Should We Be More Disrespectful?

Two thoughts on Shakespeare from other people got me thinking about this.

First off, I was reading the New Yorker profile of Mark Rylance where he said something along the lines of that in order to do Shakespeare right you have to think about his plays as being the interstiticials between serving beer and getting a prostitute.

Second, I was in Rapid Response rehearsal the other night and was saying that Shakespeare had this one writing habit that really irked me, namely the epic comparative metaphor.  These sections usually sound something like well then you sir are a like a man who, having had his bottom spanked by a wild boar covered in bees, decides to wash his behind in a spitoon only to discover the secret of relativity buried inside!  Dan responded that these sections were in fact written for Lords in the audience to transcribe while listening to them so that they could then deploy the witticisms at parties and pretend they came up with them.  This was one of the main reasons why upper class men would attend these plays to begin with.

So now I can't help but feeling that maybe in this day and age, we "respect" theatre too much. Or maybe what I actually mean is that we respect theatre in the wrong way, which is to say treat it like the big formal occasion / semi-sacred rite / civic duty rather than something someone might actually want to see. Or as someone said on a panel at the LCT Lab a few years ago, we too frequently have "medicine theatre" as in take your medicine, Jimmy! Given that it's possible for people to be entertained and also have a deep experience and that many great tragedies are also on some level greatly entertaining I think it's possible to talk about theatre as something simultaneously valuable and enjoyable, at least as long as you don't think enjoyment is automatically suspect. (Anne Bogart has some interesting thoughts on this is And Then You Act which I'll post later when I have the book in front of me)

I don't necessarily know how to resolve these thoughts with the other side of my brain that gets furious when people talk during shows, or scroll through their iPHONES, or in some other way behave "disrespectfully" during a show.  And I also wonder if the transcendently alive moments I've had while sitting in audiences would be possible if people were ordering beers and consorting with prostitutes and talking throughout the show. But I am also, I should note, fairly easy to distract and my sense of hearing has difficulty discriminating between foreground and background which hightens my awareness of disrespectful people in the audience...

Comments

[sashanaomi]

Yeah, it has become a bit too much like medicine. I'm taking a Shakespeare course, and have spent the last week reading the theories of old, dead white men. After a while it just seems so ridiculous to put something that was intended for the masses up on a pedestal. You know, when they sorted through the remains of the burnt down Globe, they found lots and lots of hazelnuts. They figure that this is because the groundlings munched on hazelnuts during the show like we munch on popcorn during a movie.
Some theatre and even movies are better with the sounds of munching, audience commentary, and well, prostitutes. I tend to think before the turn to Bourgeois drama in the late 1800s and Stanislavski, Strassberg, and the Freudian study of character came into play that theatre was alot, well, bigger. The archetypes of Greek theatre, as well as Commedia and Shakespeare, (I know, that's alot of territory) could withstand beer and prostitutes.
Part of the reason why I sometimes just see a movie instead of theatre is because when I see theatre I sometimes feel like I'm on stage even though I'm just in the audience. If I so much as open a bottle of water, I might get a dirty look. Yes, sometimes going to theatre can feel like attending a service at a church where I don't belong.

[Slacker]

"Old, dead white men."

Well, how racist, age-ist and necrophobic of you.

And while I think it's quite romantic to think of the movies as more like a groundlings experience than the theatre, I personally HATE it when people talk, take phone calls, text, play video games, kick my chair and munch on popcorn right behind me in a movie theatre.

I'd hate to have fucking going on in the theatre. And hazelnut chewing to boot.

That's hardly bourgeouis of me.

Where a little less respect for the Bard would be welcome would be onstage.