill; the branches of the plane trees around and above the stage began to sway and whip; and when Macbeth finally faced Macduff on the ramparts, it was a battle fought in lightning and horizontal rain.

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