Front of House: Observations from a Decade on the Aisle (13 page)

Royale Theatre

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.

Niels Bohr

The stage seats at
Copenhagen
were situated in a gallery high above the white circle of the set. During the show the audience members looked down on the action like arbiters or, perhaps, angels. Given that all three of the characters in the play were supposed to be dead, either or both of those possibilities would have been plausible.

I always got a kick out of stage seating. I’d first encountered it at
Cats,
and when I’d seen the show as a patron, it had been my location of choice. Becoming part of the action appealed to me; I liked being up close and personal with the performers.

Set designers had become very clever with their stage seating configurations, too. At
Inherit the Wind,
the action took place in a courtroom. The audience stage seats made up the jury box and spectator gallery, and the actors were scattered amongst the patrons. I never worked at
The
Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,
but I heard that some lucky audience members there were active participants in the show: they sat on the bleachers with the actors and actually spoke. The stage seats at
Copenhagen
were far less participatory, but no less critical to the overall impact of the set design.

For the cast, crew and front of house staff, stage seating always required special vigilance. It was an arrangement that could turn very bad very quickly if an audience member got up and wandered onto the set, found their way backstage, or dropped something from the seating gallery to the stage. For this reason, most productions with onstage seating stationed at least one usher in the wings to monitor the patrons.

At
Inherit the Wind,
patrons sitting in the onstage jury boxes were required to leave their belongings in lockers backstage to ensure that nothing ended up on the set. I heard that the same was done over at
Spring Awakening.
Nothing so drastic happened at
Copenhagen,
but every single onstage patron was warned that they could not leave their seats once the performance started. We begged and pleaded with those guests to please, please, use the restroom before the show, get that drink of water
now,
and take care of all phone calls before going up to the gallery. Most of the time they were smart enough to take us seriously.

Once the show began we sat in the wings, strategically positioned at the bottom of the staircases to the galleries. Nobody could get past us. We couldn’t go anywhere either, since we were bound by the same restrictions as the patrons. At intermission there was a changing of the guard, and two different ushers came onstage to patrol the wings until the end of the performance.

I subbed at
Copenhagen
on a fairly frequent basis. It was a fictional straight play that speculated on the real-life 1941 meeting between the brilliant German scientist Werner Heisenberg and his former mentor, Niels Bohr. If you’ve ever taken chemistry you’ve heard the name
Bohr
before; he designed the circular atomic model you had to draw and fill with electrons. The play was fascinating and the actors, Michael Cumpsty, Blair Brown and Phillip Bosco, were truly excellent. It wasn’t light entertainment; if patrons weren’t prepared to think they weren’t going to enjoy themselves. I could always tell when people with science backgrounds were in the house; they laughed at the references to chemistry and physics that the rest of the audience just didn’t get.

Normally, I was intrigued to go backstage at Broadway shows because I could observe all the frenetic activity that went into the production. I loved the idea of working backstage at
Copenhagen
in concept, but in reality, the experience was as inert as argon. There weren’t any set changes and all three actors stayed onstage the whole time, so I didn’t get to see the stagehands or dressers bustling about. After Phillip Bosco waved hello and went onstage — and he always did, kind man — there wasn’t anything at all to do or see. I was trapped in a pitch black, warm space. I couldn’t actually see the show from my vantage point, I could barely hear it because the theater’s acoustics weren’t designed with backstage in mind, and I was consequently so bored that I struggled to stay awake. I didn’t dare nod off, however. I was always worried that if I wasn’t paying full attention, a patron might get past me, wander onto the set, and disrupt the play. The only thing left to do was to sit numbly in my chair and watch the actors’ shadows dance across the bare brick walls. It was my own personal shadow-puppet show, I guess.

I wasn’t the only one who found the backstage shift to be ineffably tedious. Toward the end of Act II there was an atomic bomb sound effect. The ushers always joked that it was their alarm clock; it woke everyone right up again. That says it all.

One weekend when I had a major chest infection, I was assigned backstage. It was a job that none of the regulars wanted to do so they relegated it to the subs when they could; they knew that I was savvy enough to handle it responsibly. Knowing that every sound I made would carry to the stage, I struggled to keep myself from coughing or clearing my throat. On the rare occasions when the silence was interrupted by laughter or applause from the audience, I took the opportunity to cough as much as I could. When I couldn’t stop myself from coughing at other points in the show, I pressed my face into a cushion to muffle the sound.

It was impossible to read backstage at
Copenhagen,
but once someone tried, or so I heard. A sub brought reading material with her to the backstage post. Since it was too dark to see, she angled her chair toward the stage to get some light. And then she scooted over a little more. And a little more. And suddenly the audience was treated to the vision of an elderly woman sitting on the edge of the set, reading. She was oblivious to the ushers and house manager in the orchestra, who frantically tried to gesture to her to move back into the wings, so someone had to go around through the stage door and yank her offstage.

The first line of the show was “Why did you come to Copenhagen?” I’m sure everyone who saw that poor elderly usher was wondering just that.

Lyceum Theatre

Denise:
Tickets please?

Patron:
(angrily)
Of course I have a ticket! How do you think I got in?!
(storms away)

Denise:
(aside)
On your broom, perhaps?

If I had to choose the worst show I ever worked, it would be
The Invention of Love
at the Lyceum.

The irony is that on paper, it should have been a very positive experience. The production team was fabulous and always included the ushers in activities and parties. We adored the actors, and they liked us in return. One of the leads, Richard Easton, even thanked the front of house staff when he won a major award for the play. I didn’t think the play itself was particularly well-written, but the actors slayed it and the set design was gorgeous. There was one scene in Act II, where the protagonist watched fireworks from a hill in the English countryside, which was breathtakingly beautiful.

The other ushers were awesome, and I genuinely enjoyed all of them. We greeted each other with hugs and laughed as much as we could. My dear friend Greg was at the Lyceum with me, and we were lucky enough to be assigned as aisle partners for the entire run. The ushers’ room was large and comfortable.

The Lyceum Theatre itself is a beautiful 1903 Beaux-Arts jewel box; it is tied with the New Amsterdam as the oldest currently operating Broadway house. Technically, the New Victory is slightly older than both of those venues, but since it was designated as an off-Broadway theater when it reopened, it’s not counted. The Lyceum also holds the record as the oldest Broadway theater to operate continuously. Unlike both the New Amsterdam and the New Victory, it’s remained a legitimate house for a full century, and has never switched to films or closed down. There is an elaborate, but disused, smoking room downstairs with warm, rich carved wooden walls. An goddess presides over the proscenium. The Lyceum also serves as a mini-museum of sorts: it houses the Shubert Archives, a repository of historical documents, images and artifacts pertaining to Broadway. Photos of theatrical stars line the lobby and central staircase. Long story short, it’s a beautiful, and intriguing, theater.

What made
The Invention of Love
so horrible, then? The audience. Hands down, no question, the audience. The audiences that came to
Invention
were downright ghastly. They were rude, they were snappy, they were pompous, and they acted as though we were the enemy.

After a while, that is just what they became.

We inwardly cringed every time the ticket taker yelled, “The house is open!” I began repeating the “Once more unto the breach” speech from
Henry V
to steel myself each day. We hummed the Wicked Witch of the West’s theme song from
The Wizard of Oz
when especially horrid patrons walked away. We tried to smile, but when were being abused at every single performance for no reason at all, our spirits invariably flagged.

Not a day passed when there wasn’t an audience/usher conflict at the Lyceum during
The Invention of Love.
Many patrons were angry and hostile from the moment they walked into the building. They yelled at us because the theater was old, the mezzanine was small, and the balcony was high. It was our fault that there were not enough stalls in the restrooms. An elderly man told me that the “rotten old theater” should be torn down. Numerous guests became ornery when I told them that they couldn’t put their feet up on the ancient metal radiators on the mezzanine landing. They weren’t just complaining or making observations; they seemed to be accusing of us of personally designing the theater to thwart and frustrate them.

It reached nightmarish proportions very quickly. People tried to snatch Playbills from my hands and pushed me out of the way. They screamed at me when I would not let them walk on the fire escapes. They were even livid when we asked for their tickets so we could figure out where they were sitting. That was a biggie; it happened every single day. It defied logic, really: in order to seat them we needed to know their exact locations. In order to know their exact locations we needed to see the tickets. Patrons didn’t get this, however, and they acted as though we were asking for their firstborn children when we requested to see their ticket stubs. I guess they thought we could figure out where they were sitting through our special psychic powers.

One woman proclaimed that I was “really stupid.” Someone argued with Greg and me because the house did not open to the public until half-hour. Early in the run, management had to position two ushers right next to the stage during intermission because patrons kept hurting the floor microphones and stealing the prop leaves that were scattered across the set.

Some patrons actually got physical with us. One of my colleagues was poked in the back. Old men believed it was appropriate to try to stroke my arms or shoulders and were offended when I pulled away. On one occasion someone grabbed me by the shirt and yanked so hard that the cloth stretched out. Many customers seemed to have a problem grasping the concept of personal space.

At the conclusion of one particular matinee, two women refused to leave the theater, which meant that
I
could not leave. When I gently asked them to please move toward the lobby after I’d watched them walk in circles in the empty orchestra section for several minutes, one of them got in my face and screamed, “I want a New York experience!” I am still not quite sure why perambulating in a loop for ten minutes was more of a “New York experience” than seeing the play or, I don’t know, actually
walking around New York,
but hey, what do I know.

On another day, a colleague and I had to contend with a man who had a conniption because we wouldn’t let him go through the passdoor, the passageway that connects backstage to the front of house. Why this was such an issue? People who are not in the production or associated with the theater in some way are
never
allowed to walk through the passdoor, or anywhere backstage, without an escort that personally knows who they are. It’s a very strict security rule. There wasn’t anyone in the house to meet this man, and nobody was scheduled to do so, but he honestly thought we should endanger every single actor, crew member and house staff member by letting him walk around backstage unattended. Taking a two-minute walk to the stage door was beneath him. He was red with rage by the end of the exchange; his wife, who was standing to the side with her head in her hands, was visibly mortified. The stage manager finally appeared to rescue us; later in the day she apologized for the incident.

The fact that the ushers, actors and production staff enjoyed each others’ company really kept us all sane. On the first day of the show Jeff Weiss, who played Charon, the boatman of Hades, met me at the stage door. He welcomed me to the Lyceum as though he were welcoming me to his home, and in a way, he was. I adored Jeff, and whenever I ran into him I knew I was in for a lively, fascinating conversation. I also enjoyed chatting with David Harbour, who played Moses John Jackson. His character was an athlete, and he jogged around backstage and did exercises to make himself legitimately sweaty. Every now and then my break coincided with his evening laps, and he’d stop for a moment to talk.

There was a foam wig head in the ushers’ room. Nobody claimed it and it didn’t seem to actually belong to Wardrobe, so we decided to have fun with it. Greg and I named him Hermie and did him up with lipstick, stringy hair and a hat. Hermie lived in our lounge for a while, but at some point he was spirited away to parts unknown, never to be seen again.

As the months passed we developed as many coping strategies as we could. The first was to walk away from irate patrons — those who were simply arguing for the sake of arguing, and didn’t actually need anything — to breathe and defuse the situation. Some guests calmed down or ran out of steam when they realized they didn’t have someone to harangue anymore. If they legitimately required help we would summon the assistance they needed, get away from them as quickly as possible, take a deep breath and stroll around the lobby for a few minutes to regroup before returning to our posts.

The second coping strategy was to laugh as much as we could. We shared our war stories, and they reminded us all that we weren’t alone in our strange, hostile world. Everyone sharpened their storytelling skills as they regaled their colleagues with lurid tales of the patrons with whom they’d contended the night before.

To this day I am not sure why
The Invention of Love
attracted such an ornery crowd. I’d never seen anything like it before, and I never saw it again afterward. Was it because it was a play and not a musical? Was it the subscription audience? Was it because a lot of the patrons were seniors? I don’t think any of those excuses applied. During my time as an usher I worked at a lot of straight plays, a lot of shows that attracted older patrons, and a number of other productions for the Roundabout, Lincoln Center and the Manhattan Theatre Club, and none of them were as horrendous as
Invention.
Was it the subject matter? Love stories? Ancient Roman poets or Oxford scholars? A.E. Housman? England? I can’t find any matches there, either. I’ll perhaps never know what compelled some of the meanest theatergoers in New York to converge at
Invention
every night, but converge they did.

But Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? The play was, in my opinion, terrible, especially in the second act. To give it its due, it started off with what was truly a compelling story of sexual awakening and unrequited love; but by the middle of Act II it veered totally off course with random characters that came onstage to pontificate.

However, it had a wonderful safeguard against bad reviews: it made generous use of Latin. Characters in the show studied Classics at Oxford and quoted ancient Roman poets. There were also many references to Victorian-era politics, history and literature, and that threw the audience off. They thought that if they hated the show or didn’t recognize every single historical character, it meant that they didn’t understand it. Nothing of the sort was happening; they were just seeing the Emperor’s New Clothes, and they weren’t confident enough to realize it.

I was often asked, “Do you understand the show?” Frequently, the query was dripping with condescension. When I answered in the affirmative, the response was generally an incredulous “Really?” I’d suddenly become the three year old who could do calculus. Since I was only a lowly usher, I couldn’t possibly have the education or the intellect to comprehend Catullus or the social engineering of Victorian England, could I?

They never got that it wasn’t even
about
Catullus or any of the other historical figures; it was about a brilliant poet who stuffed up his finals at Oxford; became a clerk; suffered unrequited love toward his good school friend; revealed his secret in an emotional scene with said friend; was all bogged down, repressed and restricted from showing his true colors by Victorian sensibilities on homosexuality; and finally became a nasty, irascible professor. It was a commentary on wasted potential, homophobia’s ability to wreck people’s lives, and general attitudes toward sexuality in Victorian and Edwardian society. Oh, and Oscar Wilde showed up, clad in purple velvet, as a counterpoint to the repressed A.E. Housman. To boot, Daniel Davis, better known as Niles the butler on the TV sitcom
The Nanny,
played Wilde.

My secret amusement toward the end of the Pompous Ancient Roman Poet Show was to learn to swear in Latin. I never said anything that would have gotten me fired if I’d said it in English, mind you. All the same, I did devise a rather brilliant rude Roman lexicon and I repeated selected phrases as I walked away from patrons who behaved like arrogant fools.

Not a single person — certainly, none of the ones who loudly proclaimed that they’d read ancient Roman poetry in the original Latin and knew far more than a plebeian like me — ever understood a word I said. What makes this even more hilarious is that there’s a fair amount of profanity and slang in Catullus’s work. If you’ve actually read him, you know that.

These
stultissima
didn’t understand the easy, polite phrases, either. Really, if you claim to have studied Latin and the meaning of something like “nescio quid dicas”
(“I don’t know what you’re talking about”)
or “carpe noctem”
(“seize the night”)
eludes you, chances are good that you’re a liar.

There’s a certain savage satisfaction in realizing that the pompous windbags around you are really entirely clueless.