Shakespeare in the Park(ing) Lot

Went and did something really fun this evening. (Technically it was last Friday evening, by the time I get around to posting this). A friend from my community group made a list of things she was interested in doing in NYC this summer on the cheap, or fairly cheap, and one of them was this thing called Shakespeare in the Parking Lot.

A lot of people have heard of Shakespeare in the Park, which I believe is done in Central Park and is of course what this thing was taking its name from. This wasn’t anything nearly so grand, but it was still a ton of fun.
It was a free performance of Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’, performed (as I understand it) by actors from a couple of different venues & production companies; the organizing production group is called the drilling company (linked at the bottom). They took out space in a parking lot at the corner of Ludlow & Broome on the edge of Chinatown. I think there were a total of about a dozen different actors (a few of them played multiple smaller parts), and there were I’m guessing 60 or 70 people attending; those who got there early got the thirty or so chairs brought by the drilling company, and everyone else either brought their own or sat on mats.
I’d never seen this play before, and I decided against reading the Cliff Notes before the show, which I ended up being glad for. I won’t spoil the plot for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but the show really was very entertaining; it’s a lighter piece, similar in feel I think to ‘Much Ado About Nothing’.
The great thing about this performance is that even though the dialog was classic Shakespeare, the costume design was a little unorthodox. Orlando, the male protagonist, was dressed like John Travolta from Grease; the Duke and his men were dressed like Prohibition-era gangsters, and Rosalind (the female protagonist who might really in truth be accurately called the ‘main character’) wore a button-up sweater and a poodle skirt. There was also a character dressed like a cheerleader. It reminded me of some ways of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with Leonardo DiCaprio, which had the original language in a very unorthodox setting. It sounds strange, but these actors were both very enthusiastic as well as very talented, and they made it work. It helped that it was clear they were having a good time with it as well.
To be honest, if I were still going to be in town (I’m leaving on Thursday to go back to Seattle for the rest of the summer until Labor Day), I’d go see the performance again.
One of the really interesting things was that the audience was very respectful; the only real disturbance we had was the garbage truck across the street being so loud that we couldn’t hear part of the dialog. (But I guess that is a risk you take with a street performance). I was honestly a bit surprised; the crowd was very mixed, you had the entire range from people who looked like they were regular attendees of professional Shakespeare productions to homeless people right off the streets. I felt sure that there would be at least one person who would disrupt things in some way, shout out some silly remark at the actors or something. But it never happened; the entire audience was very respectful of both the performers and each other. In a strange kind of way, as I looked around over the crowd at various times, I’d almost say it was like a bonding experience. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, was really into the performance, and I saw people afterwards having conversations with people they would probably never otherwise have talked to. It brought people together in a really neat kind of way.
And it reminded me again how good the Bard really is.

the drilling compaNY
www.drillingcompany.org