The Delacorte Theater

0:00Jeff Lunden:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30Jeff Lunden:And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.

0:51Lupita Nyong'o:Welcome to the documentary In the Studio from the BBC World Service. I'm Jeff London, and I'm in the heart of New York City's Central Park, right next to a theater which has presented free Shakespeare in the Park for more than 60 years. The Delacorte Theater has been closed for the past 18 months for a big renovation, and tonight it reopens with a star-studded production of Shakespeare's comedy of romance and mistaken identity, Twelfth Night. At 8.30 in the morning, there's a long, winding line of people, some in lawn chairs, some on blankets, one even in a hammock. The very first person on the line is Mary Flum Peterson.

1:37Lupita Nyong'o:And where are you from?

1:38Jeff Lunden:I live here in New York. I grew up in Wisconsin, but I've been coming to Shakespeare in the Park since I was an undergrad at Columbia when I was 19 years old. So it's a tradition for me for many years. So we'll just leave it at that, many, many years.

1:53Lupita Nyong'o:So when did you get here this morning?

1:56Jeff Lunden:This morning I got here at 4.30. Wow, okay.

2:00Lupita Nyong'o:So you really want to see Shakespeare in the Park. I do, I do. Like Mary, I've been seeing Shakespeare in the Park every year since I moved to the city in 1980. My first show wasn't Shakespeare at all. It was a highly entertaining production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance, starring Linda Ronstadt and Kevin Kline. I was enchanted, not just by the performance, but by the setting.

2:26Jeff Lunden:One of the great beauties of Free Shakespeare in the Park is you never lose sight of the fact that you're in the middle of New York City.

2:33Lupita Nyong'o:That's Oscar Eustace, artistic director of the Public Theater, which runs the Delacorte.

2:38Jeff Lunden:You're in this beautiful park, but you can also see the skyline of downtown and midtown below you. You can see the apartments on the east side and the west side of the park. You see the planes and helicopters going overhead, sometimes to our distress. You're not excluded from the life of the city. You're at the heart of the life of the city, seeing great art. And all for free.

3:04Lupita Nyong'o:Central Park is a huge green expanse in the middle of the city, with lawns, a zoo, gardens, and playing fields. And the Delacorte Theater is one of its jewels. Loved as it is, over the years it had become pretty dilapidated. Rain had taken its toll on the structure and electrical systems. Central Park's raccoons had free rain under the grandstand. accessibility for disabled audiences and artists was limited. And don't even start on the bathrooms. So a plan was made to strip the theater down to its basic structure and rebuild it. This is the story of its renewal and rebirth. On a frigid February morning earlier this year, I don a hard hat.

3:57Lupita Nyong'o:Okay, so it is about 25 degrees outside. 25 degrees Fahrenheit is about minus 4 degrees Celsius. And I am standing in front of the Delacorte Theater, and reconstruction is going on. I'm joined by Eustace, as well as the project's architect, Stephen Chu, and Patrick Willingham, the public theater's executive director, who's been overseeing the project. It's been more than 10 years in the making and has been funded both publicly and privately.

4:35Jeff Lunden:I tell the story all the time of when I first got this job 14 years ago, walking up behind two women. One was clearly a New York citizen, and the other was someone coming to visit her. And as I was walking behind them, the visitor pointed at the Delaware Court and she said, what's that, a baseball stadium? And I sort of knew from that moment, like, we've got to do something. Like, the art that happens inside is so incredible. The exterior and the experience of going has to feel as parallel to that as possible. So it's what we've really tried to pull off.

5:07Lupita Nyong'o:But the theater is landmarked, a legal protection against destruction or significant alteration. So its footprint in Central Park can't be changed, even as the building itself is getting a major upgrade. Architect Stephen Chu. One of the big goals here is to make this theater more accessible

5:28Jeff Lunden:for all types of visitors, as well as more welcoming. So it wants to nestle into the trees and to the nature and to the different seasons of the park and feel like it really sits in harmony here. But at the same time, it makes a big gesture to welcome and invite all the visitors and patrons to come here.

5:47Lupita Nyong'o:And to do that, Chu says, the theater's exterior, which used to be a drab gray, is being changed in a striking way.

5:56Jeff Lunden:We really wanted this project to be resilient and as sustainable as possible and be in harmony with the nature. So we found a shop that actually reclaims wood from water tanks here in New York City. And the amazing thing is that wood is old-growth redwood, which is very precious these days. And because we're reusing it, reskinning it, we basically have clad the whole theater with fabric that comes from all the five boroughs of the city, and it's really for the people, the five boroughs of the city.

6:26Lupita Nyong'o:Chu says the impression will almost be like seeing a huge redwood tree trunk sprouting in the park. Before we enter the construction site, it's worth telling the story of the Delacorte Theater itself. It begins with theater producer Joseph Papp, a native New Yorker who grew up in a household that spoke Yiddish. He discovered Shakespeare on school trips and in the 1950s founded the New York Shakespeare Festival. In 1987, he told WHYY's program Fresh Air about his clear vision.

7:04Jeff Lunden:I started with this notion of wanting to bring Shakespeare to the people without charge and play in the city's parks, playgrounds. I felt he'd been taken over too much by the academics. He was being presented in a way that would turn a lot of people off. And so I made it sort of my commitment to develop American actors to act the works of Shakespeare with the right emotionality, the right speech, clarity.

7:26Lupita Nyong'o:Before the theater was built, the festival presented productions in a city-run amphitheater on the Lower East Side and on a flatbed truck which drove across New York City. One story suggests that the truck broke down right by the turtle pond near the Belvedere Castle, one of the most beautiful spots in Central Park, and Joseph Papp decided that would be the perfect place to build a theater to present Shakespeare for free. But, artistic director Oscar Eustace says, like all good drama, Papp had a nemesis.

8:02Jeff Lunden:In 1959, Robert Moses, the all-powerful commissioner of parks in New York City, decided that we could not do free Shakespeare in the Park, that if we wanted to do Shakespeare in the Park, we had to charge money for it and split it with the Parks Department so that they could reseed the grass. Joe Papp said no. He said to even charge a nickel for Shakespeare in the Park undercuts the very idea, which is that the theater is not a commodity to be sold. It's something that belongs to people for free. He fought Moses all the way through the courts in the pages of the newspapers, and finally when Joe won in the appellate court and they ruled that Moses had behaved in an arbitrary and capricious manner, free Shakespeare was an institution forever, I hope.

8:48Lupita Nyong'o:The Parks Department built a permanent 1 ,864-seat theater on the site with some seed money from publisher George T. Delacorte, which the public theater rents for$1 annually. The first performance in 1962 was The Merchant of Venice, starring George C. Scott, long before he starred in the film Patton, and a very young James Earl Jones, long before he became the voice of Darth Vader. A lot of great actors have trod the 75-foot-wide stage, like Meryl Streep and Addams Family star Raul Julia in The Taming of the Shrew.

9:28Jeff Lunden:Come, come, you wasp in faith. You are too angry. If I be waspish, best beware my sting. My remedy is then to pluck it out. I, if the fool could find it where it lies.

9:39Lupita Nyong'o:Or Academy Award-winning actor Kevin Kline in Hamlet. Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, fall, and resolve itself into a dew. The Delacorte in particular holds a special place in Kline's heart.

9:58Jeff Lunden:I mean, my first job was holding a spear in Richard III in the park. We keep returning because it is a special, magical experience. When the weather is right, when the production is right, when things are going well, they go better outdoors in the middle of Central Park in the Delacorte.

10:15Lupita Nyong'o:Of course, in an open-air theater, weather is always a concern. Sometimes shows are rained out, more often there's a delay, but sometimes they continue in light rainfall. Lily Rabe, best known for American Horror Story, played Portia in a production of The Merchant of Venice with Al Pacino.

10:37Jeff Lunden:It had been raining softly and steadily, about from 8 o 'clock, and everyone was drenched, but it wasn't a heavy enough rain that they had to call the show. When I got to Quality of Mercy,

10:48Lupita Nyong'o:It dropped with as the, I've got to put my hands out in that gentle rain that had been falling on all of us for the past two hours. I just about died. And I remember with Al afterwards, he just said, well, I don't really get better than that. Rabe also recalls waiting in the wings next to that other Delacorte hazard, the raccoons. That's certainly Daphne Rubin Vega's experience. She's playing Mariah in Twelfth Night, the first production in the newly refurbished theater. The raccoons are our friends. They're our mascots. If we give them the respect that they deserve, putting your stage right,

11:28Jeff Lunden:they are humbling and they're not frightened.

11:35Lupita Nyong'o:Ruben Vega may find the raccoons friends, but back on that cold winter day, when I tour the site in a hard hat. The Delacorte's brain trust tells me one of the things they wanted to do was make the dressing rooms under the seats critter-proof. As we walk underneath the grandstand, executive director Patrick Willingham turns.

11:58Jeff Lunden:Just stopping here for a second because we've talked so much about raccoons showing up. We've all seen them show up on stage. You've heard stories from performers, technicians, of them wandering through the back. Well, we've actually constructed what we're teasingly naming the raccoon wall. A big, beautiful wall. Build it. Build it. So the cinder block wall that's sitting in front of us underneath the grandstand is meant to separate outside or inside.

12:30Lupita Nyong'o:They're also making the dressing rooms waterproof and reliably air-conditioned, says artistic director Oscar Eustace.

12:39Jeff Lunden:The conditions in the dressing rooms for the actors and technicians who work back here were, I mean, I won't say barbaric. At their best, we could say it's like summer camp, remember? Literally, rain would come in the dressing rooms. The air conditioning was extremely suspect. There was no privacy. It was just really criminal.

13:02Lupita Nyong'o:We walk along and look at what will be the dressing rooms.

13:06Jeff Lunden:Walls are up. Sheetrock is up. The sliding doors are in. Obviously, it's far from finished, but we've really advanced the plot here in terms of getting the dressing rooms ready to go. There are five dressing rooms, three of which are fully accessible to folks who use wheelchairs or other mobility devices.

13:25Lupita Nyong'o:After touring the theater's bowels, we go outside. It's still freezing, but very sunny. The new stage light towers are up, An elevator to the stage manager's booth high above the audience has been constructed, and the workers are all over the empty theater shell. So we are now on the stage of the Delacorte Theater, which is very much a construction space, and I guess, what are they all doing now? They're sawing wood for where the seats are going to go?

13:59Jeff Lunden:They're finishing the decking. So the decking is made out of a product called Kebany, which is treated with a bio-liquid. It makes a hardwood far, far harder. And it's super exciting to be here right now because I haven't seen the beginning of the seat installation. So all new seats. We were able to maintain the same seat couch as we had prior even though we've increased the amount of accessibility and even though we've increased the width of the seats overall.

14:28Lupita Nyong'o:Work continues and about a month later I meet architect Stephen Chu in the offices of his firm Ennead on the 40th floor of the new World Trade Center overlooking lower Manhattan and New York Harbor. Chu, who's previously worked on renovations of the public theater's home in Greenwich Village, explains to me how he was able to retain the same number of seats, even if they're wider.

14:55Jeff Lunden:The solution that we came upon was to hold the footprint, but to give the exterior wrap, if you will, just a slight cant. And what that volumetric impact does is not just give us more footprint above, but also give an expression that's a little bit more outward and a little bit more engaging towards the public face approaching the theater.