Is It Just Me? Or Is It Nuts Out There?
By Whoopi Goldberg (Hyperion New York 2010)
Whoopi Goldberg’s scattershot career has probably disappointed more people than it has impressed. She has the distinction of being one of the only African Americans to win an Oscar and one of the only African American characters on Star Trek. She’s had talk shows, Broadway shows and minstrel shows (her infamous blackface act at the Friar’s Club with then-beau Ted Danson).
The first to be unnerved by the odd twists and turns of her professional life were her very first fans, theatergoers. Whoopi Goldberg’s first wide success was in a one-woman show written by her and directed by Mike Nichols. That’s an impressive calling card, and she should be congratulated for revisiting it a few years ago.
Goldberg has some stage notes in her book Is It Just Me? Or Is It Nuts Out There?, and she’s definitely in her autopilot, mass-commodification mode here. The book is about pet peeves, from toe-nail clipping to “stadium behavior,” with frequent “Civil Person’s Handy List” and “Self-Test” interludes.
Right in the middle, there’s a chapter called “Louder, They Can’t Hear You in the Lobby,” with a sub-section entitled “The Stage Theater” (a lovely layman’s expression for “not a movie theater” which I hadn’t encountered before). It begins:
“As a performer on the live stage, one thing that irritates me is people coming in late.” Never mind that’s there’s an unstoppable theater legend about Goldberg keeping Meryl Streep and the rest of the cast of a reading of Wendy Wasserstein’s An American Daughter waiting while she reportedly shopped; this is not a book about self-berating, or details. Goldberg’s instructions on how to behave in the theater could be taken from the program of any smug regional theater, lightly translated into Whoopi’s voice:
“As a performer on the live stage, one thing that irritates me is people coming in late… Ringing cell phones are also a pain…
Then the screed turns into a much more personalized, impassioned spiel against those who shoot video on their phones at live shows. She rightly complains that doing so is “stealing my work,” and says she’s not afraid to break character and stop shows cold if she catches someone videoing her:
Am I the first one to wonder when a nice night in the theater stopped being just a night in the theater?
This cell phone recording is why so many comics and solo performers have changed the way they do things now. For instance, there’s a whole lot of stuff now that I just won’t say. I won’t say it because I don’t want my performance on YouTube out of context. And I can’t even find you. It’s anonymous. And that’s cowardly. You can edit it, you can cut it, you can do whatever you want to it and take my work someplace maybe I wasn’t going with it. But not one else knows that because they weren’t there.
Excuse me for turning this into something other than a diatribe against copyright infringement, but this idea of audience members distorting the effect of a live performance by sharing their personal recollection of bits of it—isn’t that the entire history of world theater? And here’s another deep insight inspired by a shallow peeve screed: Mightn’t performers acclimate themselves to the new technology rather than self-censor around it? If you need to preserve context, figure out the medium and the method in which you can do—including enlisting the understanding of audiences.
I’m showing my colors here. I’ve always detested those theater-manners guides in programs because I think that audiences should determine those groundrules rather than the theater’s managing director. A rowdy performance might incite some rowdiness among the groundlings. Not sure how cell phones will eventually fit in to the theater landscape, but I’m tired of warnings about them (and the titters which always greet the caveat to “unwrap your candy”) upstaging all other emotions in the theater, just moments before showtime. Not sure there’s any easy answer here, but am pretty sure we’ll well past Whoopi Goldberg’s mere glance of disdain and “Folks are so rude” folksiness.