I’ve had a bit of time to digest the recent announcement that Lincoln Center Festival is bringing over the Royal Shakespeare Company in the summer of 2011. Of course, the money shot isn’t so much that LCF is going to present five plays in rep over six weeks, but that the shows will be performed at the Armory in a full-scale replica of the RSC’s Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon. This seems to be field-of-dreams logic: If you build it, they will come.

I’m of two minds about the whole thing. I have no problem with LCF spending money on pharaonic arts projects — there’s something inspiring in something of this scale and I don’t see anything inherently wrong in spending money on ambitious undertakings. It’s not like throwing tax cuts worth hundreds of millions at, say, the Nets basketball team. At least with Shakespeare, we know we’re not getting a losing proposition, plus seeing a company do plays in rep is a rare treat in the US.

At the same time: more Shakespeare? Sigh. At least they won’t do “Twelfth Night.” More to the point: Do these shows warrant the expense of building a theater?

Now, this isn’t a new endeavor for LCF: In 2004 they erected a Kabuki theater for the Heisei Nakamura-za company. The following year, Ariane Mnouchkine and her Théâtre du Soleil company performed in a replica of their Paris space, the Cartoucherie; when they came back last year, the inside of the Cartoucherie was transposed to the Armory. Similarly, when LCF imported the modernist opera “Die Soldaten” at the Armory, it really couldn’t have been done anywhere else.

But in these shows there was a real tie between setting and staging: The two elements were organically connected. Is it really the case in the RSC’s pretty trad productions? The company’s “King Lear” and “The Seagull” fared well at BAM’s Harvey in 2007, for instance, and I don’t think seeing them in a replica of their English house would have improved the experience in any way. So when it comes to bringing their home over here methinks there’s a bit of a stunt going on here. But then it does belong in a great American tradition: Weren’t the Cloisters brought over brick by brick from Europe? Now we just import stuff for short-term runs.

And where is it going to stop? Personally I’ve never been to La Scala in Milan or the Bolshoi in Moscow: Could the Met please rebuild them in Damrosch Park? It would really make my life easier.