Jeeze, what cluster-thing is this fresh hell? You heckle at a comedy club, not in the ligitimate theater. But I must say about that photo, I'm not sure I'm down with Big Daddy's costume and facial hair. Ditto Brick (I presume) with those blue satin cuffs. All of which is beside the point. It is not the actor's job to police an unruly crowd, and it's unfortunate that Mr. Lacy had to enter the fray.
This is the strangest thing. In more than 40 years of theater going, I've never heard of someone heckling a legitimate play, much less Cat on a Hot Roof. Yet some members of the cast seem to think hecklers just come with the territory. (One wonders where the hell they have been working.)
However, I don't think one of the actors should have directly confronted the heckler. The actors should have just stopped the show and taken a pause while the theater staff (if there was any) removed him.
This also reminds of the much funnier story (told by Elaine Stritch) in which Merman herself broke off in mid song and threw a drunk out of the house . . . .
Low added that Troy's character, Brick, is gay, suggesting that the heckler's anti-gay slurs may have been appropriate.
“And, the truth is, Brick is, after all, a gay man,” she wrote. “The material is strong, and it elicits strong responses from an audience, different every night.”
Why is the Maggie doing damage control like this? Maybe it IS one of her guests.
I'd probably never get into a physical altercation with an audience member, but if the front of house is doing nothing, then somebody better put a stop to it.
Fellow actress Emily E. Low, who plays the female lead, agreed that violence should not have been the answer, adding that part of acting is accepting criticism from the audience.
“As actors we must take the positive audience responses with the negative. It's not always about cheers and standing ovations,” she wrote in the same Facebook thread before deleting the post.
A really bad actress with no brains or integrity would say something like that.
"What can you expect from a bunch of seitan worshippers?" - Reginald Tresilian
As someone who has worked front of house, it's ridiculous that the patron was allowed to continue for as long as he did. House management should have escorted him out much sooner - I have had my share of drunk audience members and hecklers and the house will usually be on your side when you have to kick them out.
In situations like this, you don't know how you're going to react until it happens. That said, whatever constituted the front house staff here should have done something. It is their job, after all.
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
I wonder, based on what tobiasragg has said, if there really was any "front of house" staff to speak of, or if maybe it was (as is the case at many community theaters)just volunteer older ladies & gentlemen (the ladies carrying their purses with them, which always throws me off because I think they're part of the audience), who are in no way equipped to deal with a loud and possibly violent heckler. I can just see them all cowering in the back wondering what to do.
That said, I think that had I been the actors, I would have stopped the performance, signaled for the curtain to go down, then had someone come out and speak to the audience and the (hopefully present) staff, explaining that the play could not continue until the disturbance was taken care of. But I'm saying all this now - who knows if anyone was able to think that clearly at the time. I am sorry that the actors lost their jobs/felt they had to resign; even if they were being paid little or nothing, a job is a job and something that can go on the resume.
i've seen heckling and drunken hooting in broadway theatres. i've seen audience members falling down drunk at broadway plays stumble back to the bar at intermission and down even more booze and spend a second act even more obnoxious. it happens. it's live theatre.
in a small house it's difficult to manage. from the article on playbill it's pretty clear the producers were well aware how loaded this audience was and how obnoxious. that nothing was done at intermission is indicative of how they value their show.
good for big daddy. i hope someone offers him a better job as a result.
r.i.p. marco, my guardian angel.
...global warming can manifest itself as heat, cool, precipitation, storms, drought, wind, or any other phenomenon, much like a shapeshifter. -- jim geraghty
pray to st. jude
i'm a sonic reducer
he was the gimmicky sort
fenchurch=mejusthavingfun=magwildwood=mmousefan=bkcollector=bradmajors=somethingtotalkabout: the fenchurch mpd collective
Miss Low (or are we to use her stage name Jolee Blon?)says she must accept criticisms along with the ovations? I don't know how many ovations she has gotten but since when is a hate heckling a criticism? Is she for real? So if we happen to see her in a show we can just yell out at her if the mood strikes us? But we can't really take her seriously because after seeing her facebook I realize that she must be from a new Christopher Durang play. She is (or rather was) playing Maggie the Cat as played by Marilyn Monroe. That had to be worth a boat load of laughs. Someone might want to tell her that developing her own persona might be more beneficial to channeling Marilyn unless she is auditioning for Bus Stop, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Sugar or maybe Playboy.
Nah, Anton Troy/Brick seems pretty legit in his comments on FB. (Of course he also seemedhappy that The Advocate's coverage of the story had a picture of him shirtless in the play that got many complements on his abs.)