Good morning. It’s Friday. Today, and on Fridays through the summer, we’ll focus on things to do in New York over the weekend.
Before the Delacorte Theater in Central Park became the permanent home of Shakespeare in the Park, one of New York’s treasured summer pastimes, the annual Shakespeare festival got its start touring parks and playgrounds across the city.
Now, nearly 70 years since the famous theatrical producer Joseph Papp started that tradition with a production of “Julius Caesar” in an amphitheater in East River Park, the festival is returning to its roots. With the Delacorte closed for renovations this summer, the Public Theater, the nonprofit that presents Shakespeare in the Park, is taking the show on the road with roving performances of “The Comedy of Errors” in parks and plazas across all five boroughs through the end of June.
“This traveling squad of players is something that is deep in our roots,” Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director, said. “It’s really where the Shakespeare festival began.”
The first weekend of performances begins tonight at 6:30 p.m. on the terrace of the New York Public Library near Bryant Park, a fitting location — the library holds six copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio, including one housed at the Fifth Avenue branch. Performances will continue there through the weekend before moving to locations on Staten Island and in Hudson Yards next week.
This year’s show is a modern musical adaptation of the classic Shakespearean comedy of mistaken identity, performed by the Public’s Mobile Unit, a reincarnation of the theater’s original roving troupe, which played in parks and playgrounds across the city. The group performed the same show last year but has beefed it up this year to accommodate larger audiences and venues, Eustis said.
The Mobile Unit was revived around 2010 — almost 40 years after the original troupe stopped performing — to expand access to the arts, especially in underserved communities, and typically performs in prisons, libraries and homeless shelters in New York.
“It was clear that in the absence of the Mobile Unit, we were losing one of the core missions of the Public, which is to reach people who not only weren’t otherwise reached by theater, and by Shakespeare, but who actually had no idea that they had any interest,” Eustis said.
This year’s “Comedy of Errors” adaptation was created with much of the same mission in mind.
Directed by Rebecca Martínez and composed by Julián Mesri, the show is bilingual, weaving original Shakespearean passages with Spanish translations and contemporary Latin American music. The overall effect is an organic rhythm that “sounds like New York,” Eustis said.
“The Comedy of Errors,” one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, was chosen with a similar objective. The play’s slapstick humor plays well with audiences less familiar with Shakespeare, and the themes — foreigners arriving in a new city, and families reuniting — have felt especially resonant this year, Eustis said. It’s “unlocking something in the play,” he said.
After wrapping up performances at the public library this Sunday, the show will move to other outdoor venues, including Hudson Yards, which will host three sets of performances in June as part of its “Backyard at Hudson Yards” series. The Mobile Unit will also pop up at local parks and community spaces in all five boroughs, including Maria Hernandez Park in Brooklyn and St. Mary’s Park in the Bronx.
All performances are free and don’t require tickets, but chair seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Several of the venues have additional standing room, too.
Shakespeare in the Park was founded with the goal of bringing Shakespeare to wider audiences, a tenet still at the heart of the Public’s mission, Eustis said. He added that he believed there was a place for mobile outdoor performances, even when the Delacorte reopens.
Describing theater since the pandemic, he said, “I think as a field, we’re either going to come back smaller, and catering to a smaller, wealthier audience, or we’re going to come back bigger, and catering to a broader and more democratic audience.”
The Public has a slate of other Shakespeare-themed programming planned for the summer, including outdoor screenings of a recorded performance of “Much Ado About Nothing” in June, July and August, and more productions available to stream for free online.
To cap off the season, on July 28, the Public will host a summer block party at its Lafayette Street location in Manhattan with live performances and activities.
“Shakespeare has something to offer all of us,” Eustis said. “We can use him in a way that can bind us together across cultures.” He added: “All it really depends on is people going, ‘Hey, I enjoy watching Shakespeare.’”
Weekend Weather
Enjoy mostly sunny days this weekend, with temperatures between the 70s and 80s, dropping to the 60s at night.
A walk in the park(s)
Arts and Culture
For more events in New York, here’s a list of what to do this month and what events to do every day for free.
METROPOLITAN diary
On the No. 4
Dear Diary:
It was a Sunday morning, and I was riding uptown on the No. 4 train.
A well-dressed older woman got on at the Brooklyn Bridge and took a seat across from me.
We smiled at each other, and I looked back down at my phone and continued reading.
Looking up after a moment, I was shocked to see the woman kneeling in front of me on the floor of the moving train.
I said something in protest. The woman looked up.
“I’m tying your shoe,” she said. “I don’t want you to fall.”
— John Payne
