6:45am | Much too often in my work as a theatre critic do I witness audience rudeness. From texting while play-watching to talking over the onstage dialog, many people seem to believe that the right to act as if this is all the world is their living room comes with the price of admission.
But I have just seen something that tops them all.
On Saturday, July 9, I attended Long Beach Playhouse’s earnest production of Master Harold … and the Boys (see review here). As with most theatre companies, the playhouse is prescient enough to run an opening announcement asking audience members to silence their cell phones and the like.
To not do so after such a reminder is inexcusable. But to answer the phone, twice, in full voice, while sitting in the front row … I’m at a loss.
Contrary to what you might expect, this was not the act of a teenager; the guilty party was a woman of about 60.
After the play was over, I couldn’t resist — didn’t want to resist — saying something to her. “Excuse me,” I said in measured tones. “You answered your phone during the performance? That was incredibly rude.”
“I’m sorry,” she said feebly. “I don’t know how to turn it off.”
A piece of advice to anyone who is similarly technologically challenged: Leave it in the car. But I didn’t think to say that then. Instead, I replied with the obvious: “Answering it was not the right move.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again, as if I were the person she had most offended. Her mortal sin, of course, was against the poor actors.
I ran into one of those actors in the parking lot. “I was about a breath away from saying something to her,” he said, “from just stopping right in the middle of lines and saying, ‘Excuse me, are you seriously talking on your phone?'”
I imagine some might feel it was not my place to give the woman a piece of my mind. But this actor was delighted I had done so. And that’s enough for me.
When it comes to peer pressure, don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. Plenty of bad behavior will stick around until its perpetrators feel so societally shamed that they can’t help but desist.
Acting for the stage is one of the more precarious artistic trades, slave that it is to the vicissitudes of the moment. Presumably if you go to the theatre, you want the actors to succeed in their endeavor.
Unfortunately, not everybody acts like it.
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