“I Want to Play Too”: Why Today’s Youth Are Resisting the Rules of the Theatre

In the summer of 2012 the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center housed the critically acclaimed Broadway hit War Horse. One performance included two memorable audience events, both dealing with young patrons. First, two teenage girls were sitting in the front row of the theatre, placing them in arm’s reach of a puppet horse lying near the edge of the stage during one scene of the production. As the scene ended, one of the girls reached out and touched the horse. Her face lit up. The two girls giggled, half in fear of “getting caught” while touching the art, and half in tremendous delight at this tactile experience that, for a moment, elevated them out of the role of passive spectators and transported them into the action of the play.

The second occurrence involved a different group of young people sitting close to the front of the stage in the house center section of the theatre. After the play had concluded and the house lights were brought up, a girl in the group placed her purse on the stage in order to free her hands to put on her jacket. From the back of the house came the shrill cry of an older patron, “Get your stuff off the stage!” The girl quickly removed her bag, which did nothing to ameliorate the offended patron who continued to mumble her resentment as she vehemently exited the theatre.

In both situations, members of the younger generation were disrupting the established social contract in place for audiences engaged in a theatrical event. The hesitancy displayed by the girl who touched the horse demonstrates her personal desire to connect with the onstage action versus her understanding of social consequences. What if I get caught touching the art? The second girl’s indiscretion—her purse on the stage—was exposed and policed by an older audience member intent on maintaining the understood social contract.

Indecorous audience behavior among young theatre patrons is not isolated to this one theatrical event. There seem to be increasing complaints that audiences behave at the theatre the way they would behave while at home watching television. Theatre producer Suzy Ziller said to the Wall Street Journal, “The behavior of patrons has greatly deteriorated over the last five to ten years.”¹ She follows this up with an example from a 2012 production of Bring It On where she witnessed a group of teenage girls taking “selfies” during the production.²

Similar to the two incidents during War Horse, the question of decorum in the audience seems to revolve around young members of the Millennial Generation who, in the words of Starvox Booking president Paul Bongiorno, “either don’t know the etiquette or don’t care.”³ So why are young people resisting the rules of the theatre? Just as audiences and practitioners of the 1940s and 1950s advocated for more decorum in the theatre, the current rising Millennial Generation is advocating for theatrical experiences that reflect the unique circumstances under which they were raised. The aforementioned events indicate disharmony between the currently accepted audience social contract and the preferred collective attitude of the Millennial Generation. By characterizing these juxtaposing behaviors and evaluating their incongruence, theatre practitioners can begin to redefine the audience social contract in order to attract younger audiences.

“Get Your Stuff off the Stage”

The fervent chastisement of the girl with the purse is not altogether surprising considering the generational differences between the two audience patrons. The older spectator was presumably growing up when the theatre’s audience/performance relationship was transitioning from audience authority to passive and submissive spectator. Baz Kershaw, in his article “Oh for Unruly Audiences! Or, Patterns of Participation in Twentieth-Century Theatre,” points out that prior to World War II, “audience patronage implied audience power—the patron assumes a right will be met—and this no doubt contributed to the tendency of pre-World War II audiences sometimes to take matters into their own hands.”⁴ Kershaw refers to the inclination for audiences to vocally and sometimes physically reject a...