To say I am not an avid outdoorsman is a gross understatement. From my perspective, civilization as we know it dates to the invention of air-conditioning, and the whole point of living in New York City is the opportunity it affords to bypass nature completely and its many discomforts and outright perils.

So you might conclude that Shakespeare in the Park, the beloved summer institution created by Joseph Papp and going strong some 50 years later, would have me grumbling about bugs, heat, rain and a paranoid fear of falling tree limbs. (Not so paranoid, that, which is why I remain immune to the vaunted charms of Central Park.) I’ll cop to some resistance born of unhappy experiences, like the insufferably muggy night that I sweltered through “The Skin of Our Teeth,” and a performance of “The Merchant of Venice” that stretched until midnight after the skies opened midway through the first act, necessitating a 45-minute pause during which the audience huddled under the theater’s narrow eaves.

But I have come to appreciate — even look forward to — the undeniable pleasures of the experience, particularly in recent years, as the Public Theater has raised its Shakespeare productions to a generally high standard. The comedies in which natural realms are benign, healing influences play particularly well outdoors. Having a real forest (or what can pass for one) portray the role of the Forest of Arden in “As You Like It” sweetens the atmosphere of that play. Ditto “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” wherein the heart’s confusions are sorted out as the lovers tear through the woods surrounding Athens. I have no idea what the shores of Illyria were like, but watching “Twelfth Night” unsheltered by protective covering helps usher us into the experience of the play’s shipwrecked characters.