"Please turn off your f-king cellphones" - Broadway openings adjusting to modern times
No matter what you thought of American Buffalo on Broadway last fall, there is one way in which it may have changed the theater going experience as we know it: It turned the pre-show announcement into a stylistic decision in its own right. The announcement was not written by David Mamet, either before or after American Buffalo, but it did invoke Mamet's most famous choice of word, one that can still shock a Broadway crowd, especially when they least expect it. Not a single cell phone went off the night I saw the show; not only was it clever, it was effective.
Contrast that with the worst-behaved Broadway crowd I saw all year at West Side Story in March. Granted, it was a preview audience, but the crowd would not shut up, the family in front of me kept texting, and my whole evening turned into completely unpleasant ordeal, mostly for reasons that had nothing to do with the show itself.
At that show, no announcement was made; it was a cold opening, in traditional West Side Story style. There's shushing on stage as the Jets see the Sharks; in this case, I wasn't sure if the shushing was coming from on stage or from various members of the audience. The cold opening was brilliant in the 1950s; in 2009, it completely offset when I should start paying attention to the show and not the audience.
I may have been with a better crowd in American Buffalo, but I certainly was not in Exit the King, where even on a Saturday night, I was surrounded by old people in the rear mezzanine screaming at each other, "I don't get it." Nonetheless, cell phones were never a problem. That show had a character come out in full theater of the absurd mannerisms, holding up signs saying turn off your cell phone—and no texting either.
You may think I'm in full support of the first and third examples, but not the second. That's not the case; I want Broadway to be able to do a show however they damn well please, but the limitations of the modern audience have to be reckoned with. Even I have lowered my standards in the audience, I talk with whoever I am seeing a show with before the show starts much more than I use to; if an actor makes a casual entrance that would have once immediately indicated for me to shut up (Eddie Izzard in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg first springs to mind), I am less likely to notice it. While most shows can make the traditional announcement, a cold opening is sometimes necessary—I have a hard time justifying a West Side Story production that doesn't use a cold opening, even if it hurts the initial reaction (I'm hoping that other audiences are better behaved than the one I saw.)
It's no secret that audience behavior has taken a downturn on Broadway. That may be a bad thing for an individual show, but it's worse for Broadway overall; it means that the people with no experience seeing a Broadway show don't understand why they can't keep there phones on or text during a production, and when someone calls them out on it, they're less likely to see a show again, thinking it rude or snooty of a person to tell them how to behave after spending hundreds of dollars on tickets.
While they're being rude, they're also being fair; it's not the job of some jerk like me to tell someone how to behave on Broadway. It's the job of the people who work at the theater and make the show announcement. The American Buffalo announcement worked because the crowd was expecting a Mamet play; it would have been just as jarring, but less effective, at, say, The Little Mermaid.
There's one area where improvement can be made: informing an audience that turning a cell phone off means powering it off; not putting it on vibrate, not texting. Texting is rude to the audience members behind you who see your screen glare and hear you manipulate the keypad. It probably affects the actors somewhat as well, especially the closer you are to them. As a regular Broadway attendee, I can't understand why anyone would distract themselves by texting after spending hundreds to see a show they rarely see, even if you're in the corner in the last row, surrounded by your friends. The biggest reason I've seen people text is that they decide early on that the show is boring and that they have wasted your time. God help you if you are an overzealous new media advocate who thinks live tweeting theater is a good idea. "OMG Geoffrey Rush just said something crazy!!!" can wait until intermission.
I joke about live-tweeting theater, but in all seriousness it may be a growing trend; if Congressmen can live tweet during an Obama "state of the union speech," why can't an audience member tweet a Broadway show? There's an obvious rebuttal: Obama's speech was an important American event that millions of people were watching. Congressmen were tweeting because they knew this was a unique performance, and that millions of people would be following it on Twitter. The Obama speech tweets were more something of akin to Mass Observation, such as the one I helped work on for Inauguration Day.
Unless you're attending a Broadway premiere, and the show is completely revolutionizing American theater as you speak, I cannot imagine a tweet about a Broadway show that couldn't wait until after the curtain or act break; even then, I would at least let catharsis sink in before sending a Tweet. And even if the show is so boring you can't think of anything else to do (that's probably the case with more Broadway attendees than we like to think). Napping, so long as it doesn't turn into snoring, is less upsetting for fellow audience members.
I would love to see Broadway require you to check your phone before entering the theater; I understand why they might not want to do that. Of course, they already have it in movie previews, but for different reasons; they don't want people taking unlicensed screenshots from their cell phone cameras. If AMC is beating Broadway to improving etiquette, that's not good. But until changes get made, expect more of these creative approaches to pre-show announcements to continue. And expect them to get more creative; that candy wrapper announcement hasn't been funny since 2000, dudes.
Text Me Later (Or: How Theater Isn't Baseball) [Critical Difference]
Get A Room [The Playgoer]
Theaters' worst acts take place in the seats [Denver Post]
Labels: absurdism, american buffalo, audience behavior, audience relations, broadway, cell phones, david mamet, etiquitte, eugene ionseco, exit the king, opening speeches, texting, twitter, west side story
posted by Ethan Stanislawski @ 5/11/2009 10:44:00 AM
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