Shakespeare Stripped: From Mobile Theater to Joe Papp’s Naked Hamlet

Fifty years ago: the Vietnam War raged; Laugh In debuted; students protested at Howard and Harvard; Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated. In New York City, Joe Papp, the restless, young champion of free Shakespeare for all, marked a milestone in his career, the establishment of The Public Theater, with a surprising and radical reinvention of Hamlet, which seemed to respond to the angst of the nation.

The Public Shakespeare Initiative excavates The Library for the Performing Arts archives to tell the story Joseph Papp’s evolving vision for Shakespeare in New York from 1954 to 1968. Through readings of his notebooks, letters, and speeches, plus rare footage from the early days of the Delacorte and the Mobile Theater, discover how Papp first offered free Shakespeare in church basement, launched mobile theater tours using borrowed sanitation trucks, battled Robert Moses, built the Delacorte, then stripped Shakespeare bare, with a landmark, counterculture experiment, the so-called Naked Hamlet.