However, I did long for a sexual connection that summer. My maybe-gay liberal arts unicorn, Chris, and I had broken up after classes ended, and I was hopeful that I might be able to find some romance in the Berkshires. I think most actors would agree that there is a game we all play the first day of any rehearsal process. It’s called “Who Is Going to Be My Show Crush?” First, you scan the room looking for someone to flirt with and maybe, one night after a cast party, make out with (at least). Most of the time, you scan the room and find no one. Then, three or four days into rehearsal, everyone starts to look different and suddenly you spot your show crush. He was there all along; it just took time and boredom to find him. Mine came in the shape of our director, Brett. I didn’t even particularly care for him, nor did I think he was a great director, but toward the end of our first week, I noticed I was getting some extra attention from him. He liked everything I did in rehearsal and I often caught him staring at me. He was cute in a nerdy way, and I thought, Why not?! So I started staring and flirting back. It seemed harmless and added a layer of excitement to my days.
Another fun game actors like to play is “What Can We Complain About Now?” You usually start playing it early in the production process, when everyone is still humbled and grateful for the job and the experience. But slowly, one night after rehearsal and a couple drinks, someone starts complaining about the show, the theater, the director, another cast member. This usually comes from boredom, insecurity, or the desire to find a common enemy. Once the genie is out of the bottle, you can’t put him back in. It’s a great bonding tool for actors, but if taken too far, it can poison the whole production. With Jenn and Steve, most of the grumbling was about how busted the theater was and what a terrible director Brett was. This put me in an awkward position since I was also flirting with Brett every day. But because I didn’t trust his instincts, I also didn’t allow him to direct anything I was doing on stage, so I felt like it was fine to gripe about him, too. What this complaining did for me was make me feel (a) closer to Jenn and Steve and (b) like I wanted out of the Theater Barn immediately. I was the only one of the three of us who was staying for the rest of the season, and now I was seriously regretting that choice.
Still, opening night was pretty magical, as I recall. I was on stage with people I loved, and what’s more, I was in love with their talent. As Jenn and Steve and I performed the final moments of that show together, I felt that we were doing good work, and that I was sharing this space, this stage, with people who were making me a better actor. When I cried at the end of the show that first night, it wasn’t my usual upstaging sobs. I just looked at Jenn, happy for her friendship and amazed by her abilities and cried appropriate, authentic tears of joy.
This rush of emotion was met with a near immediate crash when I realized that we only had two weeks together before Jenn and Steve would leave and I would be left alone with a new cast to start rehearsals for Forever Plaid. I tried to put this thought out of my head, and by that I mean, I drowned my sadness in Franzia white wine at the cast party at Joan’s house later that night. I stayed close to Jenn and Steve, trying to soak in every moment with them.
At one point, while I was tipping a box of wine into my Solo cup, Brett approached me. He, too, had been enjoying the Franzia and was now bold enough to tell me how much he liked me. He talked about how talented and funny and handsome I was. Before I knew it, I was agreeing to meet him in his bedroom after the party. But there was a catch. He was staying in Joan’s house, and he didn’t want her to know that we were “spending time together.” I suggested my house. He said that was a bad idea since there were so many people there. I couldn’t argue with that. “What should we do?” I asked. (This is where, dear reader, you will see just how little self-esteem Andy Rannells had at this point and also what a ridiculous romantic he was.) Brett suggested that I go home with Jenn and Steve and wait until they were asleep. Then, I would sneak out of our house, walk through the fields to Joan’s house, and go to Brett’s bedroom window at the back, where I would stand on Joan’s central air-conditioning unit and hoist myself through said window and into his bedroom. I thought about this plan. The lying, the plotting, the potential danger/humiliation. Then I said, “Okay!” It sounded tricky but fun. I would be like Romeo climbing through Juliet’s window!
I went with Jenn and Steve back to the house, where we drank and talked and drank more. Once back in our house, I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay with them. But I had made a plan, and my Midwestern politeness, not to mention my penis, was not going to let me forget it. After some fake yawning, I said my good-nights and made my way to my bedroom. I snuck out the back door and walked quietly down the road, through the fields to Joan’s house. The moonlight was once again bright enough to light my way. I got to the house and, as planned, Brett had his window open. Getting through the window was a little harder than I had expected, but I did it. Brett acted as if this was something we did all the time. He seemed almost bored with my arrival. “Where have you been?” he asked tersely.
“I had to wait for Jenn and Steve to go to sleep.”
“I thought you weren’t coming. I almost went to bed.”
I was suddenly feeling punished. This wasn’t even my idea. I didn’t even really care about being here. But I stayed. We had sex. It was fun, I guess. Good, I guess. And totally silent. He told me I couldn’t make any noise for fear that Joan would hear. It added a level of excitement, I guess. (I’m sure “Silent Sex” is something that has been fetishized and discussed on an episode of Real Sex on HBO at some point.) He came, I didn’t, and without the power of speech, I couldn’t correctly charade, “Hey, what about me?” Before I knew it, Brett was asleep and I was lying in his bed, in the dark, wondering why I was there. I knew why he’d invited me, but why did I go? I drifted asleep and awoke to Brett fully dressed and packing his suitcase.
“Good morning,” he said. “That was fun.”
I gestured silently to the bedroom door. “Is Joan here?”
“She went to the grocery store. This is probably a good time to sneak out. I have to leave soon anyway.”
Being asked to leave, or rather “sneak out,” is not the most pleasant way to be greeted in the morning. But being a polite guy with limited experience (or just a dummy), I started to dress quickly.
“Are you coming back anytime soon?” I asked, foolishly.
“I have jobs lined up for the rest of the summer, but I will try. Truly. I’d like to do this again, Andrew.”
I smiled like an idiot. Then Brett’s face got serious. “Andrew, I think I told you this, but I have a boyfriend, so can you not mention this to Jenn or Steve?”
No, no Brett, you certainly didn’t mention the boyfriend. Also, I will definitely be telling Jenn and Steve. But what I said was “Of course.” We hugged good-bye and then I quickly left the house.
I walked back through the fields in my opening night outfit wondering why I had done that to myself. Was it fun? Did I like it? Did I like him? Yes? No? A little, I guess. I approached the house. It looked prettier in the early morning light than it did normally. I looked around at the fields and the trees and thought, Where in the hell am I? I am doing theater in the middle of a goddamn farm with a bunch of strangers and I just had sex with one of them. I am stuck here for the whole rest of the summer. I want out! I want to go back to New York right now! How can I get out of this?
I sat down on the porch and tried to calm myself. I was still doing a show I loved with people I loved, and I was getting better as an actor from working out here. Also, I reminded myself, I had been hired as an actor in New York City out of hundreds of other actors who had auditioned. I was picked. And if I was picked this time, there would definitely be a next time. My acting career had begun. It might have begun in a barn performing for grouchy-looking farmers, but it had begun. And sometimes just getting started is enough. In that sense, I guess my acting teacher
was right; summer stock was indeed some of the best training for a young actor.
Young Artists Seeking…Art
I discovered two important things during my summer on a musical theater farm in upstate New York: (1) The difference between The City and The Country was as extreme as visiting a different planet. (2) I am most definitely a City person. I had just about clicked into the rhythm of the city when I had been uprooted by my Theater Barn detour, and I was beyond excited to be back to the business of turning myself into Eustace Tilley.
My dreams of living in New York went beyond Broadway and the appeal of wearing all-black clothing; I wanted the whole lifestyle that came with being a New Yorker. I wanted to walk into a deli with my MoMA tote bag, complain about subway service intelligently, and order myself a “regular coffee” and understand exactly what I was getting. (That’s with milk, two sugars.) But perhaps most of all, I wanted to be a cultured person in the way I perceived New Yorkers to be. I wanted to go to art galleries and performance installations and plays that were staged in abandoned storefronts. My partner in this exploration was always Zuzanna. We were young artists. We were living in New York City now. There were experiences to be had. There was art to be seen. And we were going to find it all. After years of being limited to community theater productions and big-screen blockbusters in the Midwest, we were hungry for darker fare. We wanted to be challenged. In short, we wanted to see some weird shit.
Even though we were new to the city, we somehow knew that the key to finding what we were looking for lay in the Village Voice. Every week it was dense with the kind of counterculture events that we wanted to be a part of. TKTS, the half-price ticket booth, was great for Broadway shows and even off-Broadway shows, and I visited often. (“One ticket for The Life, please!”) But Zuzanna and I wanted some theater off the beaten path, far from Broadway and its mainstream shine. Our first outing took us to Theater for the New City, deep in the East Village, on First Avenue and 10th Street. I’ll be honest, as I recall we based this choice on two factors: Tickets were not only available, but also only $10, and the title of the show was Sex Industry. It was advertised as a gritty portrayal of female sex workers in America. It sounded potentially moving and maybe political. Seemed like a good bet. Plus, we liked hanging out in the East Village. There was a drag bar we’d discovered on St. Marks and Avenue A called Stingy Lulu’s. Not only did they not card, but it was fun and colorful, and all the waitresses were drag queens who did numbers in between delivering cocktails. There was certainly nothing like it in Omaha. The plan was to see the show and then have drinks at Stingy Lulu’s. Even if the show was bad, we could turn the night around with our drag friends.
The theater itself didn’t look like any theater I had ever been to. The lobby looked more like a Bohemian rummage sale. There was broken furniture and pieces of past sets strewn about, and almost everything was covered with some kind of sheer fabric or sheet. It smelled like incense, and I’m fairly certain I saw a cat or two running about. The doors to the house weren’t open yet, and everyone was just milling about in the lobby. They had a card table set up with free wine. (Free wine was becoming a warning of sorts. If you walk into a theater and there is free wine, consider it a preemptive apology, or at least a distraction. And always drink it.) We helped ourselves and took in the crowd. It was a lively group of various ages. Everyone had a real East Village vibe, which at the time was chic in a slightly un-ironed and potentially smelly way. (My most distinct sense memory is a lot of patchouli and a residual weed-smoking stench.)
The theater had open seating, or “festival seating” as it is sometimes optimistically called, so once the doors to the theater were opened, you just had to sort of shove your way in and fight for seats. We beelined it up to the back row. We felt it would be safer in case the show was a total disaster and we wanted to leave, or if there was some kind of unexpected audience participation. (I have always hated interactive theater. I don’t mean immersive theater; I loved Natasha, Pierre and The Great Comet of 1812. I mean interactive theater, like when you have to participate and actors touch you and want you to speak to them. I’m sorry, but if I wanted to be in the show, I would have auditioned for it.)
To the best of my recollection, Sex Industry was a series of vignettes about women who worked as strippers or prostitutes in New York City. The dialogue wasn’t written as traditional dialogue but rather as a bizarre style of poetry. There was a lot of repeating of words and phrases and rhythmic talking. It wasn’t like Beat poetry, which might have been cool, this seemed more like…an accident or a struggle to remember one’s lines. Zuzanna and I tried to follow the story until we realized that there wasn’t one. I think we both tapped out when one of the actresses delivered an impassioned monologue about that fact that she often had to defecate after sex. That was pretty much the point when we decided our outing was a bit of a misfire. But Sex Industry would not deter us! We would try again!
Zuzanna was taking a Theater History class at Barnard, and she would receive extra credit for seeing certain performances that weren’t affiliated with her school. Because Zuzanna loved extra credit, and I loved hanging out with Zuzanna, I told her I would join her for one of these performances. The next one coming up was an avant-garde, modern Chinese opera. Check, check, and check in my book! That sounded like a perfect, and maybe oddly cool, way to spend the afternoon. The title, which was in Chinese obviously, translated to The Woman with the Glass Vagina. Once again I was reminded that I was NOT in Omaha. The show, a matinee, was at the Asia Society. The audience was mostly made up of affluent-looking Chinese folks with a handful of students like us sprinkled in. As we were entering the theater, an usher asked us, “Do you speak Chinese?”
“Sadly, no, we do not,” I said.
“That’s okay, you can use these headsets. We have a translator today.”
Just our luck! I had only ever seen two operas in my life at that point, so I was prepared for the traditional supertitles above the stage used to translate the lyrics. But headsets? This was way more fun! We settled into our seats and the opera began. The translator, who I had thought would be a fun addition to the experience, turned out to be very distracting. It was a woman with a monotone voice, reading what seemed like a very literal translation of what was being sung. So while listening to the performers on stage sing, there was a woman in our ears in a low voice, like a female Ben Stein, saying things like:
Can’t you see my vagina is made of glass? Look. It’s glass. It is a glass vagina.
I’m sure it sounded more poetic in Chinese.
The climax of the show came a painstaking two hours later when the lead character—the one with the aforementioned glass vagina—had sex for the first time and, you guessed it, her glass vagina shattered into a million pieces. Honestly, the effect was really amazing. The actress was sitting on top of something that looked like a really, really long playground slide, her legs straddling either side. Then, when her poor vagina broke, countless, I mean, countless, marbles were poured down the slide between her legs. It went on for quite some time, all while the chorus was singing around her and the translator kept droning in our ears:
Her vagina is broken. She has broken her glass vagina.
All in all, not a total theatrical slam-dunk for Zuzanna and me. But some parts were cool and it got me out of my dorm room and it got Zuzanna some extra credit.
After that, we decided that maybe the cinema was a safer bet. We branched out of the live theater scene and looked for some fun, indie, art house films that could be inspiring. I decided to spearhead this new effort and once again took to the Village Voice for guidance. There were so many movies I had never heard of, so many movie houses I had never been to. I was getting excited about this next adventure. The options seemed limitless. For example, a Truffaut retrospective? At the time I didn’t know who that was, but it sounded French and arty. How about Following from up-and-coming director Christopher N
olan? I think it’s in black-and-white! That’s fun! No, I decided to let my penis be the guide and chose a film purely based on its poster. It was called Latin Boys Go to Hell. (Google it. Gays and girls, you’re welcome.) I didn’t read a synopsis, I just figured that if the guy on the poster was in the movie, that was good enough for me! It was playing at the Quad, a small theater on 13th Street that Zuzanna and I had never been to. The theater was packed with older West Village gay men and us. Today, the internet describes the film’s plot as such: “Young Brooklyn Latinos learn about the intricacies of relationships and their own developing sexuality.”
What I remember about it was there was a lot of nudity, a lot of overacting, and then the hot guy from the poster gets his penis cut off. (What was it with us finding all these stories about damage to the genitals?) The movie ended and I knew I had led us astray. Luckily Zuzanna found that castrated poster guy attractive, too, so ultimately, all was not lost.
Our search was never ending. There was never a shortage of things to see, experiences to seek out. And yet we usually managed to just miss the thing that everyone else was raving about. We never discovered the next Rent or Little Shop of Horrors. There was no Hamilton that we stumbled on while trying to experience unexpected art in the city. But we had successes. I remember seeing the Todd Solondz film Happiness with Zuzanna and being part of a small handful of people left in the theater when it was over, after several scenes made people walk out in droves. (We loved it.) We saw Uta Hagen in Collected Stories at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. She was as incredible as we had hoped she’d be. And we saw the revival of Cabaret with Alan Cumming, Natasha Richardson, and John Benjamin Hickey. (I know it’s a Broadway show, but the theater was super-run-down and east of Broadway so it felt more downtown.) It’s still one of my favorite theatrical experiences ever. We were happy to take them all as they came.
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