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 60th and Lexington no less than four times, and that’s not even my Container Store. Although I suppose a case could be made that Louis is Miranda, and Joe and Harper is what would happen if Carrie and Charlotte were forced to enter into a same-sex marriage, like one of those talk radio hosts we’ve all tacitly given ourselves permission to no longer learn the names of is probably suggesting the Obama administration plans to make us do. Roy Cohn is Mr. Big. Is there some sort of abbreviated way I can let you know I’m aware I’ve gone off on a tangent, without interrupting the flow? We need a Dayenu-like safe word. “LuPone,” perhaps? But will she know I mean it as a compliment? Nah, never mind. You’ll just have to bear with me.)
Tony Kushner, still holding my arm, was talking to me.
He was telling me how much he loved my recaps of the television show Smash. And then everything went black.
No, I’m just kidding. It only felt that way. I honestly have no memory of what I said. I’m sure I thanked him and told him I was a huge fan and all the other things you say when you’re trying not to seem to obsequious or impressed, even though you are quietly going out of your mind. He took his seat, and I fled to the public (in a park!) ladies’ room at the side of the theater, barricaded myself in a stall, texted my father, and burst into tears.
A few days later, a friend who knew I was going to the performance that night called to ask me what I thought of the framing device that the entire show was going on in the head of an imaginative and possibly disturbed child runaway, much like the series finale of St. Elsewhere.
I told him I thought it was unnecessary, and left it at that. I did not tell him that I missed the opening of the show because I had spent it curled on the fetal position of a park restroom floor sobbing because Tony Kushner knew who I was because of my Smash recaps, and also that Tony Kushner knew who I was because of my Smash recaps.
Slotted spoons don’t hold much soup, but a slotted spoon can catch the potato.
This is the story of that potato.
* * *
Hello, my fellow members of the orphan chorus and non-speaking townspeople.
My name is Rachel Shukert. I’m a wife, I’m a cat owner, I’m a five-time Annie cast member. First and foremost, I am a Wilderness Girl, but second and aftmost I was the official recapper of Smash, NBC’s hotly anticipated and resoundingly doomed experiment to bring the backstage drama of Broadway to the American masses, for New York Magazine’s famed Vulture blog. For two full seasons, I wrote, usually between the hours of 11 p.m. and 9 a.m. the next morning, recaps of each of the show’s 32 episodes until its cancellation this spring.
My recaps were sometimes delirious, and mostly discursive, and never less than 2,000 words long. Smash destroyed my sleep patterns, my workweek, and, I feared for a brief time, my sanity.
It also changed, and in a certain way saved, my life.
* * *
Let’s start at the very beginning; a very good place to start. And in the beginning, there was Downton Abbey.
I first got wind of everybody’s favorite soap opera about the benevolent glory of systemic social injustice the way I get most of my catastrophic news: from my mother.
“Are you alone?” she asked breathlessly, when I picked up the phone one night in early 2011. I said I was. “Good. Turn on PBS. There’s this new show about fancy British people fighting about how to hold your fork right. It’s going to blow your mind.”
My mother is not generally a very enthusiastic person, but her voice sounded the same as it did when I was twelve and she told me about a “funny little gay man” who was talking on NPR about being a Christmas elf at Macy’s in a way that “might change your life.” I wasted no time tracking down the remote control. By the end of the hour, my mind was not only blown, it was slowly trickling out my ear and down my neck. The Talmudic parsing of table manners! The Titanic tragedy being read sotto voce from ironed newspapers as no tears were shed! The dimwitted, red-cheeked Earl of Grantham, his inscrutable wife, yenta-like bubbe, and three marriageable (or not-so-marriageable, in the case of Poor Edith) daughters; it was l
ike a remake of Fiddler on the Roof written by a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl pretending to be Barbara Cartland, which, when I was a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl, was exactly what I was pretending be. (Somewhere I have an original romance novel written in spurts at a series of slumber parties in the very early ’90s. I’ll put it online sometime for you to download, but it’s going to cost you another buck.)
“I told you,” my mother said. “Now call your aunt Barbara. She’s having a liver biopsy this week and I’m sure she’d like to hear from you.”
Aunt Barbara and her liver would have to wait. I had things to do. Immediately, I went online and stayed up until 5 in the morning watching the rest of Season One on various streaming sites, heedless of international law. The Crawleys had corrupted me; their aristocratic entitlement had transformed me from a dutiful member of the bourgeoisie to an unhinged libertine who thought only of my own pleasure, like Dame Maggie Smith. And when fall came that year, and the headlines in the Daily Mail (another piece of retrograde crap to which I am shamefully, hopelessly addicted) started to say things like “How Modern Women Have Totally Failed As Wives And Mothers And Thus Will Always Be Miserable, But Anyway, Here Are Four Easy Ways To Add Some Edwardian Style To Your Wardrobe, Even Though You Look Old and Fat, You Stupid Barren Cow,” I knew it was time to do it again with the second season.
But though I still swooned at the sight of all those men in uniform and chuckled over poor doomed William’s Ali McGraw in the Love Story deathbed scene and wondered, not for the first time, why Carson has not yet reprimanded Miss O’Brien for going around with her hair made out of a collection of recycled cat toys, it wasn’t quite the same. Maybe it was the odd accelerated time warp quality that meant people were always having the same conversation, dressed in the same clothes, except it was suddenly two years later. Or the way the Spanish flu pandemic, which killed up to 100 million people worldwide, was mostly treated as a neat deux ex machina so that Lady Mary could continue her grim march towards Matthew Crawley’s still-fragile tingle guilt-free and unimpeded. Or how Branson (for my money, the hottest piece in the whole damn Abbey) kept saying things about Irish independence and socialism, and yet, we, the audience, were not supposed to agree with him, like on Fox News when they talk about Sesame Street indoctrinating children with lessons about tolerance and sharing and then realize, with a shiver, that they don’t see those as good things, but it seemed the world had changed. The tents in Zuccotti Park were beginning to rise. While I was no longer naïve enough to think that meant anything other than a whole lot of teenagers were about to get really good at hacky sack, the message of the 99 percent was suddenly on everybody’s lips. I wanted to write about income inequality and class stratification and neo-feudalism and how weird it was that Elizabeth McGovern’s voice sounded exactly like mine when I get drunk and do my impression of Truman Capote. I wanted to explore the strange celebrity of Sir Lord Earl Julian of Fellowesby, or whatever he calls himself these days, who, flush with success, was giving all kinds of interviews to the British press in which he attributed the success of his show to the peasantry finally waking up to an atavistic longing for “tradition” and bemoaning, with rancor that seemed oddly fresh, given the circumstance, the ghastly upset of the ’60s, when socialism was fashionable and one was persecuted, horribly, simply for who one was, i.e., a person who didn’t feel comfortable failing to don a dinner jacket after 6 p.m. (I mean, I have relatives who lived through the Holocaust, so I understand.)
But mostly, I was just happy I felt like writing about anything at all. For the past several months, I’d been in a terrible creative rut. I know, boo hoo hoo, cry me a river, there are child soldiers with no health insurance getting their legs blown off by drones in Afghanistan, but no matter how conscious we try to be of these unfortunate facts, eventually we still have to feel our own feelings, and my feelings were that my life, and my career, had somehow turned into a great big pile of poo, and I don’t have health insurance either. I had finished a new book, but due to the vagaries of the vague professional publishing-industrial complex, it wouldn’t come out for another year and a half, and there was no evidence that anyone was going to want to read it any more than they had my first two, so that would be another three years down the drain. What had once seemed like a promising run as a playwright had fizzled in the gridlock of practicality: The more I tried to come up with something I thought someone would actually produce, the more impossible I found it to come up with anything at all. I found myself withdrawing from old friends, not out of jealousy exactly, but because their cheerful, faux-anxious chatter about their TV staffing gig or rehearsals at the Roundabout or the New York Times review that wasn’t quite a rave, but didn’t seem to be affecting the option on their movie deal, so that was a relief, only served to make own failures starker by contrast. I was happy for them, but I felt terrible about myself. When I did go out in public, I tried to keep a good face on things, but I imagined myself growing smaller and smaller, a disappearing speck on the horizon, just some girl you went to college with, or used to see around, and whatever happened to her, and I didn’t even have like, some fucking baby to use as an excuse. Whether this was all in my head or not is a matter of debate. Normally, this would be the point where someone says, “hey, maybe some anti-depressants would be a good idea,” but those someone don’t talk to you unless you have health insurance, which, as established, I do not.
But Downton Abbey seemed like a pinprick of light in the darkness. Sure, whatever I wound up writing about it would ultimately sink into the black hole of the Internet, with a Google hit, the memory of the commenter who wished you’d be gang-raped, and a check for $150 arriving seven months later the only evidence it had ever existed at all. But it might be fun for me. It might make me want to get up in the morning again, if not, like, to actually leave the house. So I asked my friend Julie if she would put me in touch with her editor at Vulture, and suggested my recapping the show to him.
In time, this would seem like how Jack Warner originally offered the part of Rick in Casablanca to Ronald Reagan. As it was, I received a nice email from Willa Paskin, then the deputy editor, a couple of days later. Downton Abbey was already spoken for by a writer on staff; but there was a new show that would air on NBC after the holidays that nobody had jumped on yet.
“It’s called Smash,” she wrote. Had I heard about it? And more important, was I “into” musicals?
Am I into musicals? I supposed it depends what you meant by “into.” “Into” as in “like,” or “into” as in the precise moment when the sperm goes “into” the egg?
She said she’d send me the screener right away.
* * *
“The child is the father of the man.” William Wordsworth said that.
“For God’s sake, Rachel, it was 23 years ago, get the fuck over it already.” My mother said that.
As is often the case, the truth probably lies somewhere in between. But none of that changes the fact that when I was nine years old, I auditioned for, and was rejected from, the Omaha Jewish Community Center’s new production of Fiddler on the Roof.
I still remember everything about that horrible afternoon. It was my younger sister’s birthday, which, as you can imagine, was already a difficult day for me. I remember putting on one of my favorite outfits: a blue sweater with a border of French Provincial windmills knitted around the hem; black velvet capri pants, and for the first time, my black leather synagogue dress flats with no socks — a gamine look I hoped would help me glow with Audrey Hepburn-like serenity as I watched the smaller, cuter, blonder organism my parents had decided to spawn tear through her mountain of presents, opened the jigsaw puzzle or paperback book my grandmother would have wrapped up at the last minute for me so I “didn’t feel left out,” and did my best to ignore my mother’s frantic gestures to me to ferry the frosting-smeared plates back to the kitchen, like I was some kind of fucking scullery maid.
The party had dwindled down to just family when the pho
ne rang. My heart started thudding against my ribcage, as it had been doing all week. I cowered in the furthest corner of the living room in a state of almost erotic terror, waiting for the news. Hours seemed to pass before my mother put down the phone and appeared in the doorway.
“We didn’t get in,” she said simply. The entire family had auditioned, as part of a misguided and quickly aborted attempt to find a hobby we could all enjoy together. The bowling hadn’t worked out very well either.
“Yeah,” I said, “but what about me?”
“You didn’t get in. None of us did.”
“What?” I felt like the skin was literally being pulled away from my face, like somebody had put a giant version of one of those Gwyneth Paltrow cupping things over my entire head. “What do you mean?”
“I guess they didn’t want us, honey.”
“But why?” I gasped. “Why?”
“I don’t know why. I guess that’s just show biz.”
“No.” I shook my head. “You don’t understand. Ask them why.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“I mean, call them back and ask them why. Now.”
Maybe it was the terrible desperation in my voice, or the horrible finality of my words, or the fact that my eyeballs had rolled back in my head and bubbling black tar was suddenly dripping from every orifice in my face. Maybe she just loved me, who the fuck knows. No matter the reason, she made the call.
“Um, hello, is this Andrew?” she asked. Her voice was about an octave higher than usual. I’m not sure who she was more afraid of, him or me. “This is… yes, that’s right, we just spoke.…Well, I’m sorry to bother you, but it seems I have a very disappointed little girl here…” I glared at her. How could she make me sound so desperate? Everyone knows that’s the show biz kiss of death.
“Yes,” she continued, “and she was just wondering, well, why… you know, just in case there was something she could do better next time.” I hovered anxiously as she waited, tapping the end of a pencil against the block of rainbow-colored paper she kept next to the phone. “Uh huh… yes, I see. Mmm. Yes, I understand. Thank you for telling me.”
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