The Stage: Free Shakespeare

Night after night, everybody is there—cops, professors, bums, Wall Street customers' men, out-of-work actors with Biblical haircuts, dye-blonde actresses with bright blue eyelids; sailors in summer whites, girls in their summer dresses, girls in slacks, pony-tailed skinks from Greenwich Village, and novice beards with the Penguin Classics in the hip hip pockets of their dungarees—fabricating laughter in all the archaic places. The crowd begins on folding chairs around a large and multi-proned stage, then spreads out onto bleachers and grass-covered slopes. About 3,500 turn up in Manhattan's Central Park each evening...

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