Love's Leisure's Park
Nostalgically celebrating Shakespeare and the good ol' days when kids could spend their summers in an edenic, anarchist fever dream
I saw two things over this July 4th weekend. They’re probably not related, but they’re still linking for some reason.
The first, a documentary about New Jersey’s Action Park, was a quasi-nostalgic retrospective about one of the world’s first water parks. On the one hand, it featured those who lived through it remembering just how fucking insane it was that anyone allowed this literal death trap to stay open. On the other, it was about the human cost of such a place existing, where the park’s dozens of rickety attractions regularly hurt their visitors, causing anything from minor scrapes to maimings to (in a shocking number of cases) death.
The second was a lovely summer tradition I have with my friends. The Independent Shakespeare Company is in the midst of their annual summer festival, where they produce full productions of two Shakespeare1 plays in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park. We went this weekend and saw Love’s Labour’s Lost.
Both of these experiences are tugging at my mind, coming at the same nebulous idea in two different directions. It’s a bit political, but in today’s world that’s hard to avoid with a topic like this. So… apologies if this gets a little messy.
An Anarchist Utopia in Water Park Clothing
Class Action Park is a documentary that came out in 2020 and its 90 minutes detail a water park in Vernon Township, New Jersey from 1978-1996. Dubbed “the most dangerous theme park in America”, it was the brain child of a guy by the name of Eugene Mulvihill. Mulvihill was a venture capitalist and financier who built his wealth via (amongst other things) the same sleazy market exploitation playbook as Jordan “Wolf of Wall Street” Belfort. With the leisure industry booming as a result of America’s late 20th Century prosperity, Action Park was a place for Mulvihill to invest his money. And because the height of the site’s popularity was the mid-80s, he brought the “government exists to ruin lives” ethos of the Reagan administration to the day-to-day operations of the park.
The result? Action Park itself was… a bit of a death trap.
Structurally, the documentary is an endless parade of the park’s dozens of features. They pick an attraction (like a looping waterslide or a downhill bobsled race or a racing boats course), show what it looked like (through archival footage when available, animated renderings when not), and then have talking heads talk about all of the ways this particular attraction went wrong and injured the people who experienced it. For all that every interview comes from clear eyes who are aware of the level of danger and peril involved, it comes with a veneer of nostalgia. The attractions themselves all sound amazing on paper, like concept art brought to life. Only that’s what they were. There was little-to-no testing, minimal planning beyond getting it up on its feet, and infrastructure on the cheapest possible scale. Concrete, PVC, and on and on.
At a certain point, it felt like hearing grown adults nostalgically reliving what it was like to attend a society-sanctioned amusement park where they could live all their Jackass fantasies2. As someone who thoroughly enjoys Jackass, I admit to it being a lurid spectacle that had me cackling at the sheer madness of Action Park’s insanity. So much of that place was so stupid. It opens with a segment on that looping water slide and details all the different ways people got hurt. If you think it’s bad hearing about people who came out the other side with bloody mouths and missing teeth, wait until you hear what happened to those teeth . The doc only gets worse from there.
By the end, the film swerves into the actual human cost of such a place existing. At its most upbeat, it’s talking heads like from Chris Gethard waxing poetic about coming back to school after summer break and everyone comparing scars and lingering rashes from their visits at Action Park. In the more intense example, it’s talking about the girl who lost a finger on Alpine Slide. At worst, it’s detailing the not-insignificant number of deaths that occurred over the park’s two decades in operation. As it comes to a close, the film makes a brutal statement about nostalgia, intercutting a rhapsodic waxing of what it was like to be a kid in the 80s with drone footage of parents laying flowers at their son’s grave. Action Park’s apathetic approach to visitor safety took his life when he was only 19. He was certainly not the last.
All of this is a long way of getting to what struck me most. Reagan’s vision of government has infected America’s body politic since 1980 and there’s not been a coherent enough vision to counter it in the last four-and-a-half decades. That vision fed into Mulvihill’s beliefs. Mulvihill was a schmuck at best and a total monster at worse. He rode every complaint and lawsuit to court, and even if he lost there was no guarantee that he would pay anything out unless the litigants involved the U.S. Marshalls. He operated the park as an almost anarchist utopia, where he didn’t give a fuck about visitor safety or a quality product. It’s like he wanted to show a world where there were no rules and no pesky governments coming in and complaining about him not having the proper permits or safety ratings. So some kids get a few scrapes. Who cares? Who was the government to get in his way and tell him how to live his life? Especially when he was bringing so much viral joy to the youth of New Jersey. It was his money. He could make whatever he wanted. People would pay him to go have whatever fun they wanted. What was the problem exactly? He made money off people who wanted unique experiences and memories that would last a lifetime. Everyone won.
Nevermind that people died. Or got seriously injured. Forget that the builders at the park used the cheapest materials possible and didn’t guarantee an experience that wouldn’t wind you in a gross medical shack. And so what about circle painted on the ground, an area where you should stand while some random, untrained, and unqualified teen would spray an industrial strength disinfectant/bronzer on you so the concrete/asbestos abrasion that scraped up your side wouldn’t turn into a bigger infectious problem down the line. There was no safety training for the teens operating the park. To become head of security you just had to be there for a year or so, rapidly climbing the ranks because turnover was so high. There’s descriptions of questionable food handling practices like the process for rehydrating stale hot dog buns and resuscitating probably-dead hot dogs. Mulvihill didn’t even bother to insure the park, creating a fake company set in the Cayman Islands and flaunting that certificate like it was worth more than the paper he printed it on.
If the government weren’t around, would Mulvihill have done anything differently? It’s difficult to imagine. At a certain point, the incentive would be preventing deaths purely for the sake of not killing off the park’s own constituency. If that cohort were to die, no one would pay him money so he could pay his bills. It’s hard to describe this sort of… libertarianism as anything but a reckless celebration of anarchy. Survivors can talk about it with a nostalgic smile. No one talks about it as though it were some idyllic place that should have existed.
One of the major frustrations for Americans these days is a frustration over lack of forward progress. The bureaucracy we’ve built moves slow and has grown inordinately expensive. Layers of red tape and endless hoops of long arduous processes. We require permits and working through agencies and local boards and on and on and on for the smallest of projects. And that’s before we even get into the role of litigation as a NIMBYist (or otherwise) tool to functionally roadblock anything they don’t like.
And… yeah. There’s certainly too much of it. Too many pain points. Red tape and pride in a long, sluggish process has set this country back decades at this point. On one level, Mulvihill has a point about government getting in the way of letting kids’ dreams come true3. And I get it. On paper, Action Park sounds rad as hell. In practicality, the rocks guests walked on would fuck up their feet because they were… just the rocks that existed in the park’s natural setting. There was no effort to smooth out a surface or landscape to accommodate bare feet.
It’s this sort of thinking, though, that says true freedom means anyone should have the right to take their lives into their own hands (or, less extremely, to cut up their feet on raw stone). While this is true, there’s also a duty of care that the government has when it comes to its citizenry. Safety precautions is the cost of doing business. Americans have a right to a bounteous, fruitful life. At the very least, they should know if they’re paying for a risk of losing theirs.
Shakespeare set free!
The Independent Shakespeare Company (ISC) has been around for decades. I haven’t been around Los Angeles for their full 22-year history, but I go out of my way to attend their shows. It aligns with one of the long-term goals I have with my partner: to see every Shakespeare play on stage at least once. We’d not seen this year’s ISC comedy: Love’s Labour’s Lost. This year’s festival helped us check it off our list.
The comedy is not one of Shakespeare’s best, unsurprising considering that research has it as one of his earlier works. I could go on and on about Shakespeare (blame the college classes I took on him), but dating back to his earliest work, he was deeply transgressive within the zeitgeist. Love’s Labour’s Lost feels like one of his genre exercises. The first 95% is a comedy, but it swerves super hard into a big sad tragedy in the show’s final minutes. A messenger arrives and informs the Princess of France that her father is dead. The rest of the show is a brief but intense sadness, where the demands of grief utterly crush these fun and fancy romances. What seemed so full of promise dies immediately and ends in a big sad.
See? Transgressive. That said, he does this better in Romeo & Juliet, which starts off comedic and romantic enough before rapidly descending into a vicious tragedy once Tybalt kills Mercutio (and Romeo murders Tybalt in return).
The ISC puts on a great production, with lights, sound system, elaborate costumes, live music, and broad broad comedy. It’s that last bit that I struggle with, where the density of Shakespeare’s language mixed with the populist nature of the production’s circumstances (more on this in a minute) mean big loud extrapolations that magnify moments in the text through gags and physicality rather than the music of Shakespeare’s words.
This is unsurprising and also the cost of doing business. Our society is far more literate than Shakespeare’s. Audiences during his time had honed their listening and attentiveness skills, much more able to pick up on the clever wordplay and puns scattered throughout his plays. I rarely catch these, but I did catch one this time and it made me so proud:
BEROWNE ⌜reads⌝ Item, That no woman shall come within
a mile of my court. Hath this been proclaimed?
LONGAVILLE Four days ago.
BEROWNE: Let’s see the penalty. ⌜Reads:⌝ On pain of
losing her tongue. Who devised this penalty?
LONGAVILLE: Marry, that did I.
BEROWNE: Sweet lord, and why?
LONGAVILLE: To fright them hence with that dread penalty.
BEROWNE: A dangerous law against gentility.
Weird word, “gentility”. It usually refers to a sense of decorum or behavior, but in this context Shakespeare is punning on its consonance with the word “gender”. Doesn’t it sound like “gentility” is just talking about the genders intermingling? It’s a wickedly clever pun, the sort that I’m try to keep an ear for whenever I listen to Shakespeare’s words.
But I’m not here to talk about Love’s Labour’s Lost. What struck in watching is thinking about all of the promise that this institution has for the future. The ISC in the middle of building a permanent stage in Griffith Park, something they’ve been talking about for years. The project only finally broke ground within the last twelve months, and the hope is that they’ll have it done in time for next year’s performances.
That is, if next year’s performances even happen. The ISC funds itself through a variety of sources, from grants to generous benefactors to asking for audience donations. They don’t force anyone to pay and they do keep the show free, but they also pay their cast and crew. Money doesn’t come from nowhere.
I don’t know what the current breakdown of their budgets and finances are, but based on how America’s working at the moment, none of the prospects seem bright. They claim to receive a healthy chunk of their funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Of course, the current administration has taken it upon itself to personally review every federal dollar going out the door, especially those that relate to arts & culture. This review is in place to make sure spending conforms with what The President (or whoever is reviewing it I guess) believes the government should be funding. Forgive my pragmatism, but I very much doubt Trump gives a rat’s ass about Shakespeare or free theater in a community park. The dude talked within the last week about how he wants to host a UFC fight on the White House grounds.
All of this is so unnecessary. It’s common to hear “America is the richest country in the history of the planet”, but it’s quite another to believe it. Artists who try to enrich their communities by performing free, professional theater is the sort of thing that should be no problem for a country with our level of wealth. And like… I get it. The ISC getting NEA money really only matters to those who live within the distance of these performances. Yes, it helps me. But you also don’t see me complaining about the thousands of projects nationwide that receive federal funding that I also don’t get to attend. It’s the nature of an agnostic, benevolent government.
Meanwhile, if you’re a member of Congress, the best thing you can think to spend money on is allowing the richest Americans to keep more wealth for themselves at the expense of government services that help the larger citizenry. Healthcare, food assistance, renewable energy projects… based on their vote last week on the “One Big Beautiful Bill”, Republicans told all of those initiatives to go fuck themselves. And like… sure. Healthcare (Medicaid and Medicare), Social Security, and Defense spending are the three pillars of what we as Americans spend our tax dollars on. Soon, we’ll add a fourth pillar: paying off our debts. Balancing the budget is a valid concern that we should work on. But… in a world where our Defense spending is about a trillion dollars a year, why are we worries about $40m in arts funding?
Why even have a government
Everyone has a different perspective on what role government should play in our lives. As I stated earlier, we’re still living in the four-and-a-half-decade-long era inspired by Ronald Reagan saying the nine scariest words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”. But… is that the best we can do?
Because the truth is, these are the two visions of building community in America.
On the one hand, we can have Action Park. And… yeah. Again. Action Park sounds cool as hell. But it was also a hellscape that hurt people and cost lives. The dude who ran it was a libertarian to the point of basically anarchy. He viewed the government as a malicious entity that did nothing but suppress and oppress his god given right to do whatever the fuck he wanted to do. What right have they to interfere with his private enterprise?
The result? Visitors made memories (some physical) that have lasted a lifetime, and the staff had minimum wage employment with basically no training and no supervision but lots of room for advancement. The park created jobs for the community, and that budding tourist industry helped embed its position within the town’s economic infrastructure.. So there were scrapes. So there were deaths. Sure, fights broke out on the daily, sometimes on rides. Broken eggs and omelets, y’know? And… yeah. Okay. So one of the omelet fillings is now shells. At least it’s an omelet. Just eat it.
On the other, we have the free Shakespeare as put on by a theater company that’s just trying to bring culture and entertainment to the local community. And… no one gets hurt4. But by the very fact of its existence, it’s not trying to profit off the community. Yes, the artists are getting paid. Sorry that I think craftspeople should receive payment for their specialized and dedicated labor.
The result? Fostering an interest in theater or the classics. It might turn kids into fans and help the next generation keep great literature alive. It brings the community together and celebrates the wonderful public land and spaces in our cities. It supports the local economy (so many snacks!) and it helps make for a more engaged and active public. And it gets us off our phones and out of our homes. Isn’t that worth it?
America is a wealthy country, the envy of the world in many respects. We’ve gotten so rich that we literally can’t have the manufacturing we so often hear about. We outgrew it. The ability to buy from the world is a luxury for us to celebrate, not to complain about how it’s ripping us off. If selling wares to customers was preferable to buying what one doesn’t have, everyone would want to own a grocery store. But… we don’t feel that. The wealth distribution is skewed beyond reason and there needs to be a balancing. The government is capable of balancing those scales, making life more affordable, and building our communities and society-at-large into something greater than what they are.
It’s all a question of what we want to spend this wealth on. We can absolutely slash funding for the arts, immolate public broadcasting… but that disruption reverts art back into the hands of wealthy patrons. Doing that means sacrificing the freedom that agnostic government spending might provide. We already see this censorship in large studios that homogenize and sand down art from its original vision. We see it in megacorporations that control large (but small relative to their overlords’ size) news media organizations, and how those entities can put their thumb on the scale of the distribution of information.
Which is better for an artist? Owing fealty to some lunatic with billions of dollars and nothing to do but wield their wealth like a cudgel for cultural pet projects? Or a government that has to dispense funds more or less equally because we’re all living in the same country? Are there concerns that the government will censor artists who are critical of governmental actions? Absolutely. But there are also ways to build in how these grants work that minimize such concerns. There’s also the First Amendment. For… however long that lasts, anyway.
And… yeah. I’m thinking about Free Shakespeare. I’m thinking that this sort of initiative should be available for all sorts of public domain work so we can continue to build out theater culture in a world that’s getting more and more isolated on blue-light screens with infinite scrolling. Initiatives like this build up community in times like this when we desperately need it. Again, this is not relatively expensive based on the size and scope of the federal budget. It’s not an infinite amount of money. But it’s the question of priorities and what it is we as a society want to focus on. Maybe you don’t want free Shakespeare, but there’s plenty of things the government spends money on that you like that others don’t. Part of living together is accepting that the government funds things of which we both approve and disapprove. If its role is to keep us safe and help us build out our communities and make us into stronger, more informed citizens, there are far, far worse ways than buttressing theaters nationwide to ensure the medium’s longevity.
I long for the world where the Free Shakespeare doesn’t end with the cast holding up bright orange pails, making jokes about putting some ducats in their buckets. Funny as it is, it’s sad that it will probably always be a necessary gag. I’m already paying taxes. Why can’t tax dollars go to fund this? It’s the same reason why healthcare funding should be equally agnostic and ubiquitous. If it’s the same for everyone, then we’re closer to equality and one’s life need not derive its value from how well it can afford the hospital bill or incur medical debt.
Within Mulvihill’s philosophy, there’s an undeniable appeal to that anarchistic, government-should-fuck-off spirit. It looks at things the wrong way. His assumes that government is some dude with a garrote. But we can do better. In a democracy we control the government and what it does, how it acts, and what it can do. We can make it into a potentially benevolent actor that’s just trying to make sure the constituents under its duty of care can live prosperous lives. There’s a happy medium where government can be an enabling and abiding partner, protecting us from predators who are ambivalent to our maiming or death while simultaneously encouraging us into a brighter future.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
They’ve branched out a bit. A couple of years ago they did The Knight of the Burning Pestle and this year they’ll be putting up Kit Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in a couple weeks.
Albeit almost two decades before Jackass even existed
At this point, I should also point out that Mulvihill allegedly kept a submachine gun in his unlocked office desk and one staffer did allegedly steal it at one point.
Okay so maybe there’s some bug bites but people should wear bug spray (or jeans and a hoodie in the summer). And maybe there’s a lot of bees/yellow jackets or whatever. But like… Hey. They love cured meats like you’d get in sandwiches. Don’t bring those unless you’re willing to sacrifice some bee meat in the name of getting them to swarm a bit away from your blanket. This is a very insular footnote.