Reading The Playgoer's post about the National's program of mature theater for young audiences, I couldn't help but wonder how well the teen audiences are able to deal with subject matter about "child murder, pregnant 13-year-olds and soldiers returning from Iraq."
As Christopher Piatt pointed out in his review of Daniel Talbott's Slipping last week, the Side Project here is pretty masterful at handling adolescent angst, even though their shows aren't necessarily (or at least aren't overtly) targeted to teen audiences. I happened to catch both Slipping and the concurrently running Perfect, by Philip Dawkins, at the Side Project's tiny Rogers Park space on Sunday; both shows deal with teen characters in adult situations. (In the interest of full disclosure, Dawkins is a friend of mine.)
The night after I saw the shows, I heard a horror story about last Friday's performance of Perfect. Apparently a group of teens had been brought to the show that night (a church group? a school group? I don't know). Now, believe me when I say the Side Project is an intimate space—in the configuration for Perfect, it probably seats about 20 people. And from what I hear, three of these kids sat in the front row Friday night and heckled and catcalled the actors who were working inches away from them.
Yes, as Garrett points out, there's a big market in young adult novels and even TV shows that traffic in teen characters and risqué themes, and there long has been—Adam Rapp's got nothing on Judy Blume. But teen audiences are able to take in those stories alone in their rooms, on a private, one-on-one basis. Seeing a play in a theater full of their peers is a different matter. Heck, as a guy who served a tour of duty doing Shakespeare for Chicago Public Schools students back when I was still performing, I know firsthand how hard it is to break through the Wall of Cool kids of this age are constantly trying to project in front of their peers.
Are kids in the UK better equipped to handle this sort of stuff? Am I not giving US teens enough credit? I don't know, and I certainly wish there were less of the "We must protect the children" mentality in the States—maybe if there were, our kids would be able to deal more maturely with this kind of material. But I'd definitely be interested in knowing how UK school audiences are responding to the latest work from the author of Shopping and Fucking.
Hi, Kris! This doesn't totally address your question. What I'm wondering is, in a crowd of 20, what would have happened if our theatre was put together in such a way that the play proper could be interrupted to actually address these three kids. Not squash them, or yell at them to be quiet, but to address directly whatever issue was causing discomfort.
Posted by: Scott Walters | February 21, 2008 at 07:13 AM
Hey, Kris -
Do you know what the kids were saying or what prompted them to start heckling?
We had a group of older teens (17-18) come to see A View from the Bridge from a Cincinnati school and they were perfectly behaved, smart and familiar with the text and theatre ... I've also had my sister when she was in high school and a group of her friends come to see works that we've done in the past and they were fine. I used to go to theatre when I was 13 and I never would have dreamed of acting out like that. So ... I think those kids were what could be referred to as "bad apples" and shouldn't be representative of other kids their age.
RZ
Posted by: Rebecca Zellar | February 21, 2008 at 09:34 AM