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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?" ­ 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.