Audience Ethics

It doesn't really matter if one particular audience member is anticipating a great show, or if another has brought out relatives from the across the country, or if still another is a complete Bard-head who's overly fixated on every word, or a theater geek enraptured by the use of blocking and music... they all shelled out $30 per ticket and 3 hours of their lives, and they're expecting a good time.

Now in these modern times we (for the most part) are decent audience members. We shut off our cell phones, we don't talk during the performance, we don't throw vegetables... a common table of social decency is maintained during the performance.

So why in the world would someone attend an afternoon matinee while reeking of urine?!

Here I was, sitting in the line for the glen (the glen is open seating, and the nice seats go quickly), when a couple file into line behind me. The woman is nice, if a little too social (but then I'm a hermit and a curmudgeon, so everyone's a little too social for me), talking about the campus, and past shows, and how her husband was one of the first men to attend the Santa Barbara city college... and I really can't follow anything she's saying... because I'm being overcome by the savage stank of urine coming from her husband. He's huge fidgeting mound of humanity, and he's engaged in a silent assault on everyone in the immediate vicinity.

It's just brutal.

... and then the ticket takers approach, and let us file into the glen.

... and then, because he was standing near me in line, he's found a seat near me in the glen.

Fortunately for me there's about four people between me and the abominable piss monster. Unfortunately for myself (and those four people closer than me), the sun has just cleared the clouds. The mighty beaty blazing sun has hired the demons from the 3rd circle of hell to hold a huge magnifying lens on this fiend's pants.

It's not until I write this now that I realize that maybe this fellow is actually trying to recapture some authenticity for this performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Maybe he holds pity for us, that we're not able to appreciate the play the way it was intended - a play produced in the middle of the 16th century, in the middle of a major metropolitan city that lacked anything resembling a sewer system. Should I jump up and congratulate him for this endeavor? Should I praise him, after the fact, in these hallowed pages?

No.

I don't think I will. For one, his neighbors during the show, who actually got up and moved away, would not forgive me. Nor would the group of people who eagerly filled those vacated seats (for they had an excellent view of the stage) forgive me, for they too moved away shortly there-after.

Now it could be that Mr. Savage Urine Stank had an honest to goodness bladder problem... something some of us will certainly have to look forward to as we close in on our elder years... but please, could Mrs. Savage Urine Stank at least have clued her husband in? People with crying babies take them out of theaters when they start up... and they certainly take them to the bathrooms to change them when they start up a smell...

Could neither Mr. or Mrs. Potent Piss Poultice have smelled it? Have they both gone through laser nasal cauterisation?

"What a wonderful, active, lively portrayal of Puck. I think..." [wind shift] "Oh. my. god."

Bastards...

i,jasona