It has been a big season for Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers. With Kenneth MacMillan’s staging at American Ballet Theater, Peter Martins’ staging at the New York City Ballet (where it is scheduled to return this winter), and Michael Greif’s production at Shakespeare in the Park, “Romeo and Juliet” has received more than its fair share of attention in New York this summer. So is there room for one more? According to the Classical Theater of Harlem, yes.

This week, the company begins a second summer of free theater in the parks in partnership with the City Parks Foundation. Its production of “Romeo and Juliet,” directed by artistic director Alfred Preisser, will be performed at locations throughout the city, including Brooklyn’s Von King Park, Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park, and Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park, beginning Friday. But with so many versions of the same play offered in a short time period, will audiences have an appetite for yet another? Or have they suffered production fatigue?

Its a question Mr. Preisser, who was unaware of the competing scheduling when he programmed “Romeo and Juliet” for his company last fall, has been forced to consider.

Rather than fear a lack of audience, though, Mr. Pressier said he believes the competing productions generate excitement for the work itself. “I think multiple productions is kind of advantageous,” he said. “It focuses attention on the play.”

It also reinforces an idea that has been elemental to Mr. Pressier’s artistic philosophy: “There is not a correct way to do classic plays,” he said. “Someone is always doing these plays. I welcome comparisons,” he said, noting that his theater’s production of “Macbeth” last year also came on the heels of a version of “Macbeth” produced by Shakespeare in the Park.

“There’s a whole new audience that didn’t come and stand in line at the Delacorte,” he says. “And our ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is going to b e much different , much different.”

But the Classical Theater of Harlem doesn’t have the Public Theater’s marketing muscle behind its production, though it does have marketing help from the City Parks Foundation, nor does it boast Shakespeare in the Park’s all-star cast.

It does, however, deliver a free production with no waiting lines and a casual atmophere (Frisbees have been known to land onstage).

“It’s definitely a loose situation,” Mr. Preisser said. “It is that aura that anything can happen.”

The audience in the parks, he said, includes people who don’t ordinarily go to the theater, and the experience is a bit more raw, the patrons’ politeness a bit less practiced than in traditional theater.

But it is still a source of future theatergoers. “It’s essential theater: to go out there in the open air and do these plays and create interest in live theater,” Mr. Preisser said. “It is a good marketing tool.”

In six performances last summer, the company played to more than 5,000 people, some of whom later bought tickets to productions in Classical Theatre of Harlem’s 2006–07 season.

Last summer, during the company’s run of “Macbeth,” the audience picked up free tickets, drifted in around 7 p.m., poured in at 7:30 and filled the house by 8 p.m. In other words: none of that getting up before dawn to stand in line for that other production across the way.