Bad Behavior at the Theater: Reviving an Old Tradition

Sitting quietly and immobile this evening as I watched (endured? felt sympathy for?) Manhattan Theatre Club’s rather wan revival of Accent on Youth, the sound of crinkle-crinkle-crinkle catapulted from the rear of the house toward the front like a gust of wind. Everyone turned around — it was someone off to the right, deep in the dark bowels of the rear of the orchestra. We all, I suppose, tried to scan everyone’s faces but, I swear, they were all staring at the stage, where my eyes had been not a moment before. Not only is he or she unwrapping a candy or a lozenge or, I hope, a portable bit of cyanide, but he or she isn’t even aware of how annoying that sound is. Enraptured by 33 Variations, okay, all right, well, maybe. But not this play, which originally opened on Christmas night, 1934, and has scarcely been missed since then.

I did see an usher, by the way, approach someone in the dim recesses of such seriocomic rapture as I began to turn my head back toward the stage. I could hear said usher admonish said idiot to cease the unwrapping of his or her candy, which made me feel especially good about the head-turn so many of us delivered to the fool. Also, a thought occurred to me: How on earthdoes it take 90 seconds to unwrap a sweet? Is it the size of a honeydew? Or maybe it’s not a sweet — maybe it was present from Saks or Bloomingdales. I also think of opening my birthday gifts just as the action rises to a climax. Or maybe it was the chicken being unwrapped from tin foil — last night’s dinner serving as an Act II snack. Or maybe the patron in question was all set to install their new pacemaker or hearing assistant, or reset their oxygen tank or test out their defibrillator. It couldn’t, in the end, just be a tiny bit of gum.

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