Story of the Week: Shakespeare in the Park Is Back

Last week, TheaterMania took a tour of the Delacorte Theater, where a construction crew is putting the finishing touches on an $85 million renovation. Shakespeare in the Park, the Public Theater’s beloved annual tradition of staging free high-quality productions, was suspended last year as the venue underwent construction. But it is set to reopen this summer, with a ribbon-cutting on July 15 ahead of the first performance of Twelfth Night on August 7.

Story of the Week will recount the history of this New York City institution, explain how the renovation will change the experience for artists and audiences, and consider how it can serve as a beacon of social democracy in a time when the high ideals that inspired free Shakespeare in the Park are in retreat.

But for those unfamiliar with the origin story…

How did Shakespeare end up in Central Park—and for free?

Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis begins his tour with a favorite old fable, about how, in the 1950s, a scrappy young producer named Joseph Papp was driving a garbage truck all over New York City, presenting free productions of Shakespeare’s plays from a flatbed stage hitched to the back. “Legend has it that the truck broke down by the side of the turtle pond,” Eustis says with campfire flourish, “and he just kind of stayed there.” Surely, the view of Belvedere Castle in the background of Macbeth and Othello influenced Papp’s decision to settle.

The shows proved to be hits, sometimes attracting thousands of viewers each night. It was a happy development for the fledgling New York Shakespeare Festival, but it set the stage for an epic showdown between Papp, in the role of David, and New York City’s Goliath Parks Commissioner, Robert Moses, who demanded Papp charge admission to his free shows to offset maintenance costs incurred by the Park.

Eustis quotes the response of the Festival’s longtime press rep, Merle Debuskey: “Joe, I will work for free Shakespeare. I will not work for cheap Shakespeare.” The battle lines were drawn: To charge, or not to charge—that was the question. And Papp, a Shakespeare evangelist ministering to the kind of New Yorkers who had never set foot in a Broadway theater, was dead set against charging. But was Moses equally adamant?

According to Moses biographer Robert Caro, the demand for admission was made by Moses’s deputy, Stuart Constable while the boss was on vacation in Barbados. It was not a fight Moses, who had championed Papp’s earlier productions at the Corlears Hook amphitheater and had promised to raise $50,000 for the Festival’s next season, was interested in pursuing. But Moses had a longstanding policy of never undermining a subordinate, expecting that loyalty to be repaid in kind. So he stumbled into the so-called “Second Battle of Central Park” like the King of France at the top of Henry V.

Papp, a 38-year-old master showman with a knack for publicity, made an attractive foil to the 70-year-old Moses (it was a dynamic very similar to the one now shared between Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo). He trounced Moses in the court of public opinion, if not the actual court of law (which largely upheld Moses’s dominion over the Parks but ruled that he must set “reasonable conditions” under which Papp could reimburse him). Eager to put the bad press behind him, Moses offered to build Papp a theater, with publisher George Delacorte donating $150,000 of the $400,000 price tag.

Papp saw an immediate boost in his national profile and would go on to raise millions from liberal donors eager to stick it to old power brokers like Moses, men who seemed to fly above the democratic process like feudal lords. “That was a moment of great democratic expansion,” Eustis says, placing Shakespeare in the Park in the context of postwar desegregation and the Great Society. “We’re obviously in a very different moment now, when so many things are gated and restricted by money.”

But back then, Papp used the money he raised for top-notch productions that any New Yorker could access, regardless of their finances. Over the years, world-famous actors like James Earl Jones, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Kline, and Meryl Streep have graced the Delacorte Stage, and Shakespeare in the Park is a fixture of New York in the summertime. That would seem like happily ever after—but nothing lasts forever, not in this city’s mercurial climate.

Why renovate the Delacorte?

“When we started to pull the structure apart, we got a sense that maybe Mr. Moses didn’t think that Papp’s silly Shakespeare festival was going to last for all that long,” says the Public’s executive director Patrick Willingham, “certainly not the 62 years that the venue has been standing.” He describes a haphazard approach to construction, similar to the dining sheds New Yorkers have come to know in the wake of the Covid pandemic. Cinder block extensions were added to create dressing rooms and operational space. Quick fixes faded into the status quo of a functioning theater with limited time and money.

Working with architect Stephen Chu, Eustis and Willingham resolved to rebuild the theater to last, but also to reflect the Public’s values. Willingham points to the new facade, made of hundreds of long wooden dowels tilted forward ever so slightly. “It’s a little more organic and dynamic—almost tree bark like,” he says, adding, “It’s Redwood that has been reclaimed from water towers all around the city.” The expanded canopy around the entrance is meant to convey a “red carpet” feeling while also providing cover for theatergoers sheltering from the rain before a performance.

Rain has been a constant source of headaches at the Delacorte, where the backstage area was never fully protected from the elements, with moisture seeping in from the slats in the grandstand. “You would have actors and technicians dodging pools of water … the blend of electricity, water, and wood was a little harrowing,” says Willingham before he presents the solution: “The entire grandstand now has a water mitigation system underneath it, so when it’s raining the water is funneled into a gutter.”

I still vividly recall the sight of Meryl Streep mopping up rain on the stage before a 2006 performance of Mother Courage and Her Children. As Eustis remembers, “Watching Meryl in full costume pull that damn wagon by herself in 100-degree heat is a way to ensure that no one else in the cast complains about anything.” But now they won’t need to torture one of America’s most laureled actors to make the cast feel better about the oppressive heat.

The backstage area has now been completely sheltered, with air-conditioned dressing rooms and work rooms for sound and lighting technicians. The box office has also been enclosed. Ramps and elevators have been added for greater accessibility. They have even added a select number of bariatric seats for larger audience members (the theater has a capacity of 1,866—greater than most Broadway houses).

Major updates to the stage will better accommodate the expectations of 21^st century designers and directors, including permanent lighting trusses and cable systems (both previously had to be installed and dismantled every year). There is also a new modular stage that will provide more leeway to set designers, especially when it comes to the placement of trap doors. “Previously, we had to cut through our permanent stage deck,” says Willingham, “and then we would have to repair it every year.” Now there will be no repairing, because the stage will be whatever the designer imagines it to be.

For Eustis, these improvements will mean faster strike and load times between productions. “You won’t see it this year [Twelfth Night is the only production in 2025], but 2026 will be the first time in 60 years when we won’t have this dead time of four to five weeks in the middle of summer,” he beams. More performance nights mean more opportunities for thousands of New Yorkers to attend Shakespeare in the Park.

The renovation cost $85 million, but the Public’s capital campaign was for $175 million. Where did the rest of that money go?

According to Willingham, $70 million went to less Instagrammable improvements to the Public’s downtown home on Lafayette Street—boiler repairs and upgrades to the five theaters in that building. It was also used to create permanent rehearsal space across the street. “We never had rehearsal spaces that were our own, so we had to rent.” Now the Public has 30,000 square feet, which can presumably be rented out to other companies when the Public isn’t using it.

Becoming a landlord might seem like a grubby business for a theater so steeped in progressive values, but at a time when not-for-profit theaters are struggling across the country, every source of revenue can mean the difference between failure and survival. Eustis has seen the signs of peril for years.

“When I arrived at the theater we weren’t in great financial shape, and there were people on the board proposing that the way out of our difficulties was to charge for Shakespeare in the Park,” he shares, simmering rage in his voice as he recalls this echo of the Moses-Papp fight at the beginning of his tenure. “One of my missions was to make sure that nobody would ever say that on the board again.”

His solution is where the remaining $20 million has gone: a new endowment called the Fund for Free Theater, which will support the Public’s operations at the Delacorte and with the Mobile Shakespeare Unit, as well as other free programming. Eventually, Willingham would like to grow that endowment to $250 million, an unprecedented number for an American theater, but an amount that will help the Public support its current level of programming into the future. Even if a big donor suddenly pulls out, it won’t pull the plug on free Shakespeare.

“In a climate where everything is turning towards monetization, creating an endowment that will legally restrict anybody in the future from charging admission is about safeguarding the principle of free Shakespeare in the Park,” says Eustis with a grin.

In taking this extraordinary action, Eustis and Willingham position themselves as the paladins of a besieged and noble way of life in a world that is fundamentally turning away from the social democracy established by the victors of World War II. They’re the La Valette and Romegas of the not-for-profit theater, weary but confident that their faith in Joe Papp’s crusade to bring free theater to the people will be vindicated. Maybe someday the barbarians of capital will scale the walls of the Delacorte, but not on their watch.