West of the Moon
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Shakespeare in the Park
Even though vacation usually means you can sleep in, I woke up at some crazy hour — earlier than I normally wake up for work! — so that I could go sit in Central Park all morning, in the hopes of getting tickets to see Twelfth Night. Unless you can pay the $170/person for “summer supporter” reserved seats, this is how you get tickets to Shakespeare in the Park.
I joined the line at around seven in the morning, and it was already huge. The people at the head of the line had clearly been there all night; one group even had inflatable air mattresses. Around eight-thirty, one of the women sitting near me in the line took a walk up to the ticket office and back. By her count, there were four hundred and fifteen people ahead of us on line. We started doing some math. There are about 1800 seats in the theater. People waiting in line can only get a maximum of two tickets per person, so the 415 people ahead of us could account for no more than 830 tickets. There were a handful of senior citizens in a separate line that we hadn’t counted, but it didn’t seem likely that there would be more than thirty or forty of them. Some number of tickets go to the online ticket lottery, and some to the distribution points in the boroughs, and a bunch to corporate sponsors and summer supporters. Still, we felt hopeful.
A little after nine, a staff member from the theater came around making announcements. He said that our chances of getting tickets were iffy, but it was definitely possible. (”If you’re going to scream and complain if you don’t get tickets, though, you should just go home now and save us all the trouble. We can’t make any promises.”) Two hundred feet back, he started telling people that they might as well go home, but most of them chose to stay anyway.
Even with my ticket chances officially pronounced “iffy”, I didn’t mind staying. It was a gorgeous day to be hanging out in the park. I had somewhere grassy and shady to sit, I had a lot of good reading, and I even had pleasant company. (One of the women sitting near me, as it turns out, just finished a Ph.D. in history of science. Weird coincidences abound.)
Ticket distribution officially starts at 1pm. At around quarter of, everyone started packing up their blankets and chairs, and eventually the line started moving.
This is a picture of the line as it extended -behind- where I was standing. It just kept going, and going, and going. I had been feeling pretty zen about the whole experience–I would love to see the show, but if it didn’t work, it didn’t work, and I still had a nice morning–but the closer we got to the ticket window, the more anxious I started to get. If you just don’t get anywhere near the distribution before they run out, that’s one thing. But what if you get close? What if you don’t get a ticket, but you -could- have gotten a ticket if you’d just walked a little faster from the subway? Or if you hadn’t taken five minutes to figure out how to find the theater once you entered the park? That would be sort of horrible.
This isn’t one of those happy-ending stories. They ran out of tickets well before I got to the window, and the last person to get a ticket joined the line about forty-five minutes before I did. And, well, I’m not going to pretend I’m not disappointed, because Twelfth Night closes next weekend and I don’t know that I’ll be able to try for tickets again this week. But at the risk of sounding repetitive, I had a really great morning, even if it didn’t end with play tickets.
Posted Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 1:55 pm. Filed under: personal.
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A friend of mine just told me that she always goes to the Shakespeare in the Park by showing up at around 7.30p and getting return tickets. There are always returns and she says she has never once not gotten in that way in over a decade. I haven’t tried it, but it’s worth a thought!