When it comes to town, the UniverSoul Circus, a one-ring show that plays in cities on both coasts, often pitches its orange tents streaked with yellow lightning-bolt designs in an empty lot in Newark. Suburban commuters in trains passing on the elevated tracks to Newark Broad Street Station looked at the tents for a second, then back at their phones. Probably they did not know the extreme scariness of what was going on inside. Guys were limboing under flaming limbo bars. A woman was hanging only by her teeth high in the air and spinning like a top. A man in cargo shorts, whom the ringmaster had pulled from the audience, was dancing in front of everybody—mortifying! Why did he ever agree to do that? Another audience member’s heart was racing in fear that the guys with rainbow Afro wigs and white shirts and plaid ties who were charging up and down the aisles would pick him for something, as the ringmaster had picked the cargo-pants guy.

The UniverSoul Circus, which will set down later this month in Roy Wilkins Park, in Jamaica, Queens, is the most audience-participatory circus in the world, according to its advertising. “Put your hands together!” is not just a suggestion. “Get up outta your chairs!” means what it says. Audiences shout back to the ringmaster’s questions, which are often posed in the form of upwardly rising blasts on his whistle, and sing along with the music, and dance until the canvas rafters shake. Outside the tents, on a Sunday afternoon, the streets of downtown Newark were sunny and almost empty. The kind of quiet that involves only vehicular noises reigned. In Washington Park, a three-minute walk away, the statue of Seth Boyden, who refined a process for making patent leather, struck a stalwart pose for nobody. On an adjoining corner, the Newark Bears stadium sat locked up and abandoned. The Newark Bears, once a minor-league baseball team, are no more.

Across the side of a tall building, in black letters on a yellow background, stretched the words “ ‘America is too great for small dreams.’—Ronald Reagan.” A motel frequented by unsavory people once occupied the lot where the circus now was. The city tore the motel down in 2007; Cory Booker, Newark’s mayor at the time, took the symbolic first whack at it with the wrecking machine. Since then, the lot has been occasional home to large congregations of empty dumpsters, rows of semitrailers, and heaps of trucked-in, grime-covered snow. Every spring the tents appear, the circus vehicles crowd one another bumper to fender, and sometimes a smell of elephant perks up Division Street.

As the afternoon grew warmer, the roustabouts (how often does one get to use that word?) raised the lower edges of the tents to let in some air. Industrial fans the size of searchlights whirred. In the ring, young women from Dalian, China, rode small bicycles every way they could be ridden. The show’s three elephants entered, did an act without enthusiasm, and left, guided by an unenthusiastic trainer. To give them room, a backdrop opened tall and wide and the audience suddenly saw clear through to the elevated tracks baking in the bright sunshine. Then a ripping sound of motorcycle engines exploded close by, and daredevils came flying through another opening in the tent. They soared almost to the very top of the tent pole, somehow missed all the structural paraphernalia up there, landed on a ramp, and sped out the tent’s other side. Over and over, they did this, sometimes entirely parting company with their motorcycles along the way and then joining up with them again in midair. The spotlight beams turned cigarette-smoke blue with engine exhaust.

After the show’s finale, which featured flags from many nations, the crowd filed out past a concession where kids could ride on one-hump camels. The camels—there were two—curled their lips in contentment. To be a camel on the streets of an American city was an out-of-the-box approach to existence that was working out beautifully for them, their expressions seemed to say. ♦