Bard holds court in the park

Many years ago, not long after college, we spent Saturdays on the Great Lawn in Central Park. While the rest of Manhattan seemed to be playing in the Hamptons, we, who couldn’t afford to go anywhere, stayed home and played softball on Diamond No. 5. But we had something better than the Hamptons.

We had Shakespeare in the Park.

Usually about the time our game was ending, a line of people had wrapped around the fields and had begun inching toward the outdoor amphitheater, where free tickets were being distributed for the plays. Sweaty and sunburned, we’d rush into line with only enough time to buy lemonade. A drink in each hand, we’d spend the evening listening to the most glorious language ever written -- to declaimed phrases wafting over a nearby lake and bouncing off the stones of an old castle behind the stage into our imaginations.

New York on the cheap is a whole different place -- grinding, crowded, ready to bite you. And people striving to make a career in this perilous world need some kind of reward for the struggle. They need free tickets to Shakespeare and they need someone who wants to give them high-quality Bard.

For 37 years that someone was Joe Papp, a poor kid born Papirofsky in a brawling part of Brooklyn who discovered Shakespeare at 12 in the stacks of the public library. He read the plays for free and went on to make a career out of a belief that all New Yorkers, rich or poor, should have the chance to watch Shakespeare for nothing.

Not long after Papp died in 1991, George S. Wolfe, the smart and funny son of a schoolteacher from Kentucky, took up his mantle, preserving traditions of innovation at the nonprofit Public Theater and continuing one of the city’s best-known summer traditions, Shakespeare in the Park.

This season, Wolfe is producing “Henry V.” It is the fifth time the play has been staged since Papp scraped together $30,000 and hired Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara to do “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” in the park in 1957. Liev Schreiber, a Public Theater regular, is this summer’s warrior king, and Mark Wing Davey is directing. The cost: a little more than $1 million.

“Henry V” is certainly a play for this moment in America -- and one that has a long history of capturing the patriotic mood. How it is received differs according to the times. It is the story of a king, both loved and obeyed, who achieves an unexpected and overwhelming victory by rallying his troops despite great disadvantage. It was popular in London during World War II and out of favor in America during the Vietnam War. And while it seems relevant to New York in 2003, it is unclear whether it is inspiring. (The show is in previews and opens Saturday.)

“Henry is about language and leadership,” Wolfe says. “In the beginning, the king uses the language of war. Then he comes to understand the effects that language has on human beings, on their bodies, on life and death, and he transforms.” When Wolfe decided last fall to stage the play, he wasn’t out to make a political point about President Bush’s fervor for a war with Iraq. He just wanted to offer his audiences some everyday enjoyment and provoke thought, he says.

Audiences in this often antiwar city seemed captivated by the language during a few performances last week, but not roused by the trumpet call to heroic action in Henry’s St. Crispin’s Day speech, when the king inspires his demoralized troops to fight the French. (“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.”) There was no wild applause; there were no misty eyes. In fact, it sounded a little brassy in a city still unsettled with fear of terrorism.

The oratory of Henry captivated Denise Stabenau, a 46-year-old New Yorker. But Henry did not remind her of another son who became “king” and attempted to lead his troops with courage and fortitude. “Bush sounds more like a propagandist than Henry,” she said. “He could use Shakespeare.” But the director clearly was trying to touch New Yorkers’ frayed nerves. In a scene where French diplomats mock the king by sending him a gift of a can of tennis balls -- an insult reminding Henry of his wayward youth -- his nobles pull back, as if in fear of a bomb, when the king’s uncle pops open the can. People laughed; they got the message.

“We see our times in the moments of these plays,” says Wolfe, who last produced “Henry V” at the Delacorte in 1996 when the country was in a very different mood.

That the same text means something different every time it is performed reflects not only the brilliance of Shakespeare, but also the value this long-running tradition has to New Yorkers. They keep coming back, eager to see who will tell the stories and how.

Famous actors who performed in the park early in their careers return at rock-bottom salaries: Meryl Streep, Jimmy Smits, James Earl Jones, Kevin Kline and Helen Hunt. Productions always sell out. Other major cities have unabashedly copied this New York summer ritual. Even the great outdoors tries to collaborate. In a production last summer of “Measure for Measure,” starring Smits, a raccoon walked regularly across the stage as if on cue. When a Prospero played by Patrick Stewart gave up his powers, lightning regularly filled the sky, but rain rarely followed.

Could you ask for more on a beautiful summer night?

Which is not to say Shakespeare in the Park lives a charmed life. Joe Papp was forever banging at city officials’ doors for money and getting turned down. There were fat years only after Papp produced “A Chorus Line” and used its profits to put on three Shakespeare plays a summer. But for two years running, there has only been one production because, like every other cultural institution in this city, Wolfe’s company is struggling.

This year, there’s also been a controversy about “The Line,” a tradition nearly as beloved as the free plays themselves. Over the last few weeks, a debate has been roiling on the online networking site Craig’s List after a law student offered to stand in line and sell “free” tickets for $60 each. “Why wait hours in 90 degree heat if you don’t have to?” she advertised. Many balked: “Believe me, if she does this, charging for free tickets, just wait what her conscience will let her do next,” an angry New Yorker wrote. “Don’t they sell handicap tickets for the theater, too? Maybe she can borrow her grandmother’s wheelchair and rent out the wheelchair and get those tickets, too.”

Our band of broke ballplayers from the old days would be appalled. Our pickup team consisted of teachers, a good Samaritan who ran a city program for the homeless, a professional dog walker, and several writers, including one who is now a Hollywood TV mogul but who was down and out back then.

Most of us can probably afford the Hamptons and a front-row seat on Broadway for $100. But Shakespeare in the Park remains an indispensable summer institution, one that never should be tainted by a law student’s need to make a buck. It’s a city treasure, something that is now passed down to new generations like a precious family tradition. The other night, the audience included, yes, a few investment bankers, but many more students and young people holding down first jobs out of college.

Also in the crowd, sitting with one of those aged softball players, was a 10-year-old boy holding a Coke in one hand and a brownie in the other. Under a summer sky streaked with red, the boy and his dad watched contentedly as a feckless prince became a king.