Theater-maker Shamus McCarty doesn’t like the rain. And no wonder.
Audience members bringing rambunctious children and canines to West Philly’s Clark Park for outdoor performances of “As You Like It” by Shakespeare in Clark Park, the theater group McCarty leads, would have to make other plans — at least for the canines.
Operators of the rain location — the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center — prefer a human-only audience. Plus, it only seats a couple hundred people, much less than the thousand who can attend outdoors.
Clark Park picnickers enjoying their Bard with a BYOB Bordeaux would be challenged to smuggle their vino indoors. Would a Solo cup work?
And worst of all, McCarty said, the crunch of even a single potato chip, eaten comfortably outdoors in lieu of supper and covered by the noise of aforementioned canines and kids, crackles embarrassingly loud in a theater’s hush.
Instead, “let’s have a party in the park,” dogs, kids and picnics welcome, said McCarty, producer and artistic director. That’s long been the underlying ethos of Shakespeare in Clark Park’s mission — this year expressed in a three-play festival with performances in parks around the city and suburbs.
“Giving free public performances of classic texts and stories is kind of a gift,” McCarty said. “I think it’s an incredible thing to break down the barrier between artists and audience and I’m pushing for an expanded sense of that.”
3 plays across the region
In May, Shakespeare in Clark Park staged the first play, “Antonio, or What I Would,” inspired by Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” and making the case for queer visibility. A solo work, it was created by Shayne David Cameris, associate producer with the Troy Foundry Theatre, and Brenna Geffers, co-founder of Die-Cast, a Philadelphia theater company.
There’s one more chance on Saturday to see the second play, an adaption of Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors,” with a new subtitle, “The ‘Real Housewives of Ephesus’ Version.”
Adapted by Philadelphia playwright Megan Schumacher and directed by McCarty, the comic classic of mixed identities, told from the women’s perspective, was already performed in Center City Philadelphia, at Smithbridge Road Park in Concord, Delaware County, and at West Goshen Community Park in Chester County. The final show is set for 6 p.m. this Saturday at McMichael Park in East Falls. If it rains, same time and place on Sunday.
Shakespeare in Clark Park’s main show, “As You Like It,” runs July 24 through July 28.
An updated ‘As You Like It’
The main character, Rosalind, and others leave their homes when a new tyrannical leader takes over. Fleeing into the woods, they make their own community, based on love, freedom and acceptance.
Writing in 1599, William Shakespeare set the play in France, with most of the action taking place in the forests of Arden, an area of England or France, depending on which scholar is doing the analysis.
No such ambiguity exists in the Clark Park version. Director Ontaria Kim Wilson, a Philadelphia actor, director and producer, chose Arden, Delaware, a real place near Wilmington.
“Delaware is the country’s first state, and The Forest of Arden has been deemed a place of exile, simplicity and lack; but it is there where the exiled experience the true essence of humanity,” the company writes, describing the locale.
“It’s set in the immediate future, 2034,” McCarty explained, “and the proposal is that we end up in this place of conservative ideology rising to power.”
But, he said, neither Shakespeare nor Wilson imagined a doomsday dystopian tragedy. Instead, complete with Shakespeare’s usual cross-gender, mistaken identity and romantic plot twists, “As You Like It’ is a story of resilience, one informed in the Shakespeare in Clark Park production by Wilson’s experiences growing up in Philadelphia, McCarty said.
“Things are going to happen and as things happen, this is how we’ll survive,” he said. “We’ll share our space. If things go south, we’ll run to the forest and set up something together.”
Local flavor
For Shakespeare in Clark Park, the “together” part includes tapping into community talent, a tradition for the company, which staged its first show in 2006. In 2014, for example, the directors drafted 100 friends and neighbors to create an army for Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” and in 2015, two dozen youngsters formed a children’s chorus for “The Winter’s Tale.”
For this season, there have been free community poetry workshops and a community choir.
In June and early July, Philadelphia poet Warren C. Longmire led poetry workshops on gender play and transformation, as well as exile and other topics. His poems and poems written by workshop-goers will begin and end “As You Like lt” performances on July 24 and 28.
Pax Ressler, organizer of the Rise Choir and a longtime Philadelphia performer and actor, has assembled a chorus — drawn somewhat, but not exclusively, from the West Philadelphia community — to sing opening and closing numbers for each “As You Like It” performance.
Coming up
“The Comedy of Errors: The Real Housewives of Ephesus Version,” Shakespeare in Clark Park, July 13, McMichael Park, 3300 Midvale Ave., Philadelphia
“As You Like It,” Shakespeare in Clark Park, July 24-28, the Bowl at Clark Park, 43rd Street and Baltimore Avenue, Philadelphia. Poetry at 6:30 p.m.; play at 7.
