In the nineteen-fifties, Joe Papp, the founder of the Public Theatre, would travel the five boroughs with a flatbed trailer hitched to a garbage truck, offering free Shakespeare to all New Yorkers. “The myth, which is sort of true, is that the truck broke down by the side of the Turtle Pond, so he just decided to squat here,” Oskar Eustis, Papp’s modern-day successor, said one afternoon in Central Park. He was standing on the site where, in 1962, Papp—after a multiyear standoff with Robert Moses (who dismissed him as “an irresponsible Commie”)—inaugurated the Delacorte, the open-air home of Shakespeare in the Park, with “The Merchant of Venice.”

“He fought that fight so that we didn’t have to,” Eustis said. The amphitheatre is now an institution, where James Earl Jones, Meryl Streep, and Al Pacino have braved rain, heat, and scene-stealing raccoons. But, a decade ago, Eustis realized that it needed a makeover. There were accessibility issues, leaking issues. “The dressing rooms, which generations of artists have been kind to us about, were wet,” he said. “The wiring conditions—now that they’re gone, I can tell you—were quite improvisatory. The relationship of electricity and water probably should not have been allowed.”

Then, there was what Patrick Willingham, the Public’s executive director, called “over-all aesthetics.” He remembered, with a shudder, overhearing a tourist in the Park wondering aloud whether the theatre was a derelict baseball stadium.

And so, last summer, the Delacorte went dark for an eighty-five-million-dollar revamp. (A more ambitious plan, adding a roof for year-round use, had been jettisoned. Eustis: “The opposition from many, many different quarters was fierce.”) Workers were now applying finishing touches, with a show-must-go-on deadline: “Twelfth Night,” starring Lupita Nyong’o, is scheduled for August. Eustis and Willingham were joined by Stephen Chu, the renovation’s lead architect, and the songwriter and performer Shaina Taub, who adapted two Shakespeare comedies for the Delacorte. They put on Public hard hats. It was rainy, but in Delacorte fashion the tour pressed on.

The group approached the rounded façade, which has been spruced up with reclaimed redwood from New York City water towers. “Oskar always wanted a redwood theatre,” Chu said.

“My Bay Area days,” Eustis mumbled, over the din of drills. A wooden canopy on the outer rim had been extended, Willingham added, providing more space for spectators to shelter from downpours, and the showmanship of a “grand entrance.” Beneath the seating area were now hard-walled operations rooms and a concessions kitchen. “This was a chain-link fence with a tarp over it,” Willingham said. “If it was raining outside, it was raining in here.” Down the hall were dressing rooms, refurbished with showers, gender-neutral bathrooms, and air-conditioning.

“Wow. Huge,” Taub said. “There will be some very happy actors.”

Willingham pointed out a cinder-block wall—“We lovingly call it the Raccoon Wall”—designed to keep the Delacorte’s furriest denizens from sneaking backstage. (Taub remembered playing a scene under blinking lights because raccoons had chewed through the wires.) There would still be no way to keep them from getting onstage. “This is their home,” Eustis said. “The one thing I promise young actors when they first come here: if they don’t know what raccoon sex sounds like, they will by the end of the summer. It does not sound consensual, but I’m assured that it is.”

They emerged into the theatre, where crews were laying down flooring on the stage for “Twelfth Night.” There were new seats, including bariatric chairs for larger playgoers, plus prime wheelchair spots. They’d also added a ramp to the stage, as well as accessible dressing rooms. “When we did ‘Richard III’ a few years ago with Ali Stroker, who’s in a chair, we had to build separate dressing rooms for her, and that felt shitty,” Eustis said.

Suddenly, a raccoon popped out from the bleachers, sauntered over the actors’ entrance tunnel, and vanished under a seat. “I was not sure he was going to make his cue!” Eustis said.

Past the stage—now waterproofed to protect the space below—the group came to what Willingham called a “Klondike village of sheds” off stage left, used for offices and wardrobe.

Eustis nodded at a picnic table and said, winking, “There are never, ever poker games that happen here.” Channelling his populist predecessor, he insisted that the facilities would retain a “communitarian feel”: “There are no star dressing rooms.” Once the show starts, the architecture would melt away. “This is an airy nothing,” he went on. He was reminded of Prospero, in Act IV of “The Tempest”: “The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve.” ♦