Recently, New York City banned musicians from playing in Central Park. So now, unless you want to rollerblade or feed the pigeons, there’s nothing left to entertain you in the park anymore. Oh, except for one thing: Shakespeare in the Park! I remember years ago, there was a local news story about Shakespeare in the Park, and the reporter was down there during a performance to show what it was like, and there were all these yuppies sitting around on picnic blankets eating fine foods, etc., and the reporter approached a cop and asked him if the crowds ever became rowdy or troublesome, and the policeman said: “Nah! This is strictly ‘the wine and cheese crowd’!” That’s about it, in a nutshell. Shakespeare doesn’t seem to attract the riff-raff; at least not like a sporting event, or a punk or metal concert. (Maybe that’s why they banned musicians from the park: too much black metal and stuff being blasted out with mosh pits forming everywhere, scaring away all the pickpockets and muggers whose taxes fund the city.)
Yes, Shakespeare in the Park has been a New York institution for practically as long as I can remember. Romeo stabbing Tybalt to death; Othello strangling Desdemona to death; Julius Caesar getting stabbed to death by a gang of Roman Senators wearing KISS make-up and New York Yankees uniforms (Oh, sorry; I guess I was thinking of the movie The Warriors: Julius Caesar got killed by the “Baseball Furies” in that movie, I think…); Hamlet going crazy over his father’s murder and going on a killing spree: this is all perfect stuff to stage in Central Park, because it’s all just like the stuff that always happens there anyway, so the mood is optimal! It’s kind of like making a haunted house attraction in a house that was the scene of a grizzly mass-murder: it just has the appropriate feel because you know it’s authentic! Yes, I’m afraid that Shakespeare in a theater never feels quite right because you know nothing like that stuff has ever actually happened in the theater, so it’s all just an act. But in Central Park, it’s perfect: it’s all happened before, all that murder and mayhem; right there, in the park! It’s tailor-made for staging performances of such grizzly stuff due to the verisimilitude!
But since they have recently banned musicians from the park, how long is it going to be before Shakespeare in the Park is banned too? I’m telling you, it’s the obvious next logical step! Some city official is going to decide that Shakespeare in the Park has got to go! I can hear him now, rejecting their application for next year: “What’s this? Shakespeare?! Isn’t that that crap we had to suffer through reading in high school? And you want to subject people to it during the summer?! When they’re supposed to be getting a break from school? Fuck that shit!* Fuggetaboudit! Application denied! Get out! (You fuckin’ mutt!)” And just like that, Shakespeare in the Park will be history.
* (Yes, profanity-laced tirades are how we roll here in “The Big Apple”!)
