For the first time in 58 years, there will be no free Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theater this summer. All performances have been canceled due to the pandemic, but the show is going on, off-stage: this year's production of Richard II has been airing this week on WNYC as a radio play, meaning no live audience, no stage hands and no... raccoons.
Buzz Cohen is a regular stage manager with the Public Theatre, but is also known as “the raccoon whisperer” for her skill at managing the animals, who live in the rocks behind the tech shed and fish in Central Park's Turtle Pond, just behind the stage.
“We have certainly seen them on stage from time to time, the audience is delighted,” Buzz said of the raccoons. “We are in their house after all, so we learn to coexist.”
If Covid hadn’t canceled this summer’s free Shakespeare in the Park, Richard II would have been Buzz Cohen’s twentieth show at the Delacorte. And she has a raccoon story for most of them.
Can you spot the raccoon?
1991, Othello: “The end of the first scene, Iago, Chris Walken, has his soliloquy and a raccoon just walked right across, shared the stage with him!”
1996, Henry V: “We were doing the scene of the breach at Harfleur, English army thunders down the ramp and flings themselves down to gather their strength and then eventually ‘once more unto the breach’ and up the ramp they go. And then there was the one night when a raccoon was hiding underneath the ramp. The thundering feet spooked him and he ran right over one of my English soldiers who sat bolt upright and spent the rest of the scene with raccoon footprints across his chest.”
1997, Henry VIII: “The little baby raccoons during the second act would creep up and try to peer over the upstage edge of the deck, balancing on their little hind legs like little hairy kids at the circus.”
2015, Cymbeline: “One of the characters is killed and beheaded and we had this very expensive dummy that had been produced for the show. And they ate his hands.”
Not only do they steal scenes and eat props, but the raccoons have come for human lunches, too. “I live within my means as an off-Broadway stage manager, so I always bring my peanut butter sandwich,” Buzz said. But one day, at break time, “There’s a raccoon sitting at my place at the table with my sandwich box finishing the last bite of my peanut butter sandwich, looks at me, smacks his lips a few times and scurries away."
The raccoons do have a meteorological gift that has proven beneficial, however.
“They’re good whether prognosticators for us (we don’t use the R word here at the Delacorte). I hear them scratching at the underside of the booth before there's any precipitation whatsoever. So it was like ‘oh here it comes,’ and they are never wrong.”
One of the Delacorte raccoons makes a move
But this year there are no soliloquies and no peanut butter sandwiches. Buzz said the raccoons are probably confused. “They’re probably a little bewildered as to why the buffet isn’t out this year... [but] I’m sure they are on stage. We’re sort of their playground. We find muddy footprints on the deck and certainly all around. They make no distinction at all between on stage and off stage.”
All the world’s a stage, at least for the raccoons. And they now have the Delacorte to themselves... for now. “I will be happy to co-exist with them next year," Buzz said.
