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Photos: A Celebration Of The 1960s Shakespeare In The Park's Audiences
By
Ben Yakas
Published Dec 17, 2020
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George Joseph/NYPL
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Dec 17, 2020
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New Yorkers were devastated last spring when it was announced that this year's free Shakespeare In the Park festival would have to be canceled because of the pandemic. "It’s just clear to us at this point that there’s no way we can responsibly prepare, build and rehearse to get shows open in a timing that might match the quarantine’s timing," Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, which founded and runs the festival, said at the time.
We're hopeful that the Public Theater will be able to put shows back on next summer, but in the meantime, it's the perfect time to take a look back at the origins of the annual festival, thanks to the New York Public Library's treasure trove of early photos documenting its start in the early 1960s.
Back then, it was known as the New York Shakespeare Festival; it was founded by director/producer Joseph Papp, who first launched the shows with a series of Shakespeare workshops, then moved on to free productions on the Lower East Side. By 1959, the free productions had started taking place at the lawn in front of Turtle Pond in Central Park, where they attracted thousands of people.
But then-Parks Commissioner Robert Moses insisted that Papp charge a fee for the performances to help cover the cost of "grass erosion." The two battled in court over the issue, and Papp ultimately won (even after Moses circulated an unsigned letter calling Papp a communist). In the end, Moses asked the city's Board of Estimate to appropriate $250,000 for construction of an amphitheater in Central Park for the shows; Moses was notably quoted as saying, "well, let's build the bastard a theater."
The Delacorte Theatre opened by 1962, which is where the festival has taken place every summer since until now.
In the gallery above, you can see a collection of photographs by George Joseph, who documented the audiences in the earliest years of Shakespeare in the Park.
"Shakespeare in the Park is, for me, always a highlight of my theatre-going year, and reading of its (necessary) cancellation earlier this year while standing in line to enter a socially-distanced grocery store was one those many comparatively small but deeply felt injuries of 2020 that seemed to pour a bit more salt in the more profound wounds we were all experiencing," said Doug Reside, curator at The Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library. "I hope these photographs, showing the beautiful array of New York City audiences who join each summer with the raccoons and mosquitoes to watch 400 year old plays performed for free in the open air of a summer night, are for you, as they were for me, something of a salve for our still open wounds."
You can read more about those infamous Delacorte Theater raccoons here as well.
As part of our month-long Dear NYC series, we're looking at New York City gems hidden away at the New York Public Library. The NYPL’s four research centers offer the public access to over 55 million items, including rare books, manuscripts, letters, diaries, photographs, prints, maps, ephemera, and more. Integral to these robust collections is the Library’s extensive material related to New York City, and as NY works to come together, cope, heal and recover from the 2020 pandemic, economic uncertainty, and the many issues that divide us, it is important to look at that history and remember: New York is resilient. New York is strong. New York has seen its share of hard times. And, as always, with Patience and Fortitude (the names given to the Library’s beloved lions in 1933 by Mayor LaGuardia for the virtues New Yorkers needed to get through the Great Depression) we will get through it, together.
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Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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