What does “lucky” mean in New York this summer? That your exquisitely talented, warm-hearted friend and collaborator Ray Rizzo, prince among men, unparalleled drummer, straddler of the city’s theater and music worlds, band member in the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park production of “Twelfth Night” gives you a comp ticket. On a Monday night, in which the full butter-colored moon travels slowly across the sky above the grassy stage as if engined by an inspired celestial Lighting Designer. Or maybe director Daniel Sullivan made it happen– I wouldn’t put it past him.
The production (closing yesterday, sadly) was magical, absolutely deserving of its glowing reviews and the ticket lines that formed at 5 AM for much of its run. (It is intensely satisfying to type “ticket lines that formed at 5 AM” when writing about Shakespeare.) It was funny, well-crafted, warm-hearted, and refreshingly musical. And the audience I was part of was fully engaged– for the entire 3 hours. That’s amazing. Creating a Shakespeare production that speaks so directly and successfully to a contemporary audience– especially to an audience as heterogeneous as that of Shakespeare in the Park– is no small task. It’s a 400 year old play, for chrissakes, that even sustained the attention of the teenage girls that mainly came to see movie star Anne Hathaway as Viola. (Did you know that Shakespeare’s real-life wife was named Anne Hathaway as well? Weird.)
That’s what a great production can do, and director Daniel Sullivan did a masterful job integrating all the elements into harmony. I was struck by how site-specific his “Twelfth Night” felt; the grassy incline of the set and the gentle lighting seemed to press into the experience of a summer night in Central Park, to use it as the beginning of a conversation that the production continued, instead of fighting against it with the imposition of a clashing stageworld. Even the musicians felt organic to a park in which wandering buskers roam.
But if I were to meet Mr. Sullivan, I’d especially like to thank him for the show’s sense of simple generosity. It felt decidedly inclusive without ever losing trust in its audience’s intelligence and wit. In this, Sullivan’s “Twelfth Night” seemed to re-animate the original impulse behind Shakespeare in the Park as a public, freely-given theatrical gift to the people of New York City. The mammoth battle Joseph Papp undertook to bring SITP (then called the New York Shakespeare Festival) to Central Park free-of-charge is recounted in several books, and the Bowery Boys, New York history enthusiasts, have a great podcast that details the fight. The most legendary phase of battle was with then-parks commissioner Robert Moses, who wanted to instate a fee for “grass erosion. The bulldogish Papp eventually earned Moses’ enduring respect, and won the fight; it ended with Moses’ famous comment, “Well, let’s build the bastard a theater.”
The city appears to be grateful, judging from their standing O’s. My friend Ray tells me that on rainy nights, the magic endured, with Feste the fool’s (to my mind, the strangest character in Shakespeare) leading of the cast in, “And the rain, it raineth every day”. It’s a song about the passing of time and the cycles of nature that are illuminated with such a light hand in “Twelfth Night”. I feel sure that Sullivan was fully aware of the possibilities of dark weather, and the way that melancholy anthem might settle over its audience. What an enchanting way to spend a rainy summer night in New York– receiving a free gift from Joseph Papp, Robert Moses, and the extraordinary company of “Twelfth Night”; and of course the Bard himself.