I promised myself, when we moved to New York, that I wasn’t going to become one of Those People, the ones who are always talking about how much better New York is than every other city and blah blah blah. I think I’m doing okay with that promise, but I do have to say that there are a lot of great things about this city.
And, what with being a teacher and having summers basically off, I get to take advantage of things like Shakespeare in the Park. (In case anyone isn’t familiar with this: there’s an open-air theater, the Delacorte, inside Central Park. Every summer, they do two shows, at least one of them Shakespeare, and the shows are always excellent. Tickets to the performances are free, and distributed at 1pm on the day of the performance, on a first-come-first-served basis. What this means, in practice, is that people who want to see Shakespeare in the Park shows get to the park really early and wait in line. Like, really early.)
Some of you might remember last year’s Shakespeare in the Park adventure, where I sat in Central Park for hours and hours and still didn’t manage to get tickets to Twelfth Night. Last year I made some rookie mistakes: not getting an early enough start, getting lost trying to find the Delacorte Theatre, waiting until the last week in the run of an extremely popular and star-spangled show, etc. This year the whole operation ran like clockwork.
Well. Clockwork of a very particular, whole-day-wasting, slightly stressful variety. I did this twice in one week, once last Thursday and once this Wednesday, and both days had me out of bed by five a.m. and out the door by ten after. I got to the Delacorte somewhere around six, settled myself with blankets and coffee and bottled water, and stayed there for, oh, seven hours.
There’s a whole culture to the Shakespeare in the Park line. The fairness of the enterprise (first-come-first-served, no saving seats, no cutting, no cheating) is pretty closely monitored by Delacorte employees, and talking to other line-waiters you can find a kind of culture to it. Up and down the line, people are reading–in two days of line-waiting I spotted people reading David Mitchell, Margaret Atwood, Scott Lynch, Robin McKinley, Suzanne Collins, Frank Herbert, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Jon Krakauer–or sleeping or playing Scrabble. Delivery guys from local delis and coffeeshops cruise the lines on bicycles, calling out the names of people who called in orders for bagels or sandwiches or coffee. There’s a terrible terrible flute player in pink pants who moves down the line with a torturous slowness, asking for tips in exchange for his warbling. But mostly there’s a lot of waiting. And then, at 1pm, the ticket distribution starts. The whole line, several hundred people a day, stands up and shakes leaves and ants off of their blankets, packs up backpacks and totebags, filters slowly up to the box office to get their tickets–two per person, no exceptions. They say that seating is random–the people at the head of the line don’t get better seats than the ones further back–and I believe them, since they people near me on line weren’t near me in the theater.
They also say that there aren’t bad seats in the theater, and I think they’re right. The first day, last week, when we saw Merchant of Venice, we were in the next-to-last row of the theater. They don’t allow photography in the Delacorte, so you’ll have to take my word for it, about how breathtaking the view was. It’s a circular wooden stage, framed by trees and behind it a slightly weedy pond, and then further back tall art-deco apartment buildings and the moon rising in a slowly darkening sky.
And the plays were wonderful. They’re doing two Shakespeare plays in repertory this summer, Merchant of Venice and The Winter’s Tale. Throughout both, I was doing a lot of “hey wait, where do I know that actor from?” Jesse Martin (from Law and Order), Marianne Jean-Baptiste (from Without a Trace), Jesse Tyler Ferguson (from Modern Family), Max Wright (the dad from Alf!), Ruben Santiago-Hudson (from Castle), Hamish Linklater (from Groove). They were all amazing. (Seriously, if you think Jesse Tyler Ferguson is funny on Modern Family, he’s even funnier in Shakespeare.) The non-teevee-actors were excellent too–the woman who played Portia, Lily Rabe, was just astonishing. And, right, Al Pacino played Shylock. Al Pacino!
I want to be more coherent about the plays, but I’m not a theater expert, much less a theater critic. I know I’ve read Merchant of Venice before, but apparently I didn’t remember it that well, because I had forgotten all about both Portia’s marriage plot and the part where Portia and Nerissa dress as men to spy on their menfolk. I was impressed with how flexible the play is, too–that’s the thing about plays, right, especially good ones? That acting and staging can bend the text into slightly different configurations. Merchant of Venice is a mess with all the anti-Semitism, but this production makes Shylock’s actions comprehensible without really making him less of a bad guy. After his daughter runs off, he gives a speech about the loss of his daughter and his gold and his jewels; I suspect that as written it’s meant to suggest that he’s as worried about the gold as he is about his daughter, but as delivered by Al Pacino in this production it’s clear that Shylock is so driven to panic by the loss of his daughter that he can only comprehend it by focusing on the gold instead.
And then there’s The Winter’s Tale. I was totally unfamiliar with this play before seeing it this week, but Matt loves it. On our way to the theater for Wednesday’s show he was explaining the plot to me, and after a point I couldn’t stop laughing. It made more sense when Matt said it was one of the later plays–I mean, once you’re William effing Shakespeare, why -not- write a play that’s both a seriously emo jealously/betrayal plot and a wild comic pastoral romp all at the same time, and why not throw in a bear attack, a witty pickpocket, and a secretly-not-dead dead queen while you’re at it? (If you’re familiar with the line “Exit, pursued by a bear”, this is that play.) Apparently the original text also includes the Personification of Time, who explains why we jump sixteen years between acts Three and Four, but this production had a ghost taking those lines instead. The play is kind of a mess, but a fun mess, and I -loved- the staging, which put a (historically accurate, I think) Islamic influence on the Sicily scenes and included adorable puppet-sheep poking their heads out from trapdoors in the Bohemia scenes.
So that’s been my week. I loved both shows, and I loved the weird lazy isolation of sitting in Central Park all day waiting for tickets, and it’s all just credits in the bank for making me glad we moved here.
Posted Friday, July 2nd, 2010 at 12:37 pm. Filed under: Uncategorized.
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Oh you are so lucky! I’ll be in the city from July 17-27, and I’m hoping to see Merchant of Venice. I’ll take Winter’s Tale if I must, but MoV is my hoped for viewing. I just can’t believe I’m going to have to waste an entire day of NYC waiting for tickets, though. Blah. :(