Tell us this doesn’t sound familiar: You and your significant whatever arrive at your neighborhood duodeca-plex, snuggle in with popcorn and wait for the lights to dim.
Just as the credits finally roll, a pair of late comers slip in behind you, laughing, talking, loudly making their presence known. And they keep talking. And talking. Or whispering. Or laughing like braying donkeys at their own inane jokes – until you want to turn around and shush them so bad you can hardly concentrate on the movie.
Or you do shush them, and they laugh in your face. Or tell you to you-know-what yourself.
So you move, grumpily, but just as the film nears a significant climax, just as the terminally ill character is about to reveal the meaning of life, someone else gets a cell phone call.
“I’m at the movies, can you call me back?”
The caller persists. “Oh, really? Did you tell Norma? Norma Claypoole, Edgar’s friend. No, Edgar. Edgar Lunkhead. We met him at that office thingy. Didn’t you get my e-mail last week?”
By the time the conversation is over, Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon, Christina Ricci, Adam Sandler or whoever is already dead. The meaning of life will have to wait for video.
Movie rudeness is nothing new, in the ’80s routinely blamed on television and the VCR, which, the theory goes, have seduced the public into believing it’s OK to talk to your companion through a film. But lately the practice has spread to live theater, too, and other seemingly sophisticated fine art endeavors. We’re now in a pandemic of performance bad manners, a plague of patrons unconcerned about their neighbors.
To wit:
– At a recent performance by Maestro Subgum and the Whole at the Museum of Contemporary Art, a drunken woman shouted at the musicians and finally threw an empty cup onto the stage.
– A subscriber to the Shubert Theatre’s series reports that a couple of prattling young women on one occasion came to the theater with their four-course dinner — which they ingested throughout the performance.
– A young woman attending the Rolling Stones concert at Soldier Field expected to have to stand during the music. But she wasn’t feeling well and thought she might at least rest in her chair before the concert began. Not so. The people behind and around her, in their dancing and partying, were waving their beers recklessly. When she asked if they might move away a bit so she could sit down, one of the partiers, in a voice dripping with condescension and scorn, said, “You’ll have to figure out something else. It’s just not going to happen.”
“It’s why I stopped going to the movies,” says Kary Walker, producer at Marriott’s Lincolnshire Theatre. “I’ve been to all of two in the past few years. It got to the point where I’d turn around and tell people to shut up so often I knew someone someday would punch me out.”
Two years ago, a couple in a Nashville movie house asked the people behind them to please stop talking. They were told off, in no uncertain terms. They got an usher, who evicted the offending couple, but when the movie was over and the first couple left the theater, the talkers were waiting outside and threatened them physically. The other couple had to go back into the theater and ask the security guard to escort them to their car.
You have to fight for your right to be rude, apparently.
That last incident happened to Dr. Jean Bethke Elshtain, professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago and chair of the Council on Civil Society, a two-year project by the university’s Divinity School and the New York City-based Institute for American Values. The council, which issued a report in May on manners and mores in American life and politics, consisted of 24 scholars and civic leaders around the country.
“Our study showed that the perceived decline in civility is real,” she says. “Life has gotten coarser and rougher, and exchanges between strangers less and less pleasant. Almost every one we talked to had a horror story where a film or play was ruined by fellow (patrons).”
In Elshtain’s own case, the horror story was outright scary. “When we left the theater, they threatened to beat up my husband,” she says. “Even after the guard escorted us to our car, I was worried they would follow us. They were so angry and, no, they weren’t even drunk.”
The council study looked at a wide range of behavior and featured some notable experts, including Judith Martin, a.k.a. Miss Manners. “She has documented behavior in movie theaters and says it’s just as if people were in their own living rooms, watching TV rather than a film or play in public,” Elshtain says. “The attitude is, `I bought my ticket. Why can’t I act like I want?’ “
Elshtain says the phenomenon is part of a broader decline that goes back for decades.
“The only real areas of improvement,” Elshtain notes, “come where people have been legally coerced, as with smoking. We legally oblige people to do the right thing in that case, and I think some of the resentment that builds up comes out in other forms of rude behavior.”
She also traces the phenomenon to changes in family life. “Parents are so busy, and they have less time with their kids. There are less family meals at night, I think, and family meals used to be where you learned manners, you learned to say `Please pass this’ or `May I be excused?’ Parents feel guilty, meanwhile, and I think they give into their children more. Then it spreads to the schools, where we used to learn manners in class.”
But bad manners in public are by no means limited to the post-Baby Boomers. Mary Leah Prazak, secretary at a suburban elementary school, wrote the Tribune a letter last month complaining about a decidedly middle-aged phenomenon.
“My husband and I have been regular Chicago Symphony Orchestra concertgoers for the past 30 years,” she wrote. “I never cease to be amazed and appalled at the rudeness of some patrons who feel compelled to exit the concert hall as soon as the orchestra plays the final note. . . . These louts are gathering up their belongings, waving goodbye to their friends, turning their backs to the maestro and the musicians, and bolting for the door.”
Prazak says the behavior has been getting worse in recent years. “These aren’t people way in back, in cheaper seats,” she says in an interview. “These are patrons near the front, fur-coated ladies with nice jewelry. They weren’t brought up that way.”
Exiting early is a brief slap in the face. Talking or eating, especially the tortuous unwrapping of plastic-encased candy, can ruin an entire performance. Theaters, including Steppenwolf Theatre, now routinely make polite announcements before the curtain asking patrons to unwrap all candy before the show begins. Marriott’s Walker, who admits he’s quite a stickler on manners, says he also tries to run a strict shop.
“I go to other theaters, and it’s horrible,” he says. “We don’t have problems here because we won’t allow them. I do my little speech before every show, warning people not to use cell phones, warning them not to unwrap candy or talk, and it works. We do it in a positive, lighthearted way, and that’s the secret. To be entertaining but firm.” When Walker eschews the speech, he says patrons write letters demanding he restore it.
But there’s another side to all of this. Some argue this emphasis on manners borders on the anal retentive.
Michael Halberstam, artistic director of the Writers’ Theatre Chicago, isn’t in favor of stiff, scared-to-move audiences. “If they’re talking back to the actors on stage, it’s not such a bad thing,” Halberstam says. “When we were doing Noel Coward’s `Private Lives,’ and the two lead characters kiss for the first time and pull back in horror, realizing they’re about to commit adultery, someone in our front row said, `Oops.’
“It brought down the house,” Halberstam continues. “That kind of energy can fuel the process. The Elizabethan theater in Shakespeare’s time got quite rowdy. It was common for noblemen who came to the theater late to create a stir, so everyone would know they were there, and they would even sometimes stop the show and make the actors recap what had been missed.
“It wasn’t so long ago here in America that actors were pelted with tomatoes and cabbages by dissatisfied audiences. If it’s a stinky show, audiences should be more vocal.”
“As a director, when I go to shows at other theaters, the quality of listening tells me about the quality of the show,” says Charles Newell, artistic director at Court Theatre. “If a show is really great, people don’t dare eat or burp.”
You can almost turn the argument upside down: Have we let the soundproofed luxury of home entertainment poison us to the public thrill, as it were, of sharing the magic with a crowd of strangers — whispers, twitches, squirms, candy wrappers, belches and all? To insist our fellow audience members morph into mute, transfixed robots would seem to deny them a little of their humanity.
“If this manners thing is really a decline, it’s a decline in something that just got set up recently,” says Bernard Beck, associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University and an oft-quoted expert on trends. “Only recently have movies become respectable, inspiring departments of film study at universities and demanding polite behavior in theaters. When I was a kid, you never worried about coming on time; you arrived when you arrived and watched until the movie repeated and came back to when you’d come. And you shouted at the screen all the time, or at your fellow moviegoers.
“It’s a carryover from 19th Century theatrical melodrama, where you were supposed to hiss at the villain,” he continues. “You might say this perceived lack of manners is the price we pay for an otherwise good thing, the spread of interest in the higher arts throughout the population. Theater, symphony and ballet are attracting a broader spectrum.”
And some of those new patrons may bring less-than-aristocratic manners with them.
“Only in the later part of this century has theater come to be thought of as a respectable place,” he says. “In Victorian times, there are stories of customers actually relieving themselves in the balconies.”
Clearly, we’re in a period of transition. Some contemporary theaters actually owe their appeal to their willingness to restore peanut-gallery energy to a seemingly staid enterprise.
But even they have their limits. “We don’t mind them rowdy, we like them to be loose, but we ask them not to be jerks,” says Mark Sutton, actor and managing director of the wild-mannered Annoyance Theatre.”
At the Neo-Futurists’ late-night show, “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind,” audiences are encouraged to shout numbers at the players as they move through the show’s prescribed 30 playlets in an hour. “But we have our (boundaries). If someone in our audience is outright drunk, we take exception,” notes Diana Slickman, managing director of the Neo-Futurists.
The manners set, meanwhile, says a happy medium might be achieved by fighting back. Suggests Elshtain: “Say, `Be quiet.’ Or, `Could you please keep it down?’ You can’t allow a few people to ruin an experience for everybody else.”
Kendall Marlowe, who joined the Goodman Theatre as house manager in 1982 and is now company manager, says, “I get a sense that peer pressure will take care of this. A few years ago, when cell phones were new, you’d hear one go off, and it would take more than a minute for the person to figure it out. Other audience members would shush them up. Now, it takes only a second.”
CSO patron Pazak has a dimmer view. “I doubt if my letter or your article will do any good,” she says. “The people we’re both talking about will read this and think, `Oh, that isn’t me. That’s someone else.’ “
