Just before the end of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” a cold and brutal dawn rises over New Carthage. The dangerously destructive nocturnal games of George and Martha are subsumed by their mutual loneliness. In Pam MacKinnon’s very arresting and intense Steppenwolf Theatre Company production, which takes its audience on an exhausting voyage through some of the horrors of marital codependency, Tracy Letts’ George finally puts his hand gently on the shoulder of Amy Morton’s Martha. She puts her head back. He is about to sing, softly. Their nonsense song — “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf” — has become a kind of lifesaving lullaby. On Saturday afternoon, the audience was rapt.
“Are you all right?” asked George of his Martha.
Suddenly, from the back of the house, a boppy, perky, electronic tune rang out in answer to that deeply existential question.
Letts and Morton froze. Mouths of audience members dropped open. The phone rang on. And on. And on.
Freed from its merciful, muffling confines, it got louder. Instead of staring into the depths of a New Carthage exorcism, we were suddenly transported to a pachinko parlor in Shinjuku.
Make no mistake — the moment was gone forever. Letts and Morton gamely paused and then finished the last minute or so of the play, but this was like a fumble with seconds to go. There was no time for the team to recover. And, at that instant, the ringing cell phone of Saturday, Dec. 11, became the most egregiously timed audience-caused interruption of my entire theatergoing career.
It eclipsed the previous record-holder, which had easily held that title for 10 years and 11 months.
On Jan. 24, 2000, I was at the Goodman Theatre watching Daniel Sullivan’s production of “A Moon for the Misbegotten.” In a moment eerily similar to Saturday’s situation, Cherry Jones was cradling Gabriel Byrne in her arms. The pair were wrought and devastated, pouring out their innermost needs and terrors. It was the emotional climax of the play. An agonized silence hung in the air.
Ring. Ring.
Jones is not known for suffering fools gladly. I still remember the look on her face that night. I still shiver.
When phones ring at moments like these, audience members become incensed. I noticed several complainants besieging the house manager at Steppenwolf Saturday — as if there were anything the theater could have done. One published review of the performance mentioned the tarring and feathering of the unknown sinner, only partially in jest.
I understand and empathize. But it’s also worth noting that the expressed horror at the untimely ringing of a cell phone tends to come to a halt when that phone is your own.
And in my experience, some of the most vocal admonishers of the errant cell phone are themselves serial offenders. Arts people are the worst.
I’ve got plenty of stories. I remember a Congo Square Theatre production in the intimate Claudia Cassidy Theater being interrupted by a loud ring. It was a very small house. The ring stopped when a sheepish-looking August Wilson pulled a phone from his jacket pocket. The great actor Brian Dennehy has been known to rant and rail from the stage, should a phone go off. But his own phone rang out of turn when Dennehy attended the Steppenwolf Theatre production of “The Seafarer.” Dennehy, who was mortified, had to slink around backstage making apologies.
And then, in the spirit of full disclosure, there’s me. When you see 200 and odd shows a year, you live in fear of forgetting to silence that BlackBerry. I admit to only one major transgression — at the 2007 Pegasus Players production of Stephen Sondheim’s “The Frogs.” Thankfully, the show was staged in a swimming pool, which muffled the sound. But the mistake still made it to the Internet.
So, in the spirit of the season, let us acknowledge that the irritating cell phone that just ruined your theatrical moment was somebody making a human mistake — akin, perhaps, to a fellow diner in an excellent restaurant spilling red wine on your lovely dress. An accident. They happen. There is another night. The American theater will not be destroyed. And most sinners, I’ve found, are truly repentant.
I would also note that it is rare indeed for such invasions to take place in Act 1. After intermission — when people tend to switch phones back on and forget them — is when we need those reminders. I favor those fast-and-simple ring tones, now common in Broadway theaters.
Of course, this forgiveness does not apply to the truly clueless. Sometimes phones aren’t only ringing, but answered. “I’m at the theater,” one famously notorious patron said. And then, after a pause, “Nobody you would know.”
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