ABSTRACT
From the summer of 1964 until the summer of 1968, the New York Shakespeare Festival toured all five boroughs in search of fresh audiences for its outdoor Shakespeare productions. Known as the “Mobile Theater,” this peripatetic enterprise encountered varied responses from neighborhood audiences. This chapter explores the vitality and occasional volatility of these audiences, who participated in complicated evenings of theater-as-cultural-event in which spectatorship took on myriad meanings. The chapter deploys theories of the ecology of performance and play, as well as the phenomenology of performance spaces and their unique topography, to elucidate the practices and passions of these audiences.
