The New Yorker:

Central Park’s beloved open-air stage has had some work done (eighty-five million dollars’ worth). Streep and Pacino may have moved on, but the raccoons stuck around.

By Michael Schulman

In the nineteen-fifties, Joe Papp, the founder of the Public Theatre, would travel the five boroughs with a flatbed trailer hitched to a garbage truck, offering free Shakespeare to all New Yorkers. “The myth, which is sort of true, is that the truck broke down by the side of the Turtle Pond, so he just decided to squat here,” Oskar Eustis, Papp’s modern-day successor, said one afternoon in Central Park. He was standing on the site where, in 1962, Papp—after a multiyear standoff with Robert Moses (who dismissed him as “an irresponsible Commie”)—inaugurated the Delacorte, the open-air home of Shakespeare in the Park, with “The Merchant of Venice.”

“He fought that fight so that we didn’t have to,” Eustis said. The amphitheatre is now an institution, where James Earl Jones, Meryl Streep, and Al Pacino have braved rain, heat, and scene-stealing raccoons. But, a decade ago, Eustis realized that it needed a makeover. There were accessibility issues, leaking issues. “The dressing rooms, which generations of artists have been kind to us about, were wet,” he said. “The wiring conditions—now that they’re gone, I can tell you—were quite improvisatory. The relationship of electricity and water probably should not have been allowed.”

Then, there was what Patrick Willingham, the Public’s executive director, called “over-all aesthetics.” He remembered, with a shudder, overhearing a tourist in the Park wondering aloud whether the theatre was a derelict baseball stadium.

Go to link