Summer is when many New Yorkers
plot when and how they are going to leave the city for as long as possible.
Although this has been a relatively mild summer so far (we still have to get
through the rest of August), New York summers can be a cauldron of oppressively
humid heat and sweaty anger.
But New York City is also a place
of free Shakespeare in the summer, and if you have not gotten to one of the
city’s offerings of free Shakespeare, make plans to do so at once.
The most well-known free summer
Shakespeare plays are those produced by the Public Theater in Central Park’s
Delacorte Theater. But there are many others and they run the gamut. Many are
done in parks and one is even produced in a parking lot.
When I lived in Inwood in uptown
Manhattan I made sure to attend the Inwood Shakespeare Festival of free plays
in Inwood Hill Park courtesy of the Moose Hall Theater Company. A few
summers ago I was fortunate enough to attend TheNew York Classical Theatre’s production of King Lear in Battery Park that
featured my uncle Andrew in the role of the fool.
Living in Flushing, Queens among
throngs of Asian immigrants and currently out of the zones of hipsters and
rapid (or at least costly) gentrification, I am fortunately still walking
distance from seeing the Bard’s work performed.
The Hip toHip Theatre Company specializes in bringing Shakespeare to the people
of Queens. I was recently fortunate enough Hip to Hip’s production of Cymbeline
that was performed in the garden of the Voelker Orth Museum in Flushing. I walked straight there from the Main Street
stop of the 7 train and arrived with time to spare. I was able to stroll home
afterwards with no trouble.
My wife and our two baby girls got
there before me and the good people of the museum had us set up nicely with
some folding chairs on either side of our double-wide jogging stroller
(bringing a double-wide jogging stroller to an indoor production would indeed
make us among the rudest people on Earth but this was in an outside park and we
were not in anyone’s way, really).
The audience was at full to
overflowing capacity well before show time, and more folding chairs were
brought out and placed wherever people could find space without getting in the
way of the actors. There was a children’s presentation before the show began. A
member of the theater company brought children from the audience up in front of
the crowd and put them through their Shakespeare paces, including getting them
to perform dramatic Shakespearean deaths.
The show started and despite
obstacles that come with performing in public, outdoors and in New York—actors
dealt with microphones that cut out and fed back and they were constantly competing
with the sounds of overhead airplanes and a running power generator—the cast forged
through and put on a great show.
Watching Shakespeare in summer
twilight is special no matter where you are. The changing light signals a
cooling of the air and the start of night and new possibilities. Dusk ushers in
with it the promise of adventure under the cover of night and hearing the
poetry of Shakespeare’s plays as the sun sets is magnificent and is a joy that
can’t be duplicated.
Watching Shakespeare’s Cymbeline in
the summer night was outstanding. Even though we wrestled with two baby girls the whole night and
even had to take them to the back when they started getting noisy (they liked
the show and got excited), it was still possible to get lost in the beautiful
language of the play. And Cymbeline has everything: romance, long-lost relatives, bloody
swordfights, the works.
Once the show was over, audience
members and actors alike paid compliments to our twin girls. I am proud that
they went to their first Shakespeare performance when they were only six months
old. The Hip to Hip Theater Company is to be admired for so ably fulfilling its
mission.
Don’t miss the chance to see some
Shakespeare this summer.
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