New York strikes again.

Transported, enraptured, captivated.

These are just a few of the words I would use to describe the way I felt through every waking moment of "The Bacchae" tonight at the Delacorte in Central Park. Until tonight I had only been familiar with "Shakespeare in the Park" by way of reputation. I knew the following:

1) It took place in the Park,
2) It wasn't always Shakespeare,
3) It was free, and
4) People waited in line from 6AM to get tickets.

1 and 3 were hardly enough to get me past the absurdity of 2 and 4.

That said, when a friend offers you an extra ticket and your Thursday night is otherwise unplanned, you say yes. Besides, I love New York, and I love when entertainment intersects with the city's culture in such a way that, for the most part, attracts true New Yorkers with only a smattering of well-educated tourists among them.

I'm also not a scholar nor admirer of Greek Tragedy, much for the same reasons I don't like to take razor blades to my eyelids. The whole concept just seems ridden with unnecessary agony.

That said, I have a vague appreciation for the gut-wrenching brutality that drives the ancient genre, mostly because Northwestern force-fed it to me for a semester.

And if ever there were a way to experience The Bacchae or any of its contemporaries, I am now certain that it is this: In the heavy August air, buried just far enough into Central Park that the eerie rustling the trees and cicadas are not muffled by city sounds, in an amphitheater that, when you forget all too easily about the electricity required to light the stage or mic the actors, might as well be plucked out of another century.

What results is a theatrical experience - not one that can be credited to any individual component of performance or direction or design or production value - but a unique experience for which we only have to thank mother nature, literature that has endured for thousands of years, and a collection of people - actors and audience alike - with a shared commitment to give themselves over to the consuming powers of unbridled imagination.