Upstaged by Raccoons? The Joys of Playing Shakespeare in Central Park.

Covered in blood, soaked by rain, adorned with crowns and capes: A who’s who of the acting world has crossed the Delacorte stage, and over the past few decades the New York Times photographer Sara Krulwich has captured many of them. We spoke to actors, directors and others about their memories of working en plein air. “There’s nothing more magical,” Oscar Isaac said. These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Liev Schreiber

You know how some things get embedded in your memory, and you don’t know if you made them up or if they actually happened? I was relatively young, and I had this memory of seeing Raul Julia play Othello at the Delacorte, and a heron or some kind of big bird took off right behind the stage as he strangled the life out of Desdemona. It’s the thing that motivated me to want to work at the Delacorte.

Finally, one day, I’m doing “Macbeth,” and a raccoon, obviously addled from eating rat poison or something, drunkenly waddles onto the stage in the midst of my most important speech. And in full view of the entire audience, this drunk raccoon ambles onstage and plops himself dead center in my spotlight and proceeds to watch me.

Just imagine being in front of 1,500 people, and you realize you’re being upstaged by an animal that’s completely unpredictable. They’re already tittering because the raccoon has actually sat back on his haunches in front of me while I’m doing this speech about murdering the King of Scotland. I figured I had only one option, which was to play for the raccoon, which was to make him a part of it. And literally, three or four seconds into including the raccoon into my speech, he decided that was really boring and waddled off the stage and got a huge ovation from the audience. It was the kind of thing you were always terrified would happen, and then kind of anticipating and hoping that it will.

When I was doing “Richard III,” there was this time when it was raining and raining and raining and raining, and they were going to call it. The first thing I do is walk out and kill someone in that play. So, you’re sort of in a certain state of mind. And they’re about to call it. And so you start to let go, right? You start to say, “OK, I’ll just go stuff my face and watch Netflix and read the play through again.”

But then I looked up into the audience. People were still there and I remember seeing this woman. She was in a red dress, and she was drenched — like drenched through — and she was going nowhere. And I was like, “Yo, we’ve got to do this play! Come on, y’all.” And then somehow it stopped enough for them to let the show run. And we did that show with a soaking stage. We did our thing. You’ve got to give them what they came for.

Oscar Isaac

In “Romeo and Juliet,” Michael Greif and the stage designer [Mark Wendland] had come up with this set with three or four inches of water in the middle. It had this Viennese kind of feeling, and these bridges would go over the water, and the sword fights would happen in the water, and then at the end, when we died, the tomb was in the water. Of course, we all ended up getting sick by being in this water. So we called it the malaria pond. As the days went on, everyone came down with something.

But to be able to do that speech from “Romeo and Juliet,” where I talk about her being like the moon, and to actually see the moon, to see the stars in the sky behind Lauren Ambrose [who played Juliet] as I was delivering these soliloquies, it was really powerful. It’s dreamlike.

There are certain sensorial things that I remember. Just the sound of the crickets — that was so, so powerful and soothing — and combined with that certain kind of fear slash adrenaline of being about to go onstage, it was very potent, and almost sexy in its own way. I remember just anticipating nightfall and just waiting for those sounds to come up and for night to descend, to know that we were going to be able to perform.

James Lapine

Joe Papp [who helped found the Public Theater] called me out of the blue and said, “We’ve had a show drop out at the Delacorte, and I want you to do ‘Midsummer’ there.” And I said, “Seriously? I’ve never directed Shakespeare, I’ve barely been in the theater.” And he said, “Oh, you can do it.” He was so amazing in getting people to do what he wanted. So that was my introduction to that enormous theater.

It was beastly hot, and everybody was stoned. I remember I would be running up and back and forth to the actors onstage to give them instruction. And then suddenly, behind me Joe Papp appeared with a bullhorn, and he shoved it in my hands and said, “You’re a director. Use the bullhorn. You don’t run back and forth on the stage.” So that’s what I did.

I played Helena in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and to this day it remains my favorite stage appearance, which is saying a lot, because I’ve done a lot of stage. I was in love with the man who was to become my husband [Matthew Cowles], and he’d drive me to rehearsals and to the theater on his BMW motorcycle named Lucifer and pick me up after the show. Of course he had a black leather motorcycle jacket and smoked unfiltered Mexican cigarettes.

Anyway, this is the ’80s and I was in love and I was under the stars doing Shakespeare. And James Lapine gave me a note that opened up the whole performance for me when he said “She’s ‘très femme.’” And I made her flounce on and offstage and it was one of my most inventive comedic performances. I was in a state of enchantment.

Al Pacino

It was a great place to work in, under the stars, to an extremely accepting and understanding audience, all adding up to something I’ve never experienced. My instant memory is while in the middle of a scene it started raining, which was, of course, the last thing you want to have happen, but finally the best thing that could have happened. It just brought us all together, the actors and the audience, as we accepted the rain together. It was a beautiful connection. In the end, it wound up being a very good show. Outdoor theater, if you look at it, is basically our tradition for centuries. It brings with it this feeling of participation and engagement. This is the theater we come from.

Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater

RABE There was this one night — because we had many nights of rain — but there was this one night where there was this kind of misting from the beginning of the play. And it was this gentle mist that was absolutely bearable and not threatening. And then I got to that quite famous speech, and when I said, “The quality of mercy is not strained; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath,” I had my hands out, and I …

LINKLATER You caught a drop right in your palm!

RABE I turned my hand sort of up, and this big drop flopped into my hand. And then it was a downpour. And the audience made a sound unlike any sound I’ve ever heard. I had my hands out and, like, caught a rainstorm. It was unbelievable.

We also had a very wonderful mishap that could have happened indoors or out. But it’s one of our fondest memories.

LINKLATER In “Much Ado About Nothing,” I had played Benedick in high school previously so I knew all the lines, except [the director] Jack O’Brien had put in this one line which is always cut … and this is why it’s cut. I have a line where I say: “and a whole book full of these quondam carpet mongers.”

RABE And as he’s saying it, things are picking up, and I’m waiting in the wings to come out. It’s toward the end of the play.

LINKLATER I’m hopelessly in love, I’ve realized it now, and she has too.

RABE I’m standing right there waiting for my cue.

LINKLATER And instead of “quondam carpet mongers,” I said very loudly to a house of 1,800 people, “and a whole book full of these carpet condom makers!” As soon as it was out of my mouth, I realized my error. And I paused, and there was a nervous titter in the house. And then I said, “No,” and went back.

RABE They stood up on their feet. I was rolling on the floor.

LINKLATER Then she had to come out —

RABE I had to come out, and I was just weeping. And he started weeping. And the whole audience all sort of wept and laughed together with us for what felt like 20 minutes.

LINKLATER It was one of the unique pleasures of falling on your face when your best friend makes the next entrance and gets to laugh along with you.

When we were doing “Comedy of Errors” [in 2013] a rainstorm quickly approached. They weren’t able to cover the sound equipment in time; it fried the entire system. The storm clouds cleared, so technically we would have been able to continue with the show, but there was no amplification, no music, no microphones.

Hamish [Linklater] and I really wanted to continue, so we ran onto the stage and we told the remaining audience members to come down as close to the stage as they could and we were just going to continue without microphones. Where we had left off before the rainstorm was actually a big dance number. We all just started singing a cappella and snapping our fingers, and the dancers danced to us singing the song instead of a recorded musical number.

It just continued on from there. Hamish and I were projecting, and the rest of the cast was projecting. If there was a sound cue of a gunshot, the whole cast would go “bang.” And then it started raining again. The audience stayed, because we kept going, and we kept going because the audience was staying. When the play ended I don’t even think we bowed. We ended up applauding for the audience, and they were applauding for us.

Lear deBessonet

During the big festival scene [in “The Winter’s Tale”], we had Chris Fitzgerald at center stage with about 80 community members, including children. And a little girl in the audience, who was probably 5, stood up and ran, like, 70 feet directly onto the stage and joined the children. And the entire audience saw this happen, and her parent was running after her, trying to catch her, and didn’t catch her. You felt this gasp of delight from the audience. And the children onstage basically just put their arms around her and included her in song, and Chris kept going. She did not perceive any separation between herself and what was happening on that stage. And a couple of minutes later, you saw a relatively sheepish stage manager in a headset creep on and go and take her by the hand and lead her off the stage. And then you saw her eventually returned to her family, and the audience applauded.

Buzz Cohen

Yes, it is true that they call me the raccoon whisperer. I react to the raccoons according to their age. Really, we don’t mean them any harm, we just don’t want them on deck during the show. So the little babies, you can basically just kind of gently clap your hands and they think, “Oh, how rude,” and, you know, they’ll scurry on.

With the, what I call, teenage raccoons, the ones who have grown up a bit, you actually take your flashlight and kind of go back and forth toward their eyes, and they too go, “Ah, how rude,” and will leave.

Then you get to Big Mama and those of her kin who basically look at you, and go, “What?” So there I will just sort of gently interpose my body in terms of the pathways, like I just want them to go in other directions. I have to, of course, train the company that they can’t say “nice kitty” and feed or otherwise encourage the raccoons. And it’s hard, because they’re just so darn cute.

I started working there in 1963, which was a year after it was built. All of us coming into New York then thought that it had been built for us. And 62 years later, here we are. I’ve done just rafts and rafts of shows there. It would blow a huge hole in my career if you took the Delacorte out of it.

One of the great things about doing comedy in the park is that you can spread a laugh. When I was doing Benedick soliloquies, in which he makes a right fool out of himself, you could say something to the audience on stage left, and they would start to laugh, and then you could turn your head and spread the laugh like you were spreading butter on a piece of bread right around the whole theater.

There’s something about being out there. You can hear the hum of the city, and you can hear its heart beating.

Danielle Brooks

I was five months pregnant while playing Beatrice, and I didn’t share that with anyone until, I think, the final performance. So that was interesting, you know, with the outfit in the final week, having to get opened up, and just going up and down all the stairs carefully, and being afraid of having mommy brain. I kind of hid my script all over backstage to refresh my memory. During that performance I was running in the audience doing damn near back flips, doing forward rolls, going through the audience, in the aisles, all kind of stuff. But it was exciting to be able to perform pregnant and not feel alone, because I have held a lot of fear being onstage in the past. But when you’re pregnant, I felt like I just had somebody with me the whole time.

Beowulf Boritt

In the production of “Coriolanus,” a sort of a weird tradition for me started. That one was set in kind of a shantytown, and the whole set was built out of corrugated metal, and I wanted to beat it up to make it look more battered and weathered. I brought in a baseball bat and within five minutes broke the thing hitting the set with it. And the crew at the Public, I think, had anticipated I wouldn’t bring a good enough baseball bat, and proudly came out with this giant Louisville Slugger that said “Grendel Basher” on it and gave it to me. And I have forever after used that to beat up scenery on Broadway and all over the place. It’s my Delacorte souvenir that goes with me to almost every show.

The fact that the Delacorte is open to the sky is part of what’s so magical about it. It really does sort of feel as one with nature as you can get in New York City.