The Playgoer, probably one of the first and certainly one of the best New York theater bloggers, has posted some thoughts about the increasing disrption of live theater by cellphones. He recounts a particularly obtrustive incident during a performance of The Pillowman, and muses…

Question: when house managers and stage managers have been turned into librarians...is it time to consider the death of audience silence in the theatre? The kind of play that audiences watch in the dark in enforced silence--with the reverence due to a work of art, as opposed to the communal enjoyment of a public spectacle--has only been around 150 years or so. A blip--an anomalous one at that--in the arc of theatre history.

I, Thor, mighty mascot and standard-bearer of NHTC, am told of a similar story by one of our members, for whom the most recent Broadway revival of Long Day's Journey was spoiled when a cellphone pierced and deflated the incredible silence during Vanessa Redgrave's climactic speech: "And then I met James Tyrone, and I was very happy…" *riiiing* "…for a time." I am told that the air instantly became thick with the audience's fury.

The issue cuts two ways. On the one hand: The theater is a heightened and revered space because we go there to hear the truth (even if we usually end up hearing something less). Who are these jerks who are so self-important—and whose lack of consideration for their fellow audience is so thoroughgoing—that they cannot disconnect from the grid for two hours? (OK, 3.5… it is an O'Neill play.) We've all had cell phones for too long now—there's no excuse to forget to turn them off in the theater. It means you think you're more important than the communal experience unfolding.

On the other hand, and more to The Palaygoer's point, cellphones are not going anywhere and theater artists will adapt or die. Nowhere is it written in stone that the theater has to be conducted in an atmosphere of crypt-like silence.

We are a theater company with serious revolutionary artistic ambitions, but one reason we have focused so much on our comedy programs is the way the circumstances of the performance (these days in New Haven's BAR) force us to engage with the audience and the dynamic of their attention and inattention. They talk. They flirt. They hit on one another. They get up and go to the bar. The come back in and need to understand what's going on. And, yes, their cell phones ring. One of our performers once answered an audience cell phone onstage.

Working under these conditions gives us insights that we apply to more traditional-seeming theater work, like Commedia Kitchen or Meter Theater, where the backdrop of New Haven's downtown streetscape gave us—depending on how you look at it—either a panoply of distractions or a rich and rewarding bazaar of opportunities for spontaneous theater.