My ninth-grader is obsessed with Shakespeare, so last week my husband and I decided to wait in line for free tickets to Twelfth Night. While we’ve gone to Shakespeare in the Park a few times with corporate tickets, we’ve never waited on the line and experienced this particular rite of passage.
To get tickets, you must queue on Central Park West at 81st Street in the early hours (or is it late hours? To quote Sir Toby Belch, “not to be abed after midnight is to be up betimes”). At 6am, when the park officially opens, Public Theater staff escorts the entire pilgrimage into the park to wait until the box office dispenses tickets at noon.
We did some reconnaissance at Delacorte Theater earlier in the week and learned from a security guard that, as long as we arrived before 5am, we would likely get seats. Delacorte Theater had been closed for over a year for renovations; they were only running one play instead of two this summer; and the cast is ripped with super-star power (Lupita Nyong’o, Sandra Oh, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Peter Dinklage). We knew this meant there was outsized demand for tickets. So we planned to arrive at 4:30am, just to be “safe.”
We actually arrived at 4:31. We were not safe. I point out the one-minute delay, because a minute can make all the difference in this journey. A group of three (that would later become four) arrived just seconds before us. (Yes, there were some line-cutters.) Would they claim the very last tickets?
We were shocked to find that at 4:31, the line had already spread into infinity. We kept walking north and walking north in the hopes of finding its end, which turned out to be two blocks away at 83rd Street. We passed people asleep on air mattresses, covered with blankets and enormous umbrellas. It was chilly and the ground was wet from rain earlier in the night, but everyone seemed well-provisioned with portable chairs and water-proof picnic blankets. We ourselves had a fold-up number we’d borrowed from a friend and a thin cushion we’d saved from our evening on the floor at the Van Gogh light show in 2021. It was printed with a sunflower on Starry-Night blue and was just big enough for a single, medium-sized butt.
I was surprised how calm and orderly this line was, church-like, carefully pressed against the stone wall of the park, leaving ample room for pedestrians to pass on the sidewalk. At this point in the night, however, the only pedestrians were other line-seekers. There was a beautiful, hushed solidarity among us. We were a bunch of drowsy, theater-loving humans deranged and devoted enough to forgo REM sleep to venture out in the middle of a rain-drenched night to sit on the rat-infested, urine-soaked street of New York during the middle of what FOX News insists is a wild crime epidemic (hahahaha, the liars) in the hopes of watching a play written by some dude who has been dead four hundred years.
It was one of the most beautiful moments in my life.
It brought to mind the trek I’d once made with a group of German and Swiss tourists along the top ridge of a mountain of sand in the Atacama desert. We were a human line walking single-file over a geographic line. I thought of the beauty and brutality, the arbitrariness and meaning of all lines. In the super market. At the train station. Between countries. The poetic line. “Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines,” James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line. Shakespeare’s line was perfect iambic pentameter. How would we scan this line here on CPW? What meter were we? I imagined my husband and me: a spondee in this metric foot of sidewalk.
My husband placed his two inches of Van Gogh polyfill over the roots of an enormous tree between the park wall and the sidewalk. He gave me the chair. Chivalry is not dead. He did ask me not to talk to him until at least 6am; I was apparently very chatty. Insufferably chatty. He later told me that, while seated in the lap of this tree, he tried not to think about the insects and wild animals, including maybe rats, who make their homes in trees just like this. We watched as another infinity of deranged people arrived carrying bags of snacks and coffees and beach chairs. We shook our heads; oh, what those coffees would cost them!
Despite the prohibition on talking, I kept asking my husband, Did we arrive too late? Should we stay? The more people who came after us, the more committed we became to the line. Still, I asked the people in front of us, do you think we arrived too late? They told me a man had walked by counting heads and that, according to his dubious and unofficial tally, they were number 120. Was 120 good enough? How many tickets did the Public Theater give out? No one knew. It was a great mystery.
A NYC Sanitation truck stopped suddenly in front of us to ask what the line was for. When happening upon any line, there is a human tendency to wonder if you should perhaps be on it. Someone shouted, “For Shakespeare in the Park,” at him. His expression of bewilderment tinged with pity was one I will not soon forget. He laughed, hollered something along the lines of “I hope it’s worth it,” and drove off into the dark night. (I’m not sure his exact words because I was barely awake and yet also more awake than I’d ever been, dangerously awake.) Everyone on the line found this moment hilarious. We were giddy. Line-drunk.
A little before 6am, people stood and gathered their belongings to prepare for the next stage of our quest, and soon the line moved like a well-oiled machine into the mouth of Central Park. There was no cutting, no shoving, no jockeying for position. It was a slow and steady march, each person respecting their original station in the line, maintaining comfortable distance from one another. The staff from the Public Theater called out instructions. They are a people blessed with reassuringly cheery voices. Voices that carry. They seemed glad to be the ones anointed to guide us through this particular life moment. They were sincerely excited for us.
In a grassy area on a high spot beside a path leading to Delacorte Theater, we replicated the line that had first stood on the street. Mattresses and picnic blankets returned to the ground. It was still dark but we could feel the sun breathing near. Theater staff walked down the path, repeating over and over that the line was now closed; no one else was allowed to join it. They told us where the bathrooms stood—how new and shiny they were.
I took a picture of my view looking down over grass and tree and park path. This spot would be my home for the next six hours—long enough for acorns from the oak above to fall on me, for the wet ground to dry, for the humidity in the air to evaporate, for the sun to rise over the top of the hill behind me, for its light to creep up the side of my neck and onto my face. I sat long enough to see joggers of all stripes, to realize that every single one ran differently. The human body composes itself into so many unique strides and grunts.
At 6:20am, a woman with two dogs on leashes and a double-wide stroller containing two babies walked briskly by. I considered what it means to be a mother caring for so many beings at this hour.
People guarded each other’s spots in the line as we went in shifts in search of the shiny bathrooms and coffee and information. Oh, the information! Various theories and data spread in a giant game of telephone. I took a stroll to ask the first man in line what time he had arrived.
“At 1am,” he said proudly. 1AM!
“Did you sleep at all?”
“Yes, I did actually,” he assured me.
I was impressed.
“I’m crossing all my fingers and toes for you,” he said.
I walked back to my spot in the queue to offer this new intelligence. A woman shared in return that she spoke to the twentieth person on line, who had arrived at 2:30am. Someone else somehow knew that fifty people had arrived between 2:30 and 3:30.
Others learned that, if you were seated on or to the south of the “big rock,” you were sure to get tickets. But if you were beyond the stone water fountain, odds were bad. My husband and I were between the big rock and the fountain: the “iffy” section. There were TONS of people north of the water fountain, and yet they abided. A man in a Rick Astley shirt, whom everyone referred to as Rick Astley all morning, came from beyond the water fountain to see what time we had arrived. He was plotting what time to show up tomorrow if he missed out today.
We gleaned that every day the number of tickets dispensed varies, depending on the special invitations, the numbers claimed at the online lottery and the Astor Place in-person lottery. Some speculated that 200 of us would get tickets. Others 180. But today was a special close-captioned performance, which meant the hearing-impaired were given a block of seats. Would that mean fewer than 180?
Our line was a microcosm of humanity. There were people doing all sorts of things. Biting nails, playing card games with intensely complicated rules, attending work meetings over Zoom, reading books I’d never heard of. I myself read the marvelous opening pages of The Time of the Child by Niall Williams, the sequel to This is Happiness.
“But real change is often only seen in hindsight,” Williams wrote on page 2. This seemed important; I underlined it.
The woman three down the line from us was sewing black lace onto a crimson dress. She wore a kind of black ballet slippers. There was a bearded man in a Havana hat sitting in a chair, mouth open wide to the sky, snoring with all his heart. People nearby were spread across the ground, sweatshirts and blankets over faces, sleeping soundly despite the noise.
On the way to the bathroom, I watched a man and woman, old but not old enough for the senior line, lying on a sort of cardboard bed. She yelled at him, “I hate you.” And he retorted, “I hate your attitude.” Even people who hated each other were willing to wait side-by-side on a few feet of cardboard for the chance to see public theater!
I overheard a group of women in their twenties discussing Excel versus Google Sheets. Excel, they agreed, has better functionality. But Google Sheets is where they live. Another guy in his twenties mused that summer is his hardest time. Everything just feels off.
So many dogs came to visit us. The smallest, whitest, cleanest, fanciest dog ever to roam the earth. Every manner of retriever and rescue. An Aussie Doodle with blue eyes named Rockefeller. Some dogs seemed to know the drill; they pranced from blanket to blanket scavenging for snacks and cuddles. It’s clear that Shakespeare-lovers are also dog-lovers, for you could hear awwws and ooohs make their way down the line with each passing canine.
There were also various guitar sounds. One man played Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It didn’t smell so much like teen spirit as middle-aged, pot-smoking spirit. Oh, the pot. There was so much marijuana. The smell was everywhere and mixed rather nicely with the wood-chip/wet grass/hot coffee vibe.
The people behind us sang along to Weezer (“Oh yeah, alright, feels good inside”), and a guitarist further down the line joined in one of the songs too. An echo of chords. A saxophonist played Annie’s “Tomorrow” and the “Pink Panther” theme, and another man decked out in Renaissance garb played the mandolin. He carried a bucket for tips.
Mid-morning, an enthusiastic team in bright, turquoise shirts from Penguin Random House arrived with a cart load of books. Penguin sponsors the play. They offered bags of novels—Station Eleven and The Correspondent—to anyone who wanted them. Everyone wanted them. Believe me, people on line for Shakespeare are delighted to get free books! The people sitting on this little hill are stalwart proof that neither Shakespeare nor the novel is dead. (Though please don’t tell anyone that I saw an abandoned copy on a bench by the Great Lawn an hour later.)
Ann Patchett described The Correspondent in her blurb on the back of the book as “a portrait of a small life expanding.”
If you’ve made it this far in my endless, expanding tale of this endless, expanding line, you are in for a treat. Because I am about to share not only the absolute best part of this journey, but also an important life hack. If you are ever forced to wait in a 9-hour line, do yourself a favor and stand beside the woman who knows a lot about something endlessly and expandingly fascinating.
A woman like Priya. (I’m changing her name to protect the innocent.) Priya had traveled from New Jersey at 3am to get on line. A physicist who has devoted the last five years of her life to studying the zebrafish, she kindly pulled her chair down the hill closer to me so we could get deep into the zebrafish without the sun getting in my eyes from looking up at her.
I knew nothing about the zebrafish until this dramatic life moment but now might have to write a short story about it. A poem. Maybe even a whole novel! It’s a fish that only grows to a few millimeters in length, sometimes a centimeter. And yet its reach is vast. Priya showed me pictures. Please google them yourself, check out their little black and white stripes! They thrive in warm climates like India, but it was someone in Eugene, Oregon, in the 1990s, who discovered that the species is an excellent case for scientific study—much like the fruit fly, which has been a lightning rod for scientists since the early 1900s. (Who knew?!)
Priya’s lab has constructed the perfect environment for zebrafish to mate. It’s very tricky to keep these fish alive in a laboratory, but they manage to do it for nine months at a stretch, harvesting embryos from each set of mates for meticulous study. The lab has used CRISPR technology since 2013 to cause mutations in these embryos. Imagine, CRISPR on zebrafish!
Priya studies the development of the fish’s spine. She explains (yes, I’m shifting verb type here; this is just too exciting for past tense) that what makes this fish so riveting, aside from what it can teach us about human development, is that the minute you answer one question about the generation of its spine, that answer leads you to another question! And the next answer leads you to yet another question. It is a bottomless well of curiosity for her. And not just for her. There are whole conferences devoted to the zebrafish! Thousands of people attend them!
I wonder what I’ve been doing all my life. Why am I not on line for these zebrafish conferences too?
I think of Marjorie Garber, the formidable Shakespeare scholar whose class I took in college. I remember how she dove us deeper and deeper into the plays with each passing class, uncovering layer after glorious layer of meaning. I remember my own ninth grader—the whole reason I am on this wild line—writing a paper on Romeo and Juliet last spring. She said to me, eyes practically glittering with excitement: “I’ve found a whole system that Shakespeare created with the elements of earth, water, air, and fire representing his views on morality and life. Do you think I’m the first one to discover it?”
I suddenly understand why we are all on this line. Shakespeare is the ultimate zebrafish. Or maybe zebrafish is the ultimate Shakespeare.
My daughter texts from school to ask if we got tickets. She really wants to see the show. My husband confesses that he will be crushed if we don’t get them. Crushed. To console himself, he finally eats the overpriced cheese plate and olive bread that I bought at Citarella for our picnic.
At noon, we pack up our chair again. We are nervous but excited. There must be at least 150 people standing in front of us. At first the theater staff send large groups up to the box office. Then groups of five. Then one at a time. They start asking if people mind being separated from friends, from their plus-ones. If they’d take an obstructed view. It’s not looking good for us. We hold our breath. I tell my husband I love him no matter what happens.
When, at last, the exuberant Public Theater employee sends us up to the Box Office, we can hardly believe our luck. It’s as close as we’ll come to winning the Powerball. At 1pm, the woman behind the window offers us two pairs, but not together. We will take them! Who needs to sit together? This is Shakespeare! We are thrilled! But I look back; will our new friends make it too? I see Priya walking to the ticket window. We could almost embrace with joy.
Seven hours later, the smell at our seats is a spicy combination of citronella bug spray, barbecue sandwich, and whatever happens to alcohol when metabolized through sweaty human skin and mouths breathing heavy. We can see the nearly full moon bursting with orange through the trees, Belvedere Castle over the stage, and our daughters across the way in the better seats. Cynthia Nixon arrives in a red shirt to watch too. On stage, Sandra Oh delivers looks that send shivers of laughter through the audience. I have a hot flash as John Elisson Conlee playing Sir Toby Belch pretends to snort cocaine in a hot tub in one of the funniest scenes of the play. Director Saheem Ali has beautifully and hilariously modernized his zebrafish. The close-captioning is perfect; the lines in iambic pentameter run exactly after they are spoken and help my sleepy mind catch the words I miss.
After the rollicking, dancing curtain call, we spot the women who were in line behind Priya. They and their plus-ones are separated into single seats, but they’re here! Ballet slippers swapped for fancy dresses, they are absolutely glowing. We are elated to see each other—our line buddies. They pass me a phone and I take a dozen smiling photos of them—the large letters on the stage, “What You Will,” shining brilliantly behind them.
On the way out of Delacorte, my 14 year-old asks, can we see it again? I’m tempted by the lure of another line. However, if the great equalizing beauty of public theater has taught me anything, it is that we would be greedy to take a ticket from someone else on this week’s lines, someone who perhaps dares to arrive at 4:32.
I loved the play (Malvolio’s yellow cross-gartered stockings! The push-ups! Viola and Sebastian’s final embrace!). Of course, I loved the play. But my favorite part of the day was the line itself. Yes, I’m weird and perhaps even stupid. But, after living in this city for over twenty-five years, I am quite sure I did not become a true New Yorker until I went on this magical 9-hour pilgrimage. If you haven’t already, you’ve got until September 14th to become a New Yorker yourself.
And, whether you attend or not, please donate to the Public Theater! We need it now more than ever.
