(Annie Levin’s article appeared in the Compact, 8/27; Photo: Joan Marcus/ The Public Theater.)
For decades, the free outdoor summer performances put on by Manhattan’s Public Theater have been a pillar of New York City’s cultural scene. The New York Shakespeare Festival, now called Free Shakespeare in the Park, launched the careers of Meryl Streep, James Earl Jones, and George C. Scott; many other notable figures of the stage and the screen have appeared in its acclaimed performances since it was launched in 1954 by the theater artist Joseph Papp. Born to Russian Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn in 1921, Papp believed that live theater should be as accessible as the public library. With a thirty-five-foot trailer attached to a decommissioned sanitation truck, he and his company brought Shakespeare to the people for free.
When he first rolled his trailer to Central Park’s Turtle Pond, Papp could hardly have imagined what the festival would become in 2026: the Blade helicopters droning past as the festival’s director of fundraising thanks Citizens Bank and other corporate sponsors for their generous contributions; productions like last summer’s star-studded Twelfth Night, which recast the beloved comedy as a cartoonish spectacle, part Shen Yun Circus and part Spongebob musical.
The first production in this summer’s season was a bilingual Romeo and Juliet set at the US-Mexico border wall. No English supertitles were provided for non-Spanish-speaking audience members, nor Spanish supertitles for the non-English-speakers in the crowd. The star-crossed lovers code-switched in and out of Spanish, as in: “For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch / And palm to palm the palmer les da un beso.” The laugh lines in Spanish elicited obligatory titters from perhaps a fifth of the audience. The rest maintained a guilty, awkward silence.
Juliet’s balcony scene was staged on a guard tower on the border wall. The Montagues, a Spanish-speaking family of indigenous activists from the wrong side of the wall, staged a campus-style “Abolish ICE” banner drop; the Capulets were border guards, dressed like goose-stepping blackshirts. Transposing contemporary politics onto Shakespeare can, in theory, offer a fruitful way of reimagining the play, but the politics here were slapped on and made little sense. The Montagues and Capulets are “two families, both alike in dignity” battling over ancient grudges; the tragic deaths of the young protagonists prompt them to recognize the meaninglessness of the rivalry and reconcile. The new production’s desperate bid for relevance generated an incoherent statement with little relation to the text, turning a tragic love story about fate, love, and destructive enmity into a black and white morality tale.
