This, among other reasons, is why I am leaving professional theater while I still have a head left.
In the middle of a performance recently, a Broadway audience member crawled up onto the realistic set of Broadway’s hit comedy, “Hand To God,” to charge his cell phone using the realistic but non-working outlet on stage.
And yet there are people who oppose capital punishment….
The blog where I learned of this incident asks, “Sometimes, I wonder, is live theater is dying because the audiences are getting dumber every day?”
Yes.
______________________
Pointer: John Geoffrion
Ethics Alarms 
Reminds me of a college acquaintance (also a theatrical director) who insisted capital punishment be available for punishing aesthetic crimes.
Maybe Margaret Higgins Sanger was right?
Well, wasn’t she interested in murdering the babies of the lethally deficient (who may not be mentally deficient themselves) and murder black babies?
I think democrats like her policies.
I don’t think so because according to republicans this would demishes the ranks of democratic voters.
I said “lethally” when I meant “mentally”. You said “demishes” when I think you meant “diminishes”. I guess we know which Margaret Sanger list we’d be on…
And now, presenting our next installment of “You Can’t Make This Crap Up: Seriously, Who’d Want to Imagine a World Like That?”
It’s things like this that make me wish I had a mental cattle prod.
Perfectly understandable. Obviously the realism of the story and settings were convincing enough to make the audience member feel right at home. Though, come to think of it, what was the idiot scofflaw doing trying to fire up the gadget he’d been directed to turn off in the first place?
For all you scrolling baseball fans out there: embedded in the following review is a bit of a scene featuring an hilariously original routine . . . http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/theater/review-hand-to-god-features-a-foul-talking-puppet.html?_r=0
This came on, or very near, the sixth anniversary of the time the Off-Broadway production of The Toxic Avenger had to cancel a couple of performances because the hero had tripped over the apparently huge purse some idiot audience member in the first row had put on the stage (!) during a performance, tearing up his knee.
I was also just reminded of our production of Bobby Gould in Hell maybe eight or nine years ago. It was a student-directed show in our studio space (think Off-Off and you’ll be pretty close). Some student in the Theatre Appreciation class showed up without anything to take notes with, so he sauntered up onto the stage and took a pencil from the desk on the set. There was some pretty specific business involving having exactly the right number of pencils in the container, but luckily there was some pre-show business in which “the devil” checked his props and noticed the shortage, and an usher saw the incident and retrieved the pencil from the righteously indignant patron.
We’re doing that show again this fall… think good thoughts.
eight *or nine
I don’t know, Rick. This era may come to be known as The Age of Disrespect. Break a leg!