Posted June 18, 2025
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More than four centuries later, the plays of William Shakespeare stand virtually unquestioned as the greatest achievements of the English language.
The summer months find the Bard’s works on stages in parks all across the United States. Writer Aaron Childree spent part of two summers touring productions of Shakespeare in the Park to learn why.
PROLOGUE
The modern iteration of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre sits on the bank of the River Thames, just as the original Globe did when it first opened in 1599. Attending a play at today’s Globe isn’t all that different from what it would have been like more than four centuries ago, either. The theater is open-air, but the three tiers of seating that ring around the outside of the venue are covered. The area in the middle of the theater closest to the stage is standing room only, occupied by those who in Shakespeare’s day were referred to as “groundlings,” people who couldn’t afford a covered seat.
It was as a groundling that I experienced Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream two summers ago on a warm July night in London. The large stage at the front of the theater contained a sparse set, yet the pillars were impressively adorned with golden accents. A small orchestra sat on the balcony directly above the stage and played music in the interludes between scenes. As the sun set, I tried to ignore the ache in my back and legs as Shakespeare’s classic tale of love, magic, and the mysteries of the forest played out before my eyes.
I didn’t know it at the time, but almost a year later, as another summer approached, that experience would inspire me to undertake a journey to better understand the mark Shakespeare left on our world and why we still find resonance in his work more than 400 years after they were written. I spent the summer traveling to different Shakespeare festivals and theaters, interviewing some of the people involved in putting on these events, and learning more about who Shakespeare was, the world he lived in, and how his plays can help us better understand the world we live in today.
ACT 1
Center Valley, Pennsylvania — A man dressed like Elvis walks onto the stage with his backing band and begins to serenade the audience. The stage is decorated like a 1970s lodge, the walls covered in retro plaques and framed pictures. This is the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival’s take on The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which Falstaff, one of Shakespeare’s most beloved yet infamous characters, is depicted as a traveling Elvis impersonator.
In the play, Falstaff arrives in Windsor and concocts a plan to pursue two married women in hopes of winning a share of their fortunes. But the women get wind of his plan, leading to a series of schemes, misunderstandings, and intriguing subplots. There’s even a scene in which Falstaff escapes a precarious situation by hiding in a laundry basket, only to be thrown into a river along with the dirty laundry.
I spoke to Jason King Jones, the artistic director of the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Company, and he explained why they decided to set their production of Merry Wives in this modern, yet not too modern, time and place. “I think if we had the opportunity to ask Shakespeare when his plays were set, his answer would be now,” said Jones. “So we’re trying to find a way to give a contemporary audience a feeling of what it would be like to experience Shakespeare’s plays as if you were at his theater in his time by finding something analogous in our own time and culture.”
“What’s most exciting is being able to experience the stories and the language that Shakespeare was writing, while also seeing ourselves reflected in those stories,” he continues. “By putting it in a context that we find more familiar, we are able to appreciate the stories with a fresh perspective.”
Casting Falstaff as the leader of an Elvis tribute band also provided the opportunity to incorporate live music into the production in exciting ways. Live performances of entire songs were dispersed throughout the production, and in these moments, the stage almost looked more like a concert venue. The lights dimmed, and Falstaff took to the mic, singing and playing guitar, accompanied by live drums and bass.
The decision to include these musical moments was another way to stay true to Shakespeare’s intention in a contemporary way. “Shakespeare had a lot of music in his shows — they weren’t just actors speaking text,” Jones said. “So having that live performance element, there is a sense that the audience is invited into the story and are a necessary part of making the play that particular night.”
Shakespeare’s comedies, like The Merry Wives of Windsor, can be raucous affairs, with rapid fire jokes arriving one after another. Merry Wives is a play that, in Jones’ words, “has a lot of great opportunities for actors to really clown around.” Today, when many of us may be most familiar with Shakespeare from the plays we read and struggled to understand in a high school English class, it’s easy to forget that Shakespeare was first and foremost an entertainer and a businessman, concerned with selling tickets to his company’s productions. In addition to being a playwright, Shakespeare was an actor, a part-owner of the acting company his plays were performed by, and a shareholder in the Globe Theatre.
We may also forget that many of Shakespeare’s plays weren’t published during his lifetime, so most people would not have read any of the text of his plays until they were published posthumously. “If you wanted to experience Shakespeare through his plays, you had to go to the theater on the day they were being performed,” Jones said. “Live performance — the actors, the audience, the musicians, and the costumes — that’s the magic of the event.”
The Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival is held on the campus of DeSales University, and the festival is more than a place where people go to see plays — it’s an important part of the social life of the local community. In keeping with this purpose, after the performance ended, the festivities continued. On the patio outside the performance space, a makeshift stage had been constructed, and a band played cover tunes, in keeping with the production’s emphasis on musical performance. A concession stand sold hotdogs, hamburgers, and drinks, and people enjoyed the food, music, and conversation as afternoon turned to evening. It was a great way to end the day and a reminder that, at their core, Shakespeare’s plays are about human connection.
“Shakespeare’s canon gives you the whole range of what it’s like to be human,” Jones said of the importance of keeping the playwright’s legacy alive. “Revisiting the stories is also an opportunity for us to understand more and more what it is to be human.”
ACT 2
Garrison, New York — The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival takes place on the grounds of a sprawling park, with the Hudson River in the distance, and it was a beautiful place for me to spend the evening of the July Fourth holiday. As I walked through the green space toward the performance area, I passed several groups of people sitting on blankets and enjoying a picnic before attending the night’s performance.
Productions by the Hudson Valley company take place in a tent, with amphitheater-style seats rising above an unusual, sand-covered stage. Beginning in 2026, the festival will hold performances in a new open-air theater that is currently under construction and will put the company at the forefront of providing an immersive and environmentally conscious theater experience. Until then, the tent offers a unique charm.
I hadn’t traveled to the Hudson Valley to see one of Shakespeare’s plays. Instead, I would be seeing Whitney White’s new play By the Queen, a modern reinterpretation of a series of Shakespeare’s history plays depicting the battle for the British crown, including the three Henry VI plays and Richard III. While Shakespeare’s original plays focus primarily on the men vying for the throne, they also include one of Shakespeare’s strongest and most intriguing female characters, Queen Margaret, who takes center stage in White’s retelling.
By the Queen revolves around three actors who play versions of Margaret from different phases of her life, from her childhood in France to her arranged marriage to England’s King Henry VI and her involvement in the conflict over the English crown. The three Margarets converse with each other and with the audience, one of them explaining and justifying her actions to the others while they respond, sometimes with sympathy for their past or future self and other times with indignant questioning and second-guessing. Key moments from Margaret’s life are recreated on stage using Shakespeare’s original language. By the Queen is an extremely interactive production, and the way the Hudson Valley performance space is set up — the open-air tent and a stage with very little separation between actors and spectators — beckons each playgoer, inviting them to join in the action.
This immersive quality is something Davis McCallum, the Hudson Valley festival’s artistic director, mentioned when I asked him about the atmosphere the festival seeks to create. “I think a theater performance should be a communal event,” McCallum said. “And the story that unfolds happens between the actors and the audience, and they kind of create it together. That’s why it’s so much fun. It’s not just this inert thing that you go and observe. It’s a thing that you go and actively participate in.”
How the festival stages its plays is just one part of the group’s mission to create what they refer to as a “theatrical celebration,” which also includes allowing patrons to enjoy the beautiful grounds before the production and holding events where attendees can meet the actors after some performances. “We really need to be in three dimensions with other people of different generations and different backgrounds, different political beliefs, different races,” McCallum said of the festival’s goal of creating community. “And we need to try to return to the question of what it is that we mean when we talk about our shared humanity.”
In By the Queen, as Queen Margaret reflects on her life, the characters reflect on the complexities of Shakespeare’s legacy. While Margaret is one of Shakespeare’s most well-developed and complicated female characters, the plays are still limited by the blind spots of Shakespeare himself and the culture he was a part of, with outdated views on gender dynamics and a whole host of other issues. For this reason, By the Queen is an opportunity to marvel at Shakespeare’s masterful storytelling while also contemplating the aspects of his portrayals of humanity that might make us recoil.
“There are things from plays written hundreds of years ago that we need to square up to when we produce them,” McCallum said. “Either we need to contextualize them as a play that exists long ago and far away, or we need to mark the distance between the politics of the world in the play and our current world. And I think By the Queen does that really beautifully.”
By adapting Shakespeare’s plays in such a unique way, By the Queen provides another avenue for modern audiences to engage with Shakespeare’s work and confront the man himself. It’s a reminder that no matter how many times you experience the world-renowned playwright’s stories, there is always something new to learn. “Now that I’m getting a little bit older, I’ll work on a Shakespeare play that I worked on 25 years ago,” McCallum said, “and I’ll think, oh, I see it totally differently now that I’m a parent, or now that my parents are getting older, or now that I’ve gone through this loss or had this struggle. I’m amazed that the play can speak so powerfully to so many different lived experiences.”
“That’s part of the reason why it’s so meaningful to me when I watch audiences take in the plays,” he continues. “Sometimes it’s subtle — like a little physical change, or everyone breathes together, or you feel the release of tension in the room. And you think, somebody wrote this more than 400 years ago. That’s amazing.”
Because I saw By the Queen on the Fourth of July, at some point during the play’s final act, the sound of distant fireworks mixed with the ongoing conversation between the three versions of Queen Margaret. The reverberations were just loud enough to add intensity to the play’s climax. Fireflies flickered around the tent, illuminating this new telling of a centuries-old story.
ACT 3
New York City — Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, the home of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park festival, has played a prominent role in bringing Shakespeare to American audiences for more than half a century. For the summer of 2024, the theater closed for renovations, so the festival took to the streets of New York and the screens of theater lovers across the globe. The Public Theater put on a mobile, bilingual production of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, performing in all five of New York’s boroughs; the company also made filmed versions of some of their past productions free to watch online. I took advantage of the opportunity to watch the Public Theater’s 2023 production of Hamlet from the comfort of my own home.
The Public Theater’s Hamlet skips the play’s first scene in which the ghost of Hamlet’s father first appears, instead opening with the father’s funeral. A quartet sings the words of Ecclesiastes 3 at the funeral before the play’s characters first step on stage: “There is a time to be born and a time to die,” the four men sing, “a time to laugh and a time to cry.”
It’s a poignant way to introduce the tragic story about to unfold. It’s also a reminder of the events that serve as the backdrop to this particular modern-day staging of Hamlet. “We set this production in 2021,” said Kenny Leon, the director of the production, “filled with all of the challenges we face as Americans as we explore our need to love more profoundly, both nature and its people.” Several characters wear the surgical masks that became an emblem of the pandemic, and the set design evokes the movement for racial justice that came to a head in the protests during the summer of 2020.
New York’s summer Shakespeare festival is no stranger to pondering what Shakespeare’s plays have to say about contemporary America and its political climate. As Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro recounts in his book Shakespeare in a Divided America, in 2017, the Public Theater put on a highly controversial version of Julius Caesar. The production was set in the contemporary United States, the title character dressed to look unmistakably like President Donald Trump, with references to the 2016 presidential campaign woven into the narrative and staging. When Caesar is assassinated, actors planted throughout the crowd stood up and began a staged protest against the bloody murder they had witnessed. But in a stark example of life imitating art, the divisive staging of the play began to make its way through the media, which led to right-wing outrage and an actual, unstaged protest during one of the show’s performances.
It’s fair to ask whether it is appropriate to depict the current U.S. president being assassinated on stage. However, the intention of the production was very much in keeping with Shakespeare’s legacy in at least one critical way — it forced those in attendance to grapple with big moral questions, albeit in the context of extreme and extraordinary circumstances. The 2017 Public Theater production, just like Shakespeare’s text, does not seek to endorse murder but to ask audience members to examine their reactions to the gruesome acts they see on stage. “Julius Caesar offers as many arguments justifying the assassination as it does condemning it,” Shapiro writes.
This presentation is an example of the kind of thinking that would have been commonplace in Shakespeare’s time. “Shakespeare was very much of his age,” Shapiro continues in his book, “a product of an Elizabethan educational system that trained young minds to argue in utramque partem, on both sides of the question.” In our highly polarized time, our tolerance for undertaking the exercise of viewing a problem from all angles, even angles we vehemently disagree with, has drastically dissipated. But it doesn’t have to be a skill that is lost forever. It’s a muscle we are given the opportunity to exercise every time we see one of Shakespeare’s plays.
By dropping Hamlet into the world of the pandemic and the groundswell of protests against racial discrimination and violence, the Public Theater production of Hamlet continues the festival’s interaction with contemporary politics, and the modern setting gives the play an increased relevance and urgency.
But there’s one more thing that struck me while watching Hamlet in my living room — the silence. While having access to the production at home was certainly convenient, it highlighted how much is missed by watching a performance alone on a screen. I missed the chorus of laughs and communal gasps I had heard when I was sitting shoulder to shoulder with others in a crowded theater. After all, that’s the only way Shakespeare himself could have conceived of his work being experienced.
ACT 4
Ithaca, New York — My friend and I walked across a worn bridge, a creek flowing below us. On the other side, a clump of trees opened up into a grassy clearing, revealing a small wooden stage. The first few attendees had already set up blankets and chairs around the slightly raised performance space.
In the middle of a forest, away from the concrete, asphalt, and noise of everyday life, it felt as if we had been transported to a different world. It was the perfect setting to see Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, one of the playwright’s lesser known yet highly intriguing plays. Scholars categorize All’s Well as one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” those that don’t fit cleanly into the categories of comedy or tragedy.
All’s Well That Ends Well is one of a very small number of Shakespeare’s plays in which a female character is given the most lines. The play has an ensemble cast, but at its core, it is the story of Helen, an orphan who heals a king’s illness, seeks to marry the nobleman Bertram as a reward for the healing, and then comes up with a plan to win over the nobleman after he doesn’t reciprocate her love.
I got the chance to talk to Breezy Diabo, who played the role of Helen, about what it was like immersing herself in the role and what she learned about the character as she prepared for the production. “Compared to other Shakespeare shows, this feels like a huge role for a female character,” Diabo said. “She doesn’t say sorry for anything. She has her plan in place, and each scene she adds to her plot, and she’s trying to convince other people but also herself a little bit. I think she’s a really bold character.”
All’s Well That Ends Well has what on the surface appears to be a happy ending — Helen and Bertram do, in fact, get married. Yet it’s not the kind of ending we get in some of Shakespeare’s comedies — over the course of the play, reputations have been sullied, and trust has been broken. The king sums up this ambiguous ending in some of the play’s final lines:
All yet seems well, and if it end so meet,
The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.
As these lines suggest, all may “seem well” at the story’s conclusion, but in Shakespeare’s plays, as in life, things are often more nuanced than they seem. Happiness and regret, forgiveness and resentment — these are emotions that can exist at the same time and mingle together in complicated ways.
Diabo has been a part of many Shakespeare productions, so she has experienced firsthand how the subtleties of Shakespeare’s stories draw people in. “I really think it’s the complexity of the characters,” she said. “They’re so human — they’re not perfect. They’re messy in their thinking and the way they go about their plans. So as audience members, we can cheer them on, and we can see ourselves in them. We can understand the pain, and we can laugh with these characters.”
“It’s wild to think that these plays were written so long ago, and to the core, humanity is still so much the same,” she continues. “There’s still rage, there’s still love, and those are the things that will always be the center of society and humanity. It makes you ask some hard questions.”
As she continues to study Shakespeare and act in his plays, Diabo finds that there is always more to discover. “Each time you see a play performed, it’s going to be different because it’s different people, and it’s a different interpretation of the text, and I think that’s what makes it exciting for people to come.”
ACT 5
Atlanta — What would Shakespeare’s plays look like if they were staged in the style of an episode of Saturday Night Live? That question was answered for me when I attended a performance of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) at the Shakespeare Tavern Playhouse in Atlanta, Georgia. This humorous adaptation of Shakespeare’s entire canon by playwrights Adam Long, Daniel Singer, and Jess Winfield involves three actors taking the audience on a journey through Shakespeare’s plays in a series of comedy sketches.
The actors fly through the plays at breakneck speed. The histories become a football game in which a crown is continuously fumbled between the players. The character of Prince Escalus in Romeo and Juliet is played as Prince the musician. Hamlet is an emo kid dressed like the lead singer of My Chemical Romance. Shakespeare’s comedies are all mashed together, emphasizing the way he tends to recycle similar plot devices in his comedic work.
This particular production of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) was also a celebratory moment for the Atlanta Shakespeare Company because it was produced by an all-BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) cast and team. Creating a global Shakespeare community in which people of all races and ethnicities can participate in and enjoy Shakespeare’s plays has been a long road, and there is work still to be done in that regard. But the improvisational nature of The Complete Works (Abridged) allowed the actors to make the show their own in both humorous and profound ways, weaving in references to current events and Black culture throughout the performance.
“I cannot express to you the beauty of this process,” Charlie T. Thomas, the production’s director, wrote in his show notes. “From day one, a room was created that most Black artists don’t get the privilege to experience. We looked at each other and felt the relief of having ourselves present, not needing to edit or dilute our own culture and history.”
Unlike most of the venues I attended, Atlanta’s Shakespeare Tavern puts on performances year-round. So, I was able to go back to the playhouse as summer was coming to a close to see the Atlanta company’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It provided a great opportunity to see one of Shakespeare’s best-loved plays again and relive my experience at the Globe in London just over a year before.
As the last performance I would attend over the summer came to a close, Puck, the mischievous sprite that serves as the catalyst for the lovers’ adventures in the forest, turned to address the crowd for the poignant final speech of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
On one level, these lines are a clear reference to all of the sleeping and dreaming that occurs over the course of the play’s action. But Shakespeare is never working on only one level. He’s also reminding us of the dream world we are ushered into every time the curtain rises on one of his plays.
EPILOGUE
Summer ended, and Shakespeare festivals across the country closed up shop for the year. I too set Shakespeare’s work to the side for a bit and settled back into my life as a doctoral student in Ithaca, New York. But Shakespeare’s words and characters, which had been so vividly brought to life over the course of the summer, stayed with me even as the cold set in and snow blanketed the ground across Upstate New York.
It was for that reason that I made my way to a small black-box theater in mid-March, just as spring was beginning to peek through the long winter, to see the Ithaca Shakespeare Company’s production of The Winter’s Tale.
The Winter’s Tale is another of Shakespeare’s plays that avoids easy categorization, often called one of his “late romances.” It’s an unsettling play about a king who wrongfully accuses his wife of adultery and what happens in the aftermath of his fateful mistake. The story contains some startling and surreal moments — it includes retribution from the Greek god Apollo, a father and daughter who are reunited after more than a decade apart, and perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction, in which Antigonus is directed to “exit, pursued by a bear.” In the production I saw, the bear was depicted with an impressive bit of shadow puppetry.
More than any of the specific details of the performance, it was life-giving to be in a theater again. The atmosphere was different — the weather wasn’t warm enough for an open-air performance or to picnic before the show started. Instead, everyone marched from the parking lot straight inside and packed into the intimate space. Still, the purpose was the same — to experience the communion only live theater can bring, to wonder at the understanding of humanity Shakespeare possessed and explored in his plays, and to ponder what this singular figure might be trying to tell us in a voice that miraculously carries across four hundred years of history.
The Winter’s Tale was one of the last plays Shakespeare wrote, and it comes to a close in a surprising way. In the play’s final scene, a statue of Hermione, a queen who is believed to have been dead for 16 years, is miraculously brought back to life. Whether Shakespeare himself conceived of the ending this way, Hermione’s revival serves as a representation of the ways we resurrect Shakespeare himself, with all his insights, limitations, and revelations still waiting to be uncovered, every time we perform or witness one of his plays. At his best, he can wake up the parts of ourselves that need resurrection as well.