The Play in the Park

I’ve tried to write this out half a dozen times now. It never comes out right. And yet it is one of those incidents to which my mind returns with regularity, a core of gravity around which the rest of my identity spins. I think I keep coming back to it in the hope that the final, decisive, conclusive, real writing of the incident will provide an expiation.

QUINCE
If that may be, then all is well. Come, sit down,
every mother's son, and rehearse your parts.

I won’t return to New York. Not if I can help it. Once was enough. One week was enough to suffice me a lifetime. I’d break this vow for a publishing opportunity, of course, of course, but nothing shy of that could draw me back. A week of breathing in that air, congested with congealed emotion, thick with stress that was a second humidity, walking through those concrete canyons and swimming through the air that was saturated with the stress and dead dreams of myriad millions was enough to make me disinclined to go back.

And then, of course, there was the play in the park.

QUINCE
O monstrous! O strange! we are haunted.

On the downslope of a week surfeited with sensory data and concentrated culture, we were going out to see a play in Central Park. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as interpreted by students from Julliard. The prospect of seeing Shakespeare in Central Park was, for me—suburban rube and aspiring literatus with deep-seated feelings of inferiority with respect to the cultural intensity of New York City—quite exciting.

QUINCE
Pat, pat; and here's a marvellous convenient place
for our rehearsal. This green plot shall be our
stage, this hawthorn-brake our tiring-house; and we
will do it in action as we will do it before the duke.

I was, I think, about sixteen at the time. Seventeen, maybe. I was with a friend from high school who had a number of relations in the City, and we were shuffling between his uncles and aunts in the course of our explorations of New York. On this night, we were out with one of his aunts. Maternal or paternal or incidental, I don’t remember. I do remember she smiled incessantly, smiled at everything. I remember that she wore a blue dress with a white polka dot print. I remember she was very overweight, and that each step caused her to huff her breath. We’d taken a taxi from near her place of work in Brooklyn to the place of the play.

PUCK
What, a play toward! I'll be an auditor;
An actor too, perhaps, if I see cause.

We drew up on the cheap plastic chairs arranged on a green, oblique to a cluster of hillocks. I don't remember if we paid or not, nor do I remember if there were sufficient chairs for everybody or if we had to sit on the grass or on the small wall that ran behind the green. These details have left me. We were open to the air; that much I do know.

The seats filled up with persons in buttoned shirts and dresses. Even to this outdoor play in the park, this free play, a goodly number of the playgoers had gone over the threshhold of business casual, at least, to make an impression of their professionalism and their richness. Or perhaps they had just come from their serious, rich, professional jobs and had not had opportunity to change. Or perhaps they always dressed like that. Unlike me, who enjoys plays but always balks at spending more than $40 on an article of clothing, such that even when I saved up to shell out the two thousand dollars to see the Ring Cycle, I was seeing it in jeans and tennis shoes. But I'm defraying myself. Back to it.

The play commenced. It was quite the minimalist affair—which was to say it had no set to speak of, other than the green hillocks and raw moonlight.

SNOUT
Doth the moon shine that night we play our play?

The actors had no costumes other than plain black sweatclothes. They were relying on the broadness and bigness of their acting to carry the magic of the play, I guess—and that there was in abundance.

I hadn't found A Midsummer Night's Dream to be particularly funny. I hadn't found any of Shakespeare's comedies to be funny, really. I'd read MND before, or had tried to and stalled out; I can't recall. But what verbal humor there is in the play is largely lost on a first time auditor, due to the now-unusual and intricate constructions of words and the rapidity of the delivery, complicated in this face by the manifold distractions of being in an audience in a park in the middle of the City. I've read it subsequently and I can parse out the jokes now, and some of them are actually quite good, but it takes a kind of concentration and the ability to re-read lines and scan the gloss to get the full humor out of the play. None of this was available to me at the time, with the result that the comedy was coming across as profoundly unfunny.

I wasn't the only one to feel so. The audience tended to sit in dumb silence, as though these graying people in button shirts and dresses didn't know any more than I did when it was that they were supposed to laugh. The actors were trying to assist us in this regard by making exaggerated gestures and faces, turning dramatic comedy into clowning. I wasn't really feeling it, and I don't think anybody else was, either, judging by the deadness of audience around me. We'd proceeded along to Act III, Scene 1, in more of an endurance than a mirth.

That changed, though. For, you see, a homeless man who perhaps had been sleeping behind one of the hillocks or a nearby tree was stirred to come onto the “stage.”

QUINCE
Ay, marry, must you; for you must understand he goes
but to see a noise that he heard, and is to come again.

He violated the fourth wall by violating what could have been the second wall but wasn't anything more than open air. He was thin and dark-skinned. His hand was held out, and an empty, dirty white polystyrene foam cup was in it. He began to panhandle at the actors. Now that got a laugh, a general loud laugh, more of a laugh than anything the actors had done up to that point had gotten.

The man was moving slowly. He kept holding out his cup. He held it at a slim, small brunette actress who was playing one of the mechanicals. She frowned and stepped away. He held it at a round-faced blonde actress, who made an expression of disgust before moving away. He held it at the thickset bearded actor who was playing Bottom, I think, and he slapped the man's hand away. The homeless man then violated the fifth wall that was the actor playing Wall, as indicated by a man covered in a bedsheet, by holding the cup at him, too. Wall swatted at the cup as though it were a fly.

All this was the greatest of improvised physical comedy. The audience was cracking up in laughter, in a way that it never had in response to the archaic boring tameness of a Shakespearean play. Sometimes the homeless man looked out at the laughter, looked at it sideways, as though it were confusing him. He was muttering something. I couldn't hear what. I think he might have been asking for change or saying that he was hungry or needed help.

Through the duration, the actors were gamely or lamely trying to bluster their way through the scene by means of going even more over the top so as to drown out the obvious fact of a homeless man standing among them. The thickset bearded actor who was playing Bottom, I think, and who had never been under the top in the first place, tried to be even louder and even more broad than he had before, until he was damn near shouting his lines. I think perhaps he was envious of the homeless man's inadvertent facility for comedy.

I don't think that the homeless man was aware that he was interrupting a play. He looked only rarely at the audience, and he seemed to be mostly oblivious of the extraordinary circumstances of these actors and actresses reciting lines at a great group of people sitting on the green. He held up his cup at Bottom again. He asked audibly for a little something. His voice was tired and sad and weak and old.

Bottom knocked the cup away. He turned to face the homeless man. Red blood burned in his cheeks and neck. Bottom screamed that no, he would not give anything to the homeless man, that he was interrupting their play and touching the actresses and that he needed to get out of there. The homeless man lowered his hand, but made no other movement.

The crowd cheered at the monlogue. People clapped and they laughed and they cheered.

After maybe half a minute the homeless man wandered toward the front row and began to panhandle the people in the good seats. He wasn't at it for long, though.

I saw the red and blue of police lights coming from the nearby street. A good New Yorker would tell you what street it was; all the streets have distinct identities in New York, I guess, but to me a street is just a street. Comes from living in a subdivision shot through with cul-de-sacs, I guess. Somebody—a uniformed policeman, I think—came and took the homeless man away.

TITANIA
Be kind and courteous to this gentleman;
Hop in his walks and gambol in his eyes;
Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries;
The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees,
And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs
And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes,
To have my love to bed and to arise;
And pluck the wings from Painted butterflies
To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes:
Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies.

There was more cheering.

The play proceeded.

We left shortly after. I don't know why we left. I think my friend's aunt, as hard-pressed as she was to move, was the first to get up out of her seat. But the underlying motivation for leaving? Had the play become boring again now that it was once again on course? Had the illusion of the Athenian youths and mechanicals gamboling in the faery-haunted wood been so thoroughly broken that there was no going back? Or was my friend's aunt, like me, sick to the stomach, sick to the very guts, with helpless guilt? I didn't know. I don't think we talked about it.

But I thought about it. I went over the incident again and again in my head, scanning and re-scanning my memory of the evening. Because I had to know, I had to be sure—it was everything to me that I had not laughed.

I remember myself sitting rigid, silent, horrorstruck. Not laughing. Never laughing. Even when everybody else was laughing at the antics of the ruined man up on the stage, I was not laughing. I could not laugh at the play, but I would not laugh at the ruin of another man's mind. I would not. Or so I told myself.

I tried to recall the memory of my muscles. Had my diaphragham heaved up, the breath rushed quickly through my throat? I swore that it hadn't, but I had to know. But I couldn't know. So I was obsessing about it, trying to coax answers out of my muscles that my muscles couldn't give, trying to sort out my memories of the event from any form of wishful thinking. Because it was everything that I had not laughed.

And I wondered if I should have done something, if there was some right course of action to take, if I should have somehow helped the homeless man, or if I should have somehow helped the actors, or if I should have done anything other than be overwhelmed with the most sickening sense of futility in the face of misery that had ever afflicted me in my life.

I was still obsessing about it when, the next morning, we were on the subway going to somewhere; I don't recall where. There was a homeless man passed out and stretched out on the seats across from us. I didn't notice it at first over the general humid acridity of the City, but after a while I recognized that the homeless man had pissed himself, and that the scent of his urine was sour and musky and brutally strong.

BOTTOM
Good Master Mustardseed, I know your patience well:
that same cowardly, giant-like ox-beef hath
devoured many a gentleman of your house: I promise
you your kindred had made my eyes water ere now.

Another guy—a young guy—opened the door into our cabin. He exclaimed loudly that he wasn't going to be in a cabin with a bum who had pissed himself, clamped his hand over his nose, and left. My friend and I stayed. We got off the subway eventually, because that is what one does.

I was still obsessing about it the next morning, yes. And I'm still obsessing about it ten years on. And I think I'll be tumbling it over and over in my head, again and again, as long as I have thoughts to tumble.

PUCK
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.