Audience Manners; Boors Or Just Novices?





Letters To The Editor
New York Times
October 29, 2000





To the Editor:


I felt sorry for Celia Weiss and Peter Farley, whose evenings at the theater were marred by poor audience behavior (Letters, Oct. 15). Ms. Weiss shouldn't have had to do the "shushing" work of an usher, and Professor Farley's enjoyment of Ralph Fiennes's marvelous performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music shouldn't have been compromised by the misguided laughter of his fellow attendees.


The two cases, however, are not the same. Let's not confuse an audience untrained in theatergoing etiquette with one merely untrained in theater experience. Any audience reaction, if sincere and unobtrusive to the physical functioning of a piece, is a correct reaction.


Professor Farley has probably not experienced the great thrill that an actor receives when a stage choice receives an unexpected response. Such responses can reveal depth to the writing and approach that the actor had not yet found.


And while I'm not prepared to extend the benefit of the doubt to all of Professor Farley's distracting audience, we shouldn't be so quick to equate ill-informed chuckles with the more obviously inexcusable audience activities of chatting or allowing their cell phones to ring.


Professor Farley's audience, after all, took the effort to get out to BAM. The Times's readers will know that that effort, in itself, indicates some taste: taste, which if frequently indulged, will create theatergoers sophisticated in response and savvy in behavior. And perhaps then these ill-bred folk (uncharitably characterized by Professor Farley as refugees from the recently closed "Cats") will be worthy to share the house with the
professor.


We should all be careful of whom we dismiss as interlopers to the "right kind" of theatergoing society. No matter your theatrical pedigree, there's always someone who is more of a theater "insider" than you. After all, Professor Farley is from Freeport, on Long Island; I, on the other hand, am a native New Yorker, born and raised in the city, and a theater professional with Broadway credits. Someone like me might dismiss the snobbery of
Professor Farley's letter as merely misplaced "bridge-and-tunnel" self-importance.


JONO MAINELLI
Manhattan



 

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