My "Shakespeare in the Park" Story, Or How I Managed to Get Within 20 Yards of Raúl Esparza and Not Jump on His Face... Trust Me, It Wasn't Easy...

Okay, this tale has the potential of being the longest story ever told so I'm gonna try to condense it as much as possible. But I have been waiting like four days to tell you guys so my excitement might get the best of me.

Okay, breathe... Let me start at the beginning. So every summer, the wonderful people at The Public Theater put on "Shakespeare in the Park," which is this completely free, open to the public production of a William Shakespeare play or a play of similar noteworthiness held in Central Park in New York City.

And every year, they tend to get really big celebrity actors to play the parts, you know, to make these tickets incredibly impossible to get. Like a few years ago, Meryl Streep did "Mother Courage and Her Children" and half of New York lost its mind trying to get tickets. I was not one of the lucky ones. That's why when I found out that this year they were going to do "Twelfth Night" with Anne Hathaway playing Viola, I knew I had to get tickets to this show. So I proceeded to look it up and this is what I saw...


Yeah, this looks like a good production and its free. Let's... Wait! WTF!


Raúl Esparza is in the show! My lovah! My husband! THE MAN WHO DOESN'T KNOW HOW MUCH HE LOVES ME YET! Okay, so by this time not only had getting tickets to this show jumped up on my priority list above things like breathing and heart beating, but I also collapsed into a puddle on the ground. It became my life's mission to get tickets to this show.

Now, yes, Raúl was enough to make me want to see the show by himself, but then they went and added Hathaway and Tony winners Audra McDonald and Julie White to the mix. This show was going to be seen by me!

Okay, so let me tell you a little bit about how the Public Theater distributes tickets to the free "Shakespeare in the Park" because it's a fun process.


Basically, you could go to the Delacorte Theater in Central Park at 1 p.m. on days when there's gonna be a show and pick up tickets. But there's a problem... You'd have to wait on a line of hundreds of other people who are doing the same thing. It's like herding cattle (above). You can show up and hope all the tickets for the 450+ seat theater aren't gone by the time you get to the box office. Yeah, I think you can tell Junior wasn't feeling this option.

But wait! There's another way to get tickets!

You could go to the group's website and join a "Virtual Line" which is basically a lottery where you put your name in and they randomly select people to get seats to the show. Here's my chance, I thought! So I signed up like every day hoping I'd get tickets. I didn't care what day, I just signed up. But as I have the worst luck on the face of the earth, I was constantly met with...


Or as I came to know it...


This went on for about a week and I was convinced that either this "Virtual Line" thing was a joke and I was actually going to have to go down to the theater and stand in that monstrous line (GAH!) or that they knew it was me and said "Don't give him tickets ever!" I thought this until one day, I signed in for tickets and signed out... THEN I FORGOT ABOUT IT! I'll say it again...

I FORGOT I SIGNED UP FOR TICKETS!

Do you want to know what happened when I signed on at night to see if I had gotten tickets for the day I forgot about...


I am not making this up. The one time... THE ONE TIME! I forgot to check to see if I was denied tickets, I actually wasn't denied! Because that's how much Jesus hates me. Anyway, I was livid with myself. I couldn't believe that I had tried for tickets for a week and got them, and forgot!

It just made me even more eager to sign up every day to see if I could get them again. I got friend's addresses to sign up in their names, everything I could to get these tickets. Okay, so fast forward, last Friday, I signed up and proceeded about my day not realizing that this was the day Jesus would shine his light down upon me... with some strings attached.

Oh, by the way, I'm not a religious person in the slightest. I haven't been to church since my Catholic elementary school graduation, but after Friday, I now believe in Jesus (right). You'll understand why by the end of the story, and you will believe too. (p.s. this is a joke.)

So like I said, I signed up for Friday and had so much to do that day that I almost forgot to check the Public Theater's site to see how I would be denied today. Would they throw in a couple of gold stars and some ribbon to say "You failed at getting tickets spectacularly this time!"

But when I signed on this time, I saw this!


I GOT TICKETS! Like Cameron Diaz says in "Charlie's Angels": "I LOVE TICKETS!" But now this presents new problems. I had the tickets, but who would I go with? This would seem like it had a pretty easy solution, but as you know from The Great Fleet Week Debacle of '09, I sometimes have trouble corralling my friends into doing things.

I love them, but they're busy people.

So I made some calls, actually quite a lot of calls, but couldn't get anyone who could come into the city (I was already in the city, hence the problem) and join me.

And people I knew in the city weren't getting back to me in time. Then, conveniently, my cell phone battery dies which means I can't contact anyone quickly anyway or get an incoming call (pay phones? yeah, don't go there. I once saw a homeless guy peeing directly into a pay phone stall. Not Going There.)

These tickets were for today now. I would have to go by myself.


I picked up my bag and did my best Carrie Bradshaw (above) down the streets of Manhattan. Was I a little annoyed that I couldn't go with someone? Of course. But I also understand that everyone's got their own life and you can't make someone do something just because you want to do it. But I also understood that I'm not gonna stop myself from doing something just because I'm, gulp, alone. I need a boyfriend. So not the point of the story.

Okay, remember what I said about Jesus? Here's where he comes into play. So, the Delacourte Theater is an outdoor theater. It has rained literally almost every single day in New York for the past month and a half. They don't do productions of "Twelfth Night" in the rain; they cancel them. If a performance is canceled, your tickets are not transferable. You start back at square one.

I was nervous about the rain, but it wasn't raining five hours before the show, four hours, three hours... I think we're gonna make it, then at two hours...


THE SKY OPENED UP...

Rain was falling in sheets. Water was everywhere, including my eyes as I was nearly about to burst into tears. I wanted to see this show so badly. I got tickets once, missed that show. Got them again out of sheer luck. Couldn't get anyone to go with me. Had to get over my nearly crippling social anxiety to work up the nerve to go by myself and now IT WAS F#CKING RAINING!

But I said to myself "We still have two hours, the rain will stop in two hours. The rain better stop in two hours if it knows what's good for it because I will bring a fury down upon this rain so swift it won't know what hit it if I MISS THIS GODD*MED SHOW!" I was like the opposite of Storm (right). My power would be to make the weather stop.

So I put the rain out of my head as much as possible because it was getting late and I had to make my way from the West Side to Central Park and pick up these tickets in time for the show. I couldn't be late or they'd hand my tickets to someone waiting in the monstrous stand-by line.

I couldn't have that.

But here's something I didn't realize. I thought that the number 6 train was close to Central Park. It's not. We'll get to that in a minute. Let's go back to Jesus. So I'm on the train and I can't tell what's happening outside. I see people with umbrellas, they don't look really wet but I don't know. I sit there and I start to pray, yes you heard me pray... I prayed...

"I swear if you stop this rain I will be a good person, I will only watch personal entertainment videos a few times a week. I will not give people the evil eye on the subway like I just did a second ago. If there is a God listening to this... STOP THE F#CKING RAIN! Jesus, all hail, Mary and the saints."

And wouldn't you know, I step off the subway and look up...


Okay, it wasn't that clear but it had stopped raining significantly and I was so thankful. Now, remember how I said that the number 6 train is like not near Central Park. Well it isn't and I step off the train, look at my watch and I have 30 minutes to pick up these tickets and I have NO CLUE where I'm going.

I've never been to the theater before. I've obviously been to Central Park before, but just not to the theater and I was just following the simple online directions, which didn't really say much except "Go to Central Park, find theater."

So I book it up three avenue blocks to the Park, that I knew how to do although I didn't think the train was so far from the Park. If I did, I would have given myself more time. But anyway, I still didn't know where the theater was. And you know what New York City did to make it more helpful for you to find the theater... NOTHING! No signs, no path, NOTHING! ANYWHERE! I look at my watch...

25 minutes to get tix! And I'm lost.

So this is the part of my adventure that looked just like an episode of "The Amazing Race." I am now running through Central Park trying to find any indication of where the hell Delacourte Theater is, and as I mentioned there are seriously no signs.

I have twenty minutes to get to the theater and get my tickets or they will give them away and there's a chance I may never be lucky like this for the rest of the show's run. Finally, I spot one of those "You Are Here" maps and look. It says the theater is right next to the Great Lawn (below)...


Oh, and by the way, it was almost 7:30 (when my tix deadline was) on a Friday and it was slowly getting dark and there was just a torrential downpour. NO ONE was out there. It was just me running around like a crazy person by myself screaming "TEN MINUTES! I HAVE TEN MINUTES!"

So the sign says "Great Lawn." I look and see that I'm standing right next to the Great Lawn. I DON'T SEE NO FREEEGIN' THEATER! That's when my brain, which has a horrible sense of direction (can't you tell?), realizes the theater is ON THE OTHER SIDE of the Great Lawn! So I start running.

And as I'm running, I see stadium lights ahead of me and I scream out "I SEE LIGHTS! LIGHTS!" But of course, by this time, there were people around me looking at me again, like a crazy person. I didn't care. I had 7 minutes.


So I'm running toward the lights, and then eventually toward people and the theater itself (above). But I don't see any lines. Where is the box office?

FIVE MINUTES! In what I consider to be a Quintessential Junior Move, I don't realize that I'm behind the theater. I've actually run so fast so far that I ran around the theater and I am now behind it. Because I don't know this, I just run up to the first group of people I see and I quickly realize that they are not a line. They are holding champagne and little cheese squares.

I have run directly into a cocktail party for the sponsors of the Public Theater.

And not only have I unknowingly done this, but I also have been rained on for the past hour and have been running for the past 30 minutes and I look like a wet dog (right). Mortified isn't the word.

We're gonna have to invent a new word for what I was. Anyway, a kind soul, sensing my distress puts her cheese and champy down and tells me the box office is around the path right ahead. In order to cut my embarrassment short, I just run off leaving them to think who was that dark boy and why was he soaking wet? Finally, I find the box office and run up to the first 14 year old in a "STAFF" t-shirt I could find and scream at him "I have Virtual Line tickets! Where do I go?!" He looked so scared. He mumbled something and pointed and I just ran. Finally (FINALLY!!), I make it to the box office, and scream again "Is this where I pick up Virtual Line tickets!" And the girl behind the counter looks at me like this...


But I didn't care. She took my ID and I had the pleasure of announcing to all the perfectly appointed people and their hair and their blazers and groups of friends that I would only be needing one ticket because it was just me. The girl behind the counter still didn't really care. Then, the waiting started.

Basically, we stood on line waiting to be seated for about an hour.

I was stuck behind the most obnoxious family ever. Mother who was labeling all the trees around us. Father who didn't know the basic plot of "Twelfth Night". A son who was literally trying to melt into the asphalt he was so bored. And two teenage daughters who would not shut up for an hour. I went into meditation. Soon it would just be me and Raúl (and 500 other people).

Finally we were let into the theater. I sat next to a lovely Indian couple who I think noticed that I was by myself, felt a little bad, and adopted me for the show.

They noticed how prepared I was: I had my water, my umbrella, my Village Voice for the wait, my Junior Mints, and my binoculars or as I call them, my nockies. I had been carrying all this crap around for a week in case I got tix to the show. That's how serious I was.

They offered me food. I gave them free use of my nockies. I was proud of myself for even speaking to people I don't know. My invisible therapist would say that that was a good first step. And then finally, the show started. Finally, after everything you (hopefully) read above I was here, it wasn't raining, I was in a seat and I was about to come face to face with Mr. Esparza and Co...

Then the show began...






It was phenomenal!

I don't even like "Twelfth Night" that much, my fave Shakespeare comedy has and will always be "Much Ado About Nothing," but this staging was swift and funny and upbeat, musical and full of energy, every actor was excellent and the production was top notch. I was bursting inside. It was all... ALL OF IT... worth it! Let's talk some particulars before we end the longest post ever.

Audra McDonald (first photo above) was the best. She played Olivia as stern yet playful but never dumb. Hathaway (right) was as dewy and beautiful and talented as she is in the movies (and she looked great as a boy). Her readings weren't the best but she def held her own, has a fantastic singing voice, and her reactions were priceless.

Jay O. Sanders was fantastic as Sir Toby, and while as Maria, Julie White (both third photo above) got a little tripped up by the verse at times, she was so effervescent that that made up for it. Also Hamish Linklater, who plays the brother on "New Adventures of Old Christine" (and who has a lot of theater experience), was hilarious as Sir Andrew. I was less thrilled with Michael Cumpsty as Malvolio, who seemed to come from the Kenneth Branagh School of SHOUTING EVERYTHING, and David Pittu as Feste, whose singing voice is fantastic but who seemed to be acting in another play.

But these are quibbles.

Everyone was really, really good. And OMG, every male actor in the play under the age of 40 was HIGHLY F#CKABLE. Like I would have been backstage with my legs spread if security would have let me. And I would have f#cked security too because they were hot. Speaking of extreme cases of hotness...


Raúl looked good the entire time. He was all tall and meaty and one scene his shirt was unbuttoned down to no man's land and I almost passed out. Also, unlike a lot of the other actors, he chose to deliver his lines in this silky quiet tone which was totally hot. And aside from his hotness he was very good too.

My one complaint was that as Orsino, if you know the play, you know that character isn't in it that much. That was distressing.

Overall, it was excellent and I'm actively trying to win tickets to see it again. Now that I know how to get there and how long it'll take and that the weather has calmed down and I've actually lined up someone to go with, I may have some fun before the actual event.

Who knows? And if you're in New York City before July 12 and want to wait in a line for 5 hours or try you luck online, I urge you to see the show. You will laugh and cry and fight the urge to bum rush the stage knowing that Raúl Esparza is standing less than 20 yards away from you, which coincidentally is the distance I'm legally allowed to be in according to his restraining order. Just kidding. He doesn't have a restraining order against me. Not yet. Now, do you have any crazy theater stories? Ever have a cell phone go off or have someone in the show use you for their act? Or have you ever been so disorganized that getting to the show is a longer drama than the show you're going to see? You know what?

Ignore that last one.