Shakespeare in the Park, which kicks off tomorrow night with the first preview of “Macbeth,” is a New York ritual. Almost every day for the next eight weeks, New Yorkers will wait patiently in line for a chance to see great works of theater performed by actors of the caliber of Liev Schreiber and Meryl Streep – for free.

Shakespeare in the Park is today one of many free art events in the city. At a time when the performing arts have become almost prohibitively expensive – and when theater, music, and dance companies are fretting about audience attrition – it’s worth asking: What is the ultimate goal of offering free tickets? How does the institution and the public benefit? The answers are far from uniform.

Shakespeare in the Park, founded in 1956 by Joseph Papp, is the oldest free summer festival in New York. And it doesn’t come cheap. The Public Theater, which presents the Central Park event, spends nearly $3 million to produce a two-play season. Its model for funding relies on a two-tiered system.

“Our goal, and what we state, is that 75% of the tickets are free, and 25% are ultimately held by the sponsors,” the Public Theater’s executive director, Mara Manus, said. “So 25% pay for 75% to attend for free.”

Papp laid the foundations for this form of support; a program called Summer Sponsors offered individuals the opportunity to donate $150 for a reserved seat. When Ms. Manus took over as executive director in 2002, she sought to emphasize the program as a means of rebuilding attracting donors.

“We realized that, with the loss of certain corporate support, we need to ramp this up,” Ms. Manus said. “Within two years of really aggressively marketing it, we now have reached the point where last year we sold out, and this year we’re going to sell out.”

Summer Sponsors now account for 6,000 tickets during the season. Through another program dubbed Delacorte Investors, companies can donate money to reserve blocks of seats and, for an additional donation of $15,000 or more, entertain in the backstage area before the show. This year, the major sponsors including Google Book Search, Barnes & Noble, CBS Outdoor, and Time Warner Cable.

For the Public, the “why” in the equation has much to do with local expectations. That became clear in 2002, when the Public announced that it would present only one play in Central Park. The cost difference between doing one show for seven weeks and two plays for four weeks each was a million dollars – a fact that Ms. Manus didn’t think the public understood.

“While there was a lot of outcry about ‘When are you moving back to two shows?’ I don’t think there was a lot of consciousness that it costs that much more,” she said.

Last year, the Public returned to presenting two shows. “The big-C City and the little-c city were really expecting that of us,” Ms. Manus said. “On the one hand, the good news is that there’s such incredible ownership of our institution by the public. But there’s an expectation that comes along with that. And to not present two shows would be to not do our job.”

The situation is considerably different for the Free for All at Town Hall, a series of classical music concerts presented by the nonprofit group Twin Lions. Co-founder Jacqui Taylor sees free tickets as a way to provide live classical music to those priced out of the market.

In Ms. Taylor’s former role as executive director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, she presented six free concerts of Beethoven’s string quartets in 2000. The overwhelming response led her to consider what else she could create. In hopes of establishing something on a more regular basis, she approached her friend Omus Hirshbein, who for almost 20 years programmed the 92nd St.Y.

Together, they formed Twin Lions with the stated mission of presenting top-flight classical concerts to an audience that could not normally afford tickets. Seed money came from Patti Cadby Birch, a major philanthropist on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Patti’s money was the big start-up, and since then we’ve raised money from a lot of sources,” Mr. Hirshbein said.

Town Hall emerged as the venue because of its size, traditional setting, and distinguished history. “We wanted to have everything about this be just like a professional presenting situation,” Ms. Taylor said, “with the exception that no one would have to pay for the ticket.”

This year, its budget for five concerts totaled $250,000, which came from a broad array of sponsors including Bloomberg. Even with the demands of fund-raising, Ms. Taylor said that her current job offers a surprising level of ease. “On May 28, [the Ukrainian pianist] Konstantin Lifschitz played two concerts dedicated CREDIT to the complete Shostakovich preludes and fugues,” she said. “More than 2,000 people came to hear him. If you had asked me to do the same thing and charge $35 a ticket for it, I would have struggled to get 500 people.”

Mr. Hirsbein, meanwhile, said he’s having more fun than he’s ever had in the music business. “This is everything I wanted to do all my life and couldn’t,” he said. “All my life, I was selling tickets. It’s much easier to go out and raise the money and give the tickets away.”

“The satisfaction,” Ms. Taylor said, “comes from hundreds of people who come up to us at concerts and thank us for doing what we’re doing-people who say ‘I couldn’t possibly afford to hear Andre Watts at Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center.”

But while free tickets make the public happy, is there an argument against them? Robert Moses found one. In 1959, he demanded that Papp charge for tickets to the Shakespeare productions, in order to reimburse the Park for the expense of preventing erosion in the amphitheater. (The Delacorte Theater wasn’t built until 1962.)

On a more deliberate level, City Center’s Fall for Dance festival, a week of mixed bill performances, is not free – but almost. Tickets are $10, thanks in large part to the Peter J. Sharp Foundation and Time Warner. “We decided we would charge something but make it so low that it wouldn’t prohibit anybody from coming,” City Center’s president and CEO, Arlene Shuler, said. “The price of tickets was less than the price of a movie. We wanted people to make a commitment to seeing dance, and hopefully make a commitment to seeing dance, going forward.”

It appears to be working. Surveys found that 30% of the Fall for Dance audience is under the age of 30. In the second year of the festival, 41% of the audience said they had seen more dance that year, as a result of having gone to Fall for Dance. “It’s really achieving its goals,” Ms. Shuler said. “It’s the audience that we all try to reach.”

But free performances often seek to reach an even more broad audience. In the early 1970s, Lincoln Center’s director of community relations Leonard dePaur founded Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors as a way for the institution to connect with the city. At its inception, it drew on young artists from New York’s neighborhood cultures.

“It began as a showcase for street theater projects by young people and moved quickly into being a bigger operation,” the director of the program, Jenneth Webster, said. “The spirit is one of diverse presentations, designed to attract a very broad, diverse audience and make them feel welcome at this large arts institution.”

The presentations continue to emphasize diversity. This year the festival, sponsored by Bloomberg and PepsiCo, is in part organized around “The Spirit of the Blues” and will include 100 free performances of music and dance. The acts come from the world over, including Africa, India, and the Americas. All performances take place in the open-air venues and spaces at Lincoln Center. Ms. Webster declined to provide a budget figure.

A more regional intent lies behind the River to River Festival, founded five years ago. “A handful of the major arts presenters in Lower Manhattan came together to pool resources and their programming to draw people back to Lower Manhattan,” the executive producer, William Schreiber, said. “The goal was to bring people back down the restaurants, bring people back down to the shopping in Lower Manhattan, bring people into the parks and plazas.”

The festival takes place at several downtown venues, all of them south of Chambers Street, and includes everything from exhibitions at the Museum of Jewish Heritage to concerts by Dr. John, Belle and Sebastian, and the Eels. “In some of the venues, the audience is residents and working people, but in reality, about 80% are coming from outside of Lower Manhattan,” Mr. Schreiber said.

The hope is that the festival – whose lead sponsor is American Express – is having an economic impact. Audiences are heavily surveyed for information about how they’re spending money in the neighborhood. “We’ve estimated that people are spending about $40 million or $45 million – going to dinner afterwards, going to Century 21, going to J&R,” Mr. Schreiber said.

Free tickets may help spur local economic development, but do they build audiences? In many cases the goal of the free event is not necessarily to bring people back to the same seats, but it does offer access to the arts – while at the same time building a sense of community. This, indirectly, can lead to a greater demand, but the real benefit is that the reinforced idea that the arts – no matter what form – should be shared with one’s friends and neighbors, and enjoyed by all.

ktaylor@nysun.com