Summer Shakespeare in Philly: Here’s what’s on stage now (and in parks)

William Shakespeare is a playwright for all seasons. He’s so popular that he’s banned from the American theater world’s annual list of most-produced playwrights — because he’d always win. And he’s especially a playwright for summer.

“There’s a bigness, a power in the writing and the emotions, and it suits the outdoors, where you can be big and expansive," says actor Robert Dondiego, who appears this summer in the Commonwealth Classic Theatre Company’s "Free Theatre in Parks” production of Measure for Measure at parks around the city and the region.

And since Shakespeare’s 400-year-old plays are in the public domain, the production costs don’t need to break the bank to entertain the off-season audience. "You don’t have to pay performance rights, for one thing,” says director Kittson O’Neill, who’s at the helm of this year’s Shakespeare in Clark Park production of King Lear.

Neither does the staging for a Shakespeare play need to be elaborate, thanks to his vivid, entrancing language. Audiences already have the castle, the throne room, the heath, or the magic forest in their heads.

“Plus,” says O’Neill, “Shakespeare was writing for the outdoors for most of his career, for rowdy crowds, too. It had to be big and populist.”

This year is a fertile one for summer Shakespeare in the Philadelphia region, with a bumper crop of six productions: three indoor and three outdoor. Why so many? To use the jargon of our day, Shakespeare’s plays remain relatable.

"The dude knew people,” says Free Theatre in Parks cast member J. Hernandez, “and he knows what people want, exactly how to make them laugh and cry. Why are we still doing these ancient plays? Because these problems are still our problems.”

This summer’s production is the very first effort for the brand-new Phoenix Theatre company. Seth Reich, cofounder with wife Jessica Myhr Reich, says that, for him, community theater goes right back to ancient roots. “It started with the Greeks,” he says, “with plays that brought everyone together. And Shakespeare wrote for everyone.”

Housed at SALT Performing Arts in Chester Springs, Phoenix will put on two performances a year, says Jessica Myhr Reich, until “we can get our own place and begin to build our own community. This is an awesome area, with lots of musical theater already, and we’re excited about bringing classical theater into the mix.”

“We wanted a way out of the New York theater scene,” Seth Reich says. “We wanted something more authentic, something that really connects with the audience.”

And it made a powerful kind of reverse sense, Jessica Myhr Reich says, “to start with Shakespeare’s last play, a play about transformation, about someone making a choice that’s different. We didn’t realize how powerful it was until we started working on it.”

Through Sunday, July 21, SALT Performing Arts, 1645 Art School Road, Chester Springs, thephoenixtheatrepa.com.

Since 2005, Shakespeare in Clark Park has been promising “a blanket, a picnic, a community event under the stars and the trees.” This year’s production is possibly the best-regarded play in Shakespeare’s oeuvre at the moment.

Director O’Neill had to cut the vast masterpiece to 2½ hours. “It’s so tightly constructed, it was really, really hard,” she says.

For community involvement, the production is bringing in a group of real veterans who play King Lear’s retinue. “They’ll speak in their own voices rather than in Shakespeare’s words,” O’Neill says. “It’s a way of honoring veterans from within the play.”

Music and sound effects (think: the storm!) are provided by a small orchestra of middle- and high-school students assembled by Play On, Philly!, which brings music lessons to school students throughout Philadelphia.

July 24-28, Clark Park (performances in “The Bowl” area near Chester Avenue and 43rd Street), 215-764-5345, shakespeareinclarkpark.org.

The Commonwealth Classic Theatre Company is doing Measure for Measure the way traveling troupes did it in Shakespeare’s day, going from place to place, setting up, and making it work.

“For me, it’s a lot of fun,” says Hernandez, who plays Angelo, the conflicted hypocrite at the heart of this adult play. Hernandez is a veteran of outdoor theater, with its demand for good lungs, lots of bug spray, and constant hydration.

“You’re just basically going in blind to whatever space you’ll play tonight,” he says. “It’s all about having a game plan, knowing the entrances and exits, and above all, staying flexible.”

As his castmate Dondiego (who plays Duke Vincentio) puts it, “We do whatever it takes.”

Measure for Measure is famous for its ambiguous ending. “Let’s just say we’ve tried not to solve it,” director K. Richardson says.

Through July 26 at various locations (including Green Lane Park, Morris Arboretum, and parks in East Goshen, West Goshen, Lansdale, and West Chester), cctheatrec.org.

Where Measure for Measure mixes (to quote Dondiego again) “extreme comedy and extreme tragedy,” The Merry Wives of Windsor is a romp. Delaware Shakespeare has had its home in grassy, leafy Rockland Park in Wilmington since 2006, and it’s the perfect setting for this play, whose ridiculous climax happens in the woods.

Tradition has it that Queen Elizabeth I asked Shakespeare to revive his popular character Falstaff (he had died in Henry V) and write a play in which the fat knight looks for a wife. “One thing I love about this play,” says director Krista Apple, “is that there are no kings or queens, just a town full of people who sometimes get along and sometimes don’t and pull pranks and practical jokes on each other.”

Delaware Shakespeare is working with Pages Alive, a group serving middle-school-age students who don’t have many opportunities to appear in shows.

“A group of young people come in to play the fairies and the townspeople,” Apple says. “They go hide in the audience, and when the big reveal happens, it happens in the audience.”

Apple is having a ball directing: “This is joyful. So is the play. It’s a constant reminder not to take yourself too seriously.”

Through July 28, Rockwood Park, 4651 Washington Street Extension, Wilmington, 302-468-4890, delshakes.org.

Patrick Mulcahy, producing artistic director at Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival since 2003, knows about summer Shakespeare: “I began with [Public Theater founder] Joe Papp in Central Park,” he says. “I was 22, just out of school, and I was understudy for Hal," who’s the central figure, as it happens, of one of the festival’s two shows this summer, Henry IV, Part 1.

The festival’s other production is Antony and Cleopatra, and South African-born Nondumiso Tembe is playing Cleo. “It’s one of the most challenging and demanding and frightening roles of my entire career,” she says. “I can’t think of another role that requires so much from an actress.”

She and director Eleanor Holdridge are working to “get us past the exotic, oversexualized figure you often see,” Tembe says, “to reveal the totality of what she was: an exceptionally brilliant politician, leader, warrior, scholar, and tactician.”

“When you first see her, she won’t be in pajamas and being fed grapes,” Holdridge says. “These are witty, larger-than-life characters trying to run their parts of the world and still maintain the love between them.”

Both plays through Aug. 4, Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, Labuda Center for the Performing Arts, DeSales University, 2755 Station Avenue, Center Valley, Pa., 610-282-9455, pashakespeare.org.