Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
William Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream
So I’m wearing a donkey head in Lafayette Park. Out there with the unhoused who’ve seen better Lears performed on actual street corners, with joggers who time their routes to avoid my soliloquies, with couples making out on blankets who couldn’t care less that I’m channeling four hundred years of theatrical tradition through a papier-mâché ass head that smells like someone’s art school farts.
The San Francisco Shakespeare Festival gets it, or maybe they just don’t have a choice. I’m performing for free, which means I’m performing for anyone, which means I’m performing for no one in particular, which somehow becomes everyone. The drunk guy heckling me is more engaged than half the people who paid $200 for orchestra seats at the War Memorial. Bottom’s supposed to be ridiculous, transformed against his will into something absurd, and hell, isn’t that just standing there in your street clothes realizing I’ve volunteered for this? Did I?
There’s something fundamentally punk about outdoor Shakespeare, this refusal to be precious, this insistence that the words can take the punishment of reality. Wind knocking over your props. Sirens mid-monologue. The smell of weed drifting over from the drum circle. It’s messier and truer and somehow it matters more when Puck’s talking about what fools these mortals be while actual fools are wandering through your fourth-wall-free disaster of a playing space.