Tomorrow and Tomorrow Tee

PRINTED ON GD1801 LIGHT GREY TEES. 

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Shakespeare in the Park was born from the restless democratic idealism of Joseph Papp, a Brooklyn-born producer who believed that great theater belonged to everyone, not just those with Broadway money. Papp founded the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1954 originally chartered as the Shakespeare Workshop and in 1956 created a mobile theater using a 35-foot trailer pulled by a retrofitted NYC sanitation truck, bringing Shakespeare to neighborhood parks, religious institutions, and civic organizations across the city. His guiding principle was unambiguous: he wanted to bring Shakespeare to people who never thought it was for them. The city's establishment resisted — Parks Commissioner Robert Moses tried repeatedly to force Papp to charge admission but Papp fought back and won, and the Delacorte Theater, his permanent home in Central Park, opened in 1962. As the Public Theater's Artistic Director Oskar Eustis would later write in a Playbill, "This theater belongs to you, the people of New York. We hold it in trust for you, to serve you. The culture belongs to all of us." 

From its earliest seasons, Shakespeare in the Park positioned itself not merely as a cultural institution but as a living argument about who American art was for. In addition to his ambition to bring art to the masses, Papp wanted to create a "theater of inclusion," where the diversity on stage represented that of the public. This vision was radical for its era, placing Black and Latino actors in leading classical roles at a time when Broadway remained largely segregated in practice. The inaugural Delacorte production, The Merchant of Venice in 1962, starred both George C. Scott and James Earl Jones a pairing that announced from the outset that this stage would not observe the usual racial hierarchies of American theater. That commitment to inclusion would define the festival's identity for the next six decades. 

The Delacorte stage quickly became one of the most prestigious platforms in American acting, drawing the biggest names in the industry to perform for free under the open sky. The roster of landmark productions reads like a who's-who of American performance: James Earl Jones in Othello (1964), Meryl Streep and Raúl Juliá in The Taming of the Shrew (1978), Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt in The Pirates of Penzance (1980), Denzel Washington in Richard III (1990), and Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice (2010). Before Streep, Jones, Kline, and many others were household names, they took the stage in Central Park — making Shakespeare in the Park not just a venue for stars but a forge for them. The willingness of A-list talent to forgo pay in exchange for the singular experience of performing Shakespeare outdoors, for thousands of New Yorkers on blankets and folding chairs, became one of the festival's most enduring and romantic qualities. Public Theater.

The festival also evolved beyond Shakespeare himself, expanding into new American works and musicals that reflected the Public Theater's broader mission. The 1980 production of The Pirates of Penzance a rowdy, rock-inflected reimagining became a sensation and eventually transferred to Broadway, demonstrating that the Delacorte could be a launching pad for new theatrical ideas. In 2008, a celebrated revival of Hair starring Jonathan Groff similarly transferred uptown after its Central Park run, reminding audiences that the festival was never a museum of the past but a living laboratory. Over the years, more than five million visitors have witnessed performances at the Delacorte, making it one of the most attended theatrical institutions in the country all without ever charging admission. 

After 61 summers of continuous use, the Delacorte finally underwent a long-overdue transformation. The theater underwent an extensive $85 million renovation, completed in summer 2025, marking its first major upgrade since 1999 with improvements to accessibility, sustainability, and production capability. The reopening production of Twelfth Night felt symbolically apt, its themes of immigrants remaking themselves in a strange land resonating with New York's perennial story. The Public Theater described its programs as "a declaration of interdependence, a reassertion that culture belongs to everyone." More than seventy years after a broken-down sanitation truck deposited Joseph Papp and his actors on the shores of Belvedere Lake, that declaration remains the animating spirit of one of New York City's most beloved and democratically radical institutions.