“The Audience”

Helen Mirren, a renowned British actor of stage and screen, has recently been in the news. But this time, it’s for her actions while performing outside of the theatre.

This past weekend in London, the great Dame was onstage, starring in the aptly titled The Audience. When the performance and her nerves were sufficiently rattled by a loud drumming troupe on the street in front of the theatre, she left the stage to confront them.

It created one heck of a story. Dressed in her period costume as Queen Elizabeth II, Mirren used a vulgarity-laced diatribe to bring an end to the drumming, and then calmly returned to the stage to finish her performance.

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/stage/2013/05/06/helen_mirren_storms_out_of_theatre_dressed_as_queen_to_rebuke_noisy_drummers.html

 

Audience interruptions in the theatre are nothing new, as Richard Ouzounian has recapped here in the Toronto Star. Cell phones ringing, coins being tossed onstage, and rowdy behavior seem to be part of the normal theatrical experience now.

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/stage/2013/05/07/canadian_actors_known_to_pull_a_helen_mirren.html?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed

This story has piqued my interest, but not because I’m a fan of salacious celebrity-driven viral videos. Far from it. As a stage actor for more than fifteen years, I can certainly understand Mirren’s actions. Many of my colleagues and I have contemplated doing exactly the same thing.

Sometimes the distractions in the theatre are simply too much. Not only do they affect the actors, but the entire audience is affected, focus is lost, and nobody wins. I’ve personally been performing onstage while a slow-moving Motorcycle parade has noisily gone by, when fireworks displays have exploded nearby, and when torrential storms have pounded the walls and ceiling of the theatre.

But, the show must go on, right?

I don’t know about that. If everything has gone bad, why not stop the performance for a few moments? It would give everybody a chance to reset, calm down and re-focus on the task at hand – namely, providing the audience with an entertaining and enlightening story, told to the best of our abilities.

Numerous shows have been stopped due to the sudden illness of an actor, due to a technical glitch in the production, or due to power outages and fire alarms. In such instances, a pause in the action takes place, and then things pick up where they left off, with minimal disruption.

But when it comes to bad audience behavior - how much is too much?

Broadway superstar Patty LuPone famously stopped a performance of Gypsy because an audience member was taking pictures after an announcement was made forbidding it. LuPone was famously quoted as saying “We’ve lost our public manners. Who do you think you are? Get ‘em out!”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WruzPfJ9Rys

Hugh Jackman, a veteran of stage and screen, recently stopped a show after a ringing cell phone interrupted his performance. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7PCW5hi9Wc Of course, these events were both recorded on another audience member’s cellphone.

I can definitely see Jackman and LuPone’s point. While 99% of audience members are wonderfully polite and supportive in my experience, I’ve been onstage for dozens of cell phones ringing – sadly, it seems that this has become an almost weekly occurrence. Particularly annoying is when the phone continues to ring because the owner won’t answer it, for fear of not wanting to admit that they are the offending party. So it just rings and rings, annoying everyone more and more.

Sometimes the patron will go the extra step to answer the phone and actually begin a conversation, instead of quickly grabbing it and powering it off. This reminds me of a story an actor friend told me, where during a performance at the Royal George Theatre at Canada’s Shaw Festival, a woman loudly answered her ringing phone with this admittedly funny commentary: “Hello?... Yeah I’m still here… Not very good… Uh Huh, I’ll call you later…“ Talk about taking everyone out of the performance.

In their defense, I think audience members don’t realize just how present they actually are. I think sometimes when the lights go down, the audience forgets that they are not on their couch at home or at a movie theatre separated from the action. They’ve never been onstage to see and hear for themselves.

But, isn’t it common sense to know that Theatres are built to have great sightlines and acoustics? And it goes both ways – trust me, the actors can see and hear you as well as you can see and hear us. That is a big part of what makes going to see a play so exciting – we’re all together in one big living room, interacting back and forth. There’s energy there. It’s alive.

As frustrating as cell phones in the theatre are, a more egregious distraction is when an audience member talks back. An instance from one of my recent performances of Jersey Boys comes to mind. Near the end of Act 2, during a particularly dramatic scene where I am alone downstage talking directly to the audience, an onstage (prop) telephone rings, signaling to me that my daughter is calling. I continue finishing my monologue as I walk over to the phone. An audience member decided that this would be the ideal time to try out a little stand-up routine.

This woman interrupted my speech by shouting “Hello? Hello?!?!” a few times. I continued with my actions, trying to ignore her exclamations. Despite the audible hushing from other audience members, this woman continued her quest for attention, loudly giving a running commentary while I became ever-more distracted trying to carry on. I couldn’t hear exactly what she was saying because I was, you know, talking myself. You know, acting. (How rude of me.)

In this scene, my character and the audience find out together that my estranged daughter has died from a horrible drug-overdose. I am alone onstage, there is no one speaking to me on the phone. There are pauses, to give the reality that I’m listening to the news being relayed to me by the phoning party. It is the final chapter of the story, and I need to create the reality of this very delicate moment fully and realistically for the 2000 people watching. It’s extremely difficult.

In a poignant silence, she chimed in again. “Uh-oh… Bad news, huh?!?!” At this moment, I came as close to I’ve ever come to stopping the show. I was so angry! I decided, however, to try to press on and technically finish the beats in hopes that she will just stop the nonsense. The crowd hissed at her, and after a few more comments no doubt defending her behavior, she thankfully did stop.

But the damage was done. At the time, I felt robbed. It took all my strength of mind to continue through the next scene, sing the song Fallen Angel to the memory of my daughter, and carry on to the end of the show. I know I wasn’t giving my best performance, and it was eating at me. I felt horrible that the audience was robbed of a fully engrossing, possibly cathartic moment. Should I have stopped the show to berate her behavior?

In hindsight, I think I did the right thing. Despite how I felt in the moment, the audience still got a fantastic show, that minute or two not-withstanding. The damage, as I saw it, was relatively minor. If I had stopped the show however, it may have taken quite a while to re-compose ourselves, and the pause in the action may have taken the audience too far out of the experience.

Like it or not, these are the times we live in. Not a show goes by without me being distracted by the bluish glow of cellphone screens in a dark theatre, illuminating the torsos of the offending audience members. On opening night here in Perth, an audience member in the front row actually filmed the entire Big 3 - she just calmly took out her phone and recorded it – I know, because her ‘flash’ was shining directly in my eyes for much of the time.

I think it comes down to this: We live in a technological world. Everyone coming to the theatre can afford a smartphone, which they use to constantly stay connected. They are conditioned to take in fast-paced action. They are used to three-minute video clips being passed around the internet. They are used to celebrity-based garbage in magazines and reality TV nonsense at home. Yet, in spite of this, a large percentage of us still seem to have hung on to our public manners.

The fact that people still spend the big bucks to see live Theatre in this day and age is remarkable. There are so many entertainment options today, most of which are much cheaper than coming to the theatre. To stop a show and shun them might push them away from the theatre forever, and then where will we be?

This is just another obstacle for actors and musicians to realistically tell their story. But as hard as it is, I think the best way to deal with an offensive audience behavior is not to pull a Helen Mirren and call them out on their crap. Rather, I think we should just ignore it... like the patron who refuses to answer their ringing cellphone. Eventually the noise will stop and we can all carry on.

Have you any thoughts to share?

Check this out -http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2013/05/16/2020341/national-reviews-kevin-williamson-is-wrong-on-cell-phone-tossing-but-right-on-theater-regulation/?mobile=nc