Free Let Me Be Your Star by Rachel Shukert

The Delacorte Theater manifests itself in the picturesque
wooded glen on the southwest side of the Great Lawn of Central Park, a small
assemblage of low-slung, warren-like structures, as if Brigadoon had been built
by rabbits.
    Also like Brigadoon, no matter how many times I go there,
I’m never a hundred percent sure I’m going to find it again. I know I can’t be
the only person who has spent fifteen years in New York and still finds this
section of Central Park impenetrable. Surely other tipsy and/or careless
would-be theatergoers have taken a minor wrong turn, only to find themselves
spat back out in the East 80s, or hopelessly lost in the darkening mass of the
Ramble, surrounded by condom wrappers and sewer rats visiting their country
estates and the glowing eyes of the feral adolescent rapists your atavistic
lizard mind still tells you are out there even though you are a reasonable
person who watched that PBS documentary exonerating the Central Park Five and nothing
like that happens in Manhattan anymore or in the parts of Brooklyn that contain
anyone who has ever eaten at Roberta’s.
    But that hot evening last August seemed magical before it
even began. Not only did I find the theater with total ease, for once “taking
advantage of” all the “cultural opportunities” the “city has to offer did not
mean sitting through four hours of Shakespeare and pretending to laugh at terrible
fucking puns. That night, I was going to see (incredibly, for the very first
time!) my third-favorite musical by my first-favorite person.
    I was going to see Into the Woods.
    My ticket was a birthday present from my friend Jesse, a
theater critic who brought me along as his plus one. We had indulged in a
festive pre-show martini at Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle Hotel. By the time we
arrived at the theater, I was feeling dizzy and funny and fine, shimmering with
the sudden wild hope that one sometimes feels when one is dressed a certain way
on certain night in New York; the feeling that it hasn’t all been for naught, that
maybe on some level you’ve made it after all. Sure, you haven’t accomplished
everything (or anything) that you’d set out to do, but look, you’re still (sort
of) young and still relatively thin and isn’t that Mike Nichols over there, and
maybe, just maybe this is all there is?
    The little NBC bell rang, signaling that it was time to take
our seats. We joined the crush at the doors and were strategically maneuvering
around the usual assortment of unwashed college students, moisturized gay men
in tasteful eyewear, and women with purses that need their own seats on planes,
when I felt a strange hand grab my arm. I’m being mugged, I thought wildly. Who gets mugged at Shakespeare in the Park?
    Then I heard a voice.
    “Rachel. Shukert.”
    I turned around, and found myself face to face with Tony
Kushner.
    The Tony Kushner. Genius, modern prophet, winner of
enough to make him, if not quite an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony), a very
respectable PET (Pulitzer, Emmy, Tony). Whose first play, A Bright Room
Called Day, had made me realize there were other smart Jewish children who
were obsessed with Nazis and also, found them perversely funny; who — through
no fault of his own — had scared the crap out of my timid twenty-year-old self
during my otherwise undistinguished internship at the New York Manhattan Public
Workshop Theater Club; whose beautiful words I had memorized and analyzed and
recited and lived during my countless incarnations as Harper in college scene
study classes. Obviously, I had to be Harper, even though I’m really more of a
Louis. (For the record, Louis is Carrie, Prior is Samantha, Harper is a kind of
Bizarro Charlotte, and Joe Pitt is Miranda, solely on the basis of Cynthia
Nixon’s becoming a lesbian and marrying that woman I have seen at the Container
Store on 60 th and Lexington no less than four times, and that’s not
even my Container Store. Although I suppose a case could be made