Michael Appler The Delacorte Theater, Central Park’s open air amphitheater home to New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park, contains nearly 2,000 seats. Each summer, those seats hold New Yorkers who’ve come to commune with the Public Theater’s free summer ritual—an exercise, the theater’s late founder Joe Papp would argue, in public art as democracy. “Over the past year and a half, all of us have liked to say, ‘the Delacorte isn’t empty.