The play IN SEARCH OF INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE a few years ago at the Hammond Towle Theater was a delight. Nine women did the roles that Lilly Tomlin had done on Broadway. The play was three hours (counting intermission), but riveting. Everything was based upon the famous quotation from the play, "Reality is just a collective hunch." The only glitch in the evening was that the cell phone of a woman sitting in front of us went off, playing loudly the Toreador Song from CARMEN. The woman couldn't figure out how to answer it or turn it off. She then tried to stifle it in her purse, but apparently the damned thing had Bose speakers that persisted in being heard all over the theater. She seemed oblivious about having disturbed anyone around her, and it brought to mind the many previous public breaches of courtesy I had witnessed (endured) by other dolts who had abused their cell phones by imposing moronic conversations in loud voices, or just loud and whimsical ring tones upon people in waiting rooms, air ports, restaurants, on park benches, and in theaters.
Apparently the problem reached epic proportions recently, when someone’s cell phone actually went off at a New York Philharmonic performance of a Mahler symphony during a tender andante. The conductor stopped the performance. I’d like to believe that the fault could be placed upon ignorance about technology, but I’m afraid it goes deeper than that, to an insensitive disregard for those around the perpetrators. I’ve an awful feeling that even if there is some reaction of embarrassment for those people, it ends the moment the sound stops, so that the error in judgment occurs again and again.
The woman I mentioned at the play finally left her seat, walking down the aisle of stairs toward an exit, but dropping the phone and a bottle of water, as the phone continued to play the Bizet, which reverberated throughout the place, obviously disturbing the actors on stage and the entire audience. The woman was a walking stereotype of the worst excesses of our upwardly immobile culture. The final blow came when this pathetic creature answered the call just outside the doorway, speaking in rasping and menacing tones to the caller, so that we could all hear her as well as we could hear the actors. All I could feel was pure astonishment at this woman’s attending a performance of IN SEARCH OF INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE. I doubt that she appreciated in any way the supreme irony of the situation. Obviously the search continues everywhere there are mentally inert users of cell phones and other symbols of how civilization has made strides through technology, sometimes at the expense of our very humanity. JB
