The Walking Out — Stephen Legawiec

I’ve probably seen well over a thousand plays and have walked out of about five of them.

You have to really not like a show to walk out of it after you’ve paid for it. It stings less if you’ve bought the ticket way in advance, than if you’ve just handed the box office manager your 20, 40 or 100 dollars a half an hour before.

I almost never walk out of a play. But the first show I remember walking out of at a major theatre was a production of As You Like It. It was at a world-renown Shakespeare Festival. The play opened with leafy gobos bathing the stage in a warm cozy autumn light. Farmhands looked like they just stepped out of a Vermeer painting and wore stunning costumes of ochre, red, and gold. They sang a beautiful harvest song in harmony while they lovingly carried baskets of apples across the stage. It was gorgeous.

Photo by Liana Mikah on Unsplash — Photo by Liana Mikah on Unsplash

This was the life that Orlando wanted to be free of? Yes, I know he’s forced to work while Oliver sits around. But the director made being one of Oliver’s servants look so inviting. I would have loved to have worked there.

So I didn’t make it much farther than that scene. As I read this over now, it seems like a weak reason to miss the entire rest of the play. But there it was.

That’s one kind of walking out. Here’s another:

I saw Aunt Dan and Lemon at Steppenwolf, which was a good production, but many people walked out of that. Chiefly because the playwright Wallace Shawn had one of his main characters make long speeches that said, in effect, that Hitler wasn’t so bad. And there was no opposing argument offered in the play. Shawn, of course, wasn’t endorsing Hitler, but wanted his audience to supply the outrage that was missing from an opposing point-of-view in the play. There was outrage all right. Not only did people walk out, but they viciously shouted at the actors as they left the theatre.

And then, sometimes you are asked to leave.

Photo by Daniil Kuželev on Unsplash — Photo by Daniil Kuželev on Unsplash

I was at a sold-out production of a critically-acclaimed play in Los Angeles. At five minutes to curtain, the House Manager stepped on stage to address the audience. She said that the performance would not take place because one of the lead actors was on the film shoot that day and the shoot ran long. He would not make it to the theatre. She said the theatre was very sorry and that If we went to the box office, we could get a refund or exchange our tickets for another performance. After letting the reality of this sink in, the hundred or so of us slowly filed out, some to the box office and some to our vehicles. As I was getting into my car, the House Manager sprinted into the dark parking lot and shouted that the actor had just arrived, and the show would go on! Please come back!

That’s a real Los Angeles theatre story.

Of course, you can’t leave if you know people in the cast, no matter what the quality of the production. One of the funny memes from last October said, “I want this election to be over so bad, it’s like I’m at a friend’s play.”

Eugenio Barba told me the story of doing one of his plays in Paris early in his career. He invited his hero Etienne Decroux, world famous actor and corporeal mime to the show. Barba was shocked and thrilled when one night, against all odds, Decroux actually showed up in the audience. Moments after the play started, Decroux voiced his displeasure with the production by saying loudly (In French, of course), “What is this!?” “What IS this?” He continued announcing his irritation until a terrified usher (who I guess drew the short straw) crept up to him and whispered, “Excuse me Monsieur, you are disturbing the play.” At which point Decroux stood up and proclaimed in a loud voice, “I am disturbing the play? I am disturbing the play!? The play is disturbing ME!”

That really happened.

There were some regrettable productions in the early 1970s in New York, which had the misfortune to be booed by the audience at the curtain call. This was so prevalent that I remember the New York Times reviewer, Clive Barnes, took great exception to this practice and made a passionate speech on the radio against it. He advocated applause if you liked the show, and silence if you didn’t. “Imagine the cast coming out to take their bows and being greeted with an entire audience staring up at the actors in stony silence,” Barnes said. In Barnes’s mind he equated this suggestion with taking the high road. I don’t know. As I imagine it, it seems kind of horrible. I think I’d rather be booed.

American Repertory Theater, Loeb Drama Center at Harvard, Cambridge, MA

When Robert Brustein was fired as Artistic Director from Yale Rep (a theatre he founded), he took all of the actors and moved them to Harvard to form the American Repertory Theater. It was essentially the same theatre at a different place. Same actors, same artistic director, same aesthetic, different city. And Brustein would occasionally refer to the ART as “Yale Rep at Harvard.” Owing to the fame of Yale Rep, their first season at Harvard was fully subscribed. This is unheard of for any theatre, let alone a “new” theatre. Let me put a fine point on that fact since it’s so unusual. That’s means you couldn’t buy a single ticket for any play that year because the entire first season was sold out before it began. However, for its second season, the ART lost two-thirds of their subscribers. That’s a lot of people “walking out” from year one to year two. The ART pushed a lot of theatrical boundaries and not everyone really realized what that meant until they saw it. They weren’t up for that. When that happened, Brustein and their board of directors had a big meeting and were faced with two choices: They could make their programming more audience-friendly in order to lure back the two thirds who had left. Or they could say “screw it,” we’re going to just concentrate on the third that stayed and try to build that audience. Which is what they did. I find that inspiring.

I saw several people walk out of the Slave Play performance that I attended on Broadway. The play explores racism in an unusual way. (I will not summarize the plot here because there are spoilers.) As reported in The Washington Post, playwright Jeremy O. Harris was used to disgruntled people leaving performances of his controversial play. In fact, an enraged woman walked out of the post-show talkback after her “expletive-filled confrontation” with Harris and the cast. (Apparently she made it through the whole show, but not the talkback.) Harris did not shut her down, but let her express herself until she chose to walk out. “Rage,” Harris reflected later, “is a necessary lubricant to discourse.” He went on: “(Dismissing her) would have been hypocritical of me as someone who said from the beginning, I wanted this to be a play that sparked conversations.”

All theatre isn’t for everyone. And every theatre experience isn’t necessarily hearts and flowers. Sometimes it bores, sometimes it provokes frustration, confusion, displeasure, outrage, and hopefully, if nothing else - thought.