O OR the 1965 summer season at the open-air Delacorte Theatre, the New York Shakespeare Festival bravely-and successfully-presented three of Shakespeare's less popular plays: Love's Labour's Lost, Coriolanus, and Troilus and Cressida. Admission is free to the Central Park productions, whose audience is a varied one as to age and social and economic strata. As has been true of the Festival since its inception, the season was better as a whole than in its parts. The complex technical production has steadily improved until it is now almost perfect. A necessary evil of the outdoor stage is amplification by microphones hidden in small blocks jutting at the edge of the hexagonal stage, but the quality of reproduction is good. To the credit of Joseph Papp, the producer, the Festival since the beginning has always approached Shakespeare with great honesty, letting the merits of the play speak clearly for themselves, rather than overlarding the play with such tricks as changes of period, devices which call attention to themselves rather than to the action and dialogue, and the general hoking up which modern productions often employ. There is always an atmosphere of excitement about a production at the Delacorte, partly because the producers realize that Shakespeare is exciting theater and partly because productions on the excellent permanent open stage designed by Eldon Elder by their very use of that stage generate such an atmosphere. Clarity always has been the keynote of the Festival productions: action and dialogue are assisted by gesture and stage business to explain lines that might be difficult, and the decor and spectacle serve the play, rather than the other way around. Like every other American Shakespeare production, the festival plays are weakest where a Shakespeare play should be strongest, in the acting. A Shakespeare play makes three demands upon the actor, which only isolated actors in these productions have been able to fulfill: to grasp and convey larger-than-life emotions in a way that is realistic and convincing; to render both the meaning and the poetry of the lines; to look and move as if one is the character portrayed, and not an actor masquerading as that character. Except for an occasional genius-like George C. Scott, whose Richard III and Shylock remain the Festival's high points of acting-actors must be trained to play Shakespeare. Mr. Papp has asked for foundation assistance for such training during the winter, and surely no cause in the performing arts is more deserving or more urgent. Until such training of American actors is undertaken by a professional of the caliber of Michel St. Denis, who heads the actors workshop for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre of Stratford-upon-Avon, American produc-