Like most people in their 20's (aka Millennials), I have a very intimate relationship with my cellphone. It's underneath my pillow when I sleep at night (not for any emotional reason, it's because the outlet for my phone charger is next to my bed and I don't own a nightstand). My phone is on my desk at work. It's in my pocket when I'm on the subway. And it has a name when I plug it into my MacBook: it's Pippin. In short, I probably spend more time with my phone than with any other piece of technology, jewelry or memento that I own. Who needs a teddy bear when you have an iPhone to hug at night?
Which is why when a cellphone goes off while I'm at the theater, I get irrationally angry. Why? It goes without saying but a cellphone ring is distracting and when you're at the theater, it takes you out of a connective moment that you were having with the actors on the stage.
Two weeks ago, I was sitting at the Public Theater, listening to the Apple family talk about American politics and young people my age, when suddenly a ringtone went off. It was one of the quieter tones in the generic ringtone catalog: the xylophone. But in a 150-some-odd-seat house, it reverberated. Death glares were directed in the general area of the ringtone and it was silenced.
Similarly, when I saw "Lincoln" on the day after Thanksgiving (patriotic, no?), someone took out their cellphone (to take a vintage-filtered photo probably), only to be told by another audience member, "Turn off your phone!" There was applause when he did.
But if you're supposed to turn off your cellphones in the movie theatre, one of the most proliferate sources of mass entertainment (right behind the TV and Netflix), then why is it so difficult to turn off cellphones while at a play? You would think because plays usually cost more than going to the movies (even if a movie ticket cost $14 these days, even more if you count snacks, or you can be like me and carry a sandwich in your purse), that people would be even more disinclined to take out their cellphones and distract themselves from the (pricey) moment.
This may be going against the efforts of more adventurous non-profit and Broadway theaters but, why tweet seats then? The point, I have been told, is to connect with younger audiences (who apparently are so ADD-ridden that we can't be expected to put away social media for three hours). And to encourage a sense of community. Oddly enough, it is these young audiences who show up to a midnight film screening of "The Dark Knight" and are more than happy to put their cell phones away when the lights dim. Similarly, when I'm going through a television marathon, I'm not live-tweeting it. How can you consume other people's snark if you're too busy coming up with your own?
And even in venues like the Flea Theater where the pre-show speech includes, "If your cellphone goes off, pick and up and tell your friend you're at the Flea," I have yet to hear an audience member actually take the theater up on that get-out-of-being-humiliated free offer. And the last time I was at the Flea, for Thomas Bradshaw's "Job," with an audience in their 20's and 30's, there was barely a cellphone to be seen during the show. Then again, a show where the main character gets castrated and his removed penis and balls are laid out for the audience to see, would make theatergoers sit at attention (and maybe cross their legs).
So what is the difference between tweeting in a movie theater and tweeting in a theater? I'm not sure. I just know in one, it's still unacceptable and it's not, oddly enough, the more expensive one where there's live people in front of you. Sometimes I think in an effort to appeal to the young, technologically besotted masses, theaters are forgetting that young people are just like middle aged or old people in that we enjoy good storytelling and we want to be mentally consumed by what's in front of us.
The only difference is, afterwards, as we leave the theaters, we will tweet the shit out of what we just saw. But during, it's okay to make us turn off our cell phones, we won't demand our money back, we promise.
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