Thursday, December 5, 1996
OVATIONS:
Americans overdose on routine mass endorsementBy Peter Marks
New York Times
Someone I know received an invitation to the opening night of
"Cakewalk," Peter Feibleman’s new play about Lillian Hellman at the
Variety Arts Theater. Learning that he had been assigned choice
seats down front, he was seized by a peculiarly modern form of
stage fright.
"I realized," he sighed to me, in the voice of the vanquished,
"that there was no way around it. I told my wife, ‘We’re going to
have to stand.’"
He did not mean that they might lose their seats and be forced
to watch from the back of the orchestra. What dismayed him was the
fact that no matter how he reacted to the play, he would feel
obligated to reward it with that increasingly compulsive sign of
mass endorsement: the standing ovation.
That this man, who loves the theater, would be dreading the
evening, not because of the play but the curtain call, struck me as
some kind of milestone. Has playgoing come to this?
Anyone who regularly attends the theater today, especially on
Broadway, knows the drill: You have sat through a show, and it was
O.K., maybe even good  not the two-hour equivalent of the
torments of hell but not a glorious ascension to Valhalla, either.
The actors emerge for their applause, and one by one, clapping
people all around you are on their feet. You alone remain seated,
like a shrub in a forest of redwoods, resolute in recline. You sit,
literally, in judgment.
Then, as the actors come forward to take their bows, you begin
to lose your nerve. Besides, you’d rather see their faces than the
derrieres in front of you. (And you really do want to know if the
guy who played the slasher can smile.)
And so, sliding your program under your armpit, you fumble with
your coat and halfheartedly move to the upright position, leaving
your principles on the cushion.
To some people, awarding what amounts to an audience’s greatest
accolade (aside, perhaps, from a shower of roses) seems the polite,
even expected thing, to do.
At a lifeless performance last month of "Les Miserables," the
long-running Broadway hit that the producer Cameron Mackintosh has
vowed to overhaul in time for its 10th anniversary next year, the
audience rose lethargically in applause. It was a gesture as
mechanical as the three-hour-plus production itself.
Audiences weren’t always so easy, particularly in the days not
so long ago, when theatergoing was a more common experience, when
people had more practice in the rituals of live performance.
Back further, in 17th-century France, for example, the audience
thought little of whistling at passages or performances they
disliked. Productions were routinely interrupted by spectators
shouting witty retorts to the characters.
Today, sitting or even standing through a pro-forma ovation, you
get the feeling that though the audience may be applauding the
performers, it is also awarding itself two thumbs up for
attendance. And isn’t there a hint of insecurity in the rush to
stand?
Perhaps because of the growth of Broadway theater as a tourist
attraction, and the decline in playgoing as a habit, many people
who attend productions may lack a context for what they are seeing.
In the absence of standards shared by a wide range of informed
theatergoers, it may be unsurprising that audiences stand to
applaud anything, regardless of how mediocre.
But when expressing approval lavishly is not the exception but
the rule, doesn’t the gesture lose its meaning?
Michael Gambon, the British star of "Skylight," who is appearing
on a New York stage for the first time, said he was shocked at
first to find audiences getting to their feet at the end of the
play.
The practice is nearly unheard of in London. "Occasionally, on a
first night, but they would never stand there" as a matter of
course, Gambon said.
Although he is not about to file a formal protest  "It’s
very nice, isn’t it?" Â he said he is mystified as to why it
occurs so frequently in theaters here. (He was a little less
flattered when he realized how common standing ovations are.)
Even more perplexing to him was the difference in audience
reaction before and after the reviews of "Skylight." During
previews, Gambon said, theatergoers laughed long and hard at David
Hare’s play about the reunion of a wealthy restaurateur and his
former mistress in her seedy London flat. After the critics weighed
in, audience reaction changed.
"They were having less fun," Gambon said. "I suppose they were
told it’s a serious play."
As a result, the actor doesn’t get the lift from the crowd that
he once experienced. "It’s written to be laughed at, and if the
laughs don’t come, you have to play it in a different way," he
said.
Are we so out of the habit of responding to live performance
that we need experts to supply the cues? For most occasions, we
seem to have made a collective decision: when in doubt, gush. And
not just in the theater.
Standing ovations are common at sporting events, fashion shows,
political rallies, concerts and the opera.
On Sept. 5, when President Clinton rose to address 3,000 people
in Sunrise, Fla., he got two standing ovations before he opened his
mouth. In April, his wife, Hillary, speaking to 1,000 Methodists in
Denver, received five.
The critic Ethan Mordden recently noted the phenomenon in these
pages. "America," he said, "has become a clapping nation."
Mordden, who is writing a history of American musical theater,
says audience reactions at live performances are so programmed as
to seem canned, and that theater audiences, emulating those in
television studios, appear to applaud on cue.
He sees in such robotic response a decline in the ability to
distinguish between a performance and a performer, that where the
public once clapped wildly because a star was wonderful, "now it
claps because stars are famous."
In the theater, the rise of the "standing O" got a further boost
with the advent of what Mordden, in an interview, called "the big
lady shows," musicals like "Hello, Dolly!" and "Applause," where
the curtain calls were choreographed to get people on their feet.
"The noise, the tempo is such that you have to get up," he
said.
In a way, an undeserved ovation serves neither the audience nor
the production. It’s like heaping praise on a mediocre meal: the
chef will serve up the same disappointing dish the next time.
Mordden has his own way of holding on to his dignity when an
audience goes on automatic. "If I have to get up against my will, I
don’t clap," he said. "That’s how I retain my individuality."
True, there are those theatrical moments that warrant waves of
love from the orchestra to the last rows of the balcony. But when
ovations say more about the audience than the performance, maybe
it’s time for everyone to sit down and take notice.