Stratford-on-Firestones

In the Middle Ages, plays in England were sometimes performed from Pageant Waggons, which traveled around the ancient cities stopping at key spots --such as "ye Abbaye gates" and "ye high crosse before ye Mayor"--where the actors would strut and fret their hour upon the unsteady stages.

New York now has its pageant waggons too--set to perform everywhere from ye Bronx to ye Staten Island, and even before ye Bobby Wagner, the mayor. Belonging to Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival, they are not quaint old tumbrels. They are a caravan of six trucks, led by a big, behemoth trailer truck that disassembles like a Chinese puzzle. In four hours, they collectively become a fully lighted, handsomely equipped Elizabethan theater. In addition to the free, summerlong Shakespeare that the festival group offers in its stationary theater in Central Park, the new road company is taking A Midsummer Night's Dream to 34 parks and playgrounds in all five of the city's boroughs.

Lost. The show opened last week, playing six Manhattan locations in six nights, first in Mount Morris Park in Harlem, a neighborhood where the wail of police sirens is a part of the constant atmosphere. There all the big trucks staged an incongruous arrival, grunting and respirating into position on a baseball field while crowds gathered. Soon a rehearsing actor was standing in a tunic and sandals before a gaping group of Harlem youths. He tried to explain to them that in the play he is a character called Demetrius, who gets lost in the woods.

"You look like you're lost already," said a kid.

Meanwhile, a crew of 16 unpacked. Off came the top and sides of the principal truck. Its bed, with six decorative pillars and two staircases permanently mounted upon it, became the main stage. At the push of a button, an apron stage hydraulically unfolded itself into position. Still a third stage level was pulled out and positioned in front of the apron.

Found. Light towers rose like periscopes out of the next truck, to be fed by generators in another truck. At either flank of the main stage, trucks pulled up and opened for business as dressing rooms. Still another truck spewed out neatly packed flats, stairs, props, scenery and more lights. The last truck contained enough collapsible bleachers and folding chairs for something over 1,500 people.

Nicely acted and broadly directed, with colorful costumes and plastic cowslips that stood upright on their stems when tossed to the stage, the performance was full of life, and it found an audience. Almost no one walked away. One young boy who did leave had nothing against Shakespeare. "Man, it's getting dark," he said, "and you can get killed in this park."

Two Broadway set designers and one Broadway lighting designer were recently given a $75,800 Ford Foundation grant to develop a mobile theater similar to Papp's on an even more compact scale--that is, on one truck only. The foundation is trying to help the State Department find a way to present American theater from town to town anywhere in the world. Arena stage, dressing rooms, props, generators, lights --everything but the emotion--would roll in one unit.

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