Ask Not For Whom The Phone Tolls

A cellphone went off during the final minute of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at Steppenwolf, at the press performance. The end of Virginia Woolf is about as intense a moment as the modern theatre has, and I can only imagine how awful and jarring it must have been for the audience and cast. And of course, since it was the press performance, it got into the papers--Hedy Weiss, in the Sun-Times, called for the offender to be tarred and feathered, and Chris Jones wrote and entire piece on the interruption and others he has suffered. (Not to mention the one he has perpetrated.) He ended with a call for forgiveness, though many of the commenters were not so charitable.

I was among the commenters, and shared my worst cellphone memory:

In 2005, I was at the Shaw Festival, in Canada, watching a production of R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End. The play is set in the trenches in World War One, and it was being produced in the Court House Theatre. The theatre has 340-some seats, but it's a very intimate space, and the design was particularly immersive. It was a wonderful production, and the audience was rapt in attention for most of the show. During one scene, the characters were discussing the worst part of living in the trenches: the awful quiet, and the attendant uncertainty. You can guess the rest--that's when the endless cellphone ringing started. To the infinite credit of the actors, they never broke character, and avoided the temptation to make a cheap joke. (I would not have been so virtuous.)

Audience rudeness, of course, extends beyond phones: Dobama Theatre in Cleveland once did a production of Sam Shepard's The Late Henry Moss. The theatre was a smallish thrust space, so you could always see the set before the show started. This particular set included a body under a blanket--the title character. At a performance I ushered, a curious audience member wandered on to the stage and pulled back the blanket, curious as to whether it was a real body. I was taking tickets, so I wasn't able to stop them--it never occured to me we'd need stage guards as well.

So what are the worst instances of audience rudeness that you've ever witnessed, with phones or otherwise? Have you ever accidentally been a perpetrator yourself?

Being LuPone

Oh Patti. As the New York Times reported yesterday, Patti LuPone interrupted her show in Las Vegas on Sunday because an audience member was using an electronic device. (What the device was is not known.) She asked what the audience member was doing, threatened to have them ejected if they didn't stop, and only then returned to singing "Don't Cry For Me Argentina." This comes after her memorable freakout at the second to last performance of Gypsy earlier this year, due to someone taking pictures. (Though that person was apparently a paid, professional photographer who she'd been warned about beforehand.) LuPone read the story and sent a response to the reporter, which can be seen here, along with its 437 (!!!) comments.

My basic response to this can be seen in the comments to the first article--I am number 22. (Does that mean I can say I was published by the New York Times?) It is absolutely true that audience behavior today has serious problems--talking, crinkling, cellphones (both getting calls and texting) and recording are a plague. Also, it really should be the job of the house staff to stop this--they should be telling people to stop, confiscating devices, etc. I've seen it happen at least once in my own theatregoing.

However, isn't there a better way to do it? Is stopping the show and yelling at the audience (especially in the middle of a signature number) really the only effective way to take care of it? It seems like a bigger distraction than the device use is. It's one thing to briefly pause to make a comment, or to confiscate it yourself (like a Hair castmember apparently did), if the show's flow isn't stopped completely. It's another to go off on someone and completely break the illusion.

Of course, I'm not totally impartial, as I said. I'm not a fan of either LuPone's onstage persona (mushy diction, wobbly pitch, histrionics and all) or her offstage theatrics (anyone remember when she had a shit fit because the cast of Noises Off was collecting for BC/EFA?) so I may be judging her more harshly than I otherwise would. If Audra McDonald did this, I might be a little more lenient. (Then again, I can't imagine Audra getting quite that angry.)

So what's your opinion? Is theatrical behavior that bad these days? Was Patti justified? Am I too hard on her?

Was there any identification?

No, I'm not talking about a stage version of Law and Order. (Though that is a cool idea, no?) I've been thinking audiences identifying with plays, recognizing what they see onstage, and how it can affect their experiences of a play separate from the quality of the script or production.

For example, I have seen two shows in recent weeks set in eras before I was born: Jersey Boys at the Bank of America Theatre and Nixon's Nixon at Writers Theatre in Glencoe. The former follows the lives and careers of the members of the band The Four Seasons, focused mostly on the early 1960's, while the latter imagines the meeting between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger on the eve of Nixon's resignation in 1974.

I did not like Jersey Boys at all. I found the book to be an uninterrupted series of laughable cliches, the characters two-dimensional, and the whole enterprise vaguely ridiculous. However, the show had several strikes against it. In addition to the fact that I had a terrible seat (the rush seats are cheap for a reason, don't sit there if you want to see the stage) I had no particular love for the music of The Four Seasons, the story of blue-collar kids from New Jersey had no great emotional resonance for a kid who grew up middle-class in suburban Cleveland, and I was not born when the show took place. Now, I like to think that I would've been able to tell that the show was not very good if none of these strikes were against it. But the show's been a hit, often described as an enthralling, well-told story, so perhaps it effectively uses nostalgia to cover its own flaws.

On the other hand, I enjoyed Nixon's Nixon. However, in the 50 seat theatre, there were only three people who did not remember Watergate. I and my roommate, able to go because of our friendship with the Assistant Stage Manager, were two, and the third was a family friend of the actor playing Kissinger. And yet, my general familiarity with Nixon's presidency proved to be enough to help me enjoy the show. I didn't need to remember everyone they discussed to enjoy it, and the flaws I saw had nothing to do with not remembering the era.

A few months ago, however, I was on the opposite end of this problem. I reviewed a House Theatre show called The Attempters. Its central character was a very smart and creative, highly confused 17 year old boy. The play followed his struggles and his realization that, while he was very smart and interesting, he was also acting like a total asshole and hurting the people around him. His finally understanding this and starting to grow up was the play's drama. As far as I'm concerned, this play captured that vulnerable, impossible time of life better than just about anything I've seen, and I absolutely flipped for it, giving it a rave review. Of course, I am not too many years removed from being that character, so perhaps its no surprise that I loved a play that captured my recent past so well.

A few days later, I read reviews from other sources. They all pointed out the play's real flaws--a weak structure, a plot that took too long to get going, etc. Looking back, these things were all true, but I simply couldn't see them past the way that the play hit me emotionally.

So how much can critics and audience members do about this? Can we recognize when something outside of a play is affecting us? Should we acknowledge it? Can we work too hard to remove that bias and take all of the fun out of watching the show? Do we owe the audience a report of what we felt, a more objective reporting of what did and didn't work, or a balance between the two? And have any of you ever had the same experience, in either direction?