Among all the plays that people have either seen or read by William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, I dare say, is one of those plays most of us have never seen nor read. Twelfth Night begins with one of Shakespeare's most oft-quoted opening lines. "If music be the food of love, play on." That I heard clearly. After that, it's anybody's guess what the heck they were talking about on that grassy stage for the next hour and forty minutes. Even if I understood what words the actors were saying as they spoke them, I wouldn't have understood what they meant. For instance, the next few lines of the opening speech continue, and I had to look this up, of course: "Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again!. . ." Oh, dear, iambic-pent-anger. Such dialogue prompts early 21st Century listeners to echo an oft-quoted late 20th Century query, "Wha'chu talkin' about, Willis?"

But the magic of Shakespeare is in the intentions of the stagecraft, as well as the language. We know what's funny by how the actors say the words, as much, if not more, than what the words mean in themselves. Shakespeare could be spoken in Esperanto for all we need to understand slapstick. The chaos of Clark Park at 43d and Chester Ave. was every bit the equal of the mayhem of the Globe Theater of 15th Century London. You never heard such languages, such sounds, such startling undignified noises amidst the Shakespeare. Trolleyes to the left of us, trolleys to the right of us, volleys of rescue squad sirens, squeals of happy children, barking dogs and buzzing cicadas, basketball players calling for a foul, and throbbing underneath the entire time was the pulsing rhythm rising from the drum circle in front of the statue of Dickens and Little Nell. Carlos Santana meets the Bard.

And the Bard fit right in. The Bard rocked. During those four nights Shakespeare was the straw that stirred the drink in this complex and delicious cocktail of a city neighborhood, this quixotic urban community too good to be bad, too real to be true. In the hour and two-thirds that it took the 500-year-old play to be staged each night, the magic of Elizabethan theater in West Philadelphia unfolded from sunset, through twilight, through darkness. Crowds grew larger each performance. They came to see Shakespeare, sure. But they also came to see each other enjoying what each, in our own way, did not understand. Not even a little bit. But enjoying it tremendously, in whatever language we didn't understand it, in each other's company.