Monday Manners: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!

After the Fringe Festival, Monday Manners covered a variety of audience faux pas surrounding preventable behavior. But there's an equally big problem when the audience members prevent themselves from behaviors that they should be engaging in.

I've found myself in a number of rude audiences, lately.

Rude might be an overstatement. But I've been in a lot of audiences full of people who didn't quite know how to behave in a theatre. Specifically, they didn't make the two kinds of noise it is permissible for audience members to make: laughter, and applause.

The first one should be easy: if you think something is funny, laugh at it. Out loud. As opposed to, I don't know, holding your breath. Or whatever you people are doing to keep from laughing. Why is it so important to laugh? Well, because it's encouraging to the performers onstage. If you're not giving them positive feedback when they're used to getting it, they're going to suspect that something is very wrong with what they're doing onstage. And eventually, they'll start to do things wrong onstage, because they're trying to fix imagined mistakes.

The other kind of noise, applause, is also infinitely easy to make. It requires putting your hands together and taking them apart a few times. But when should one make such a noise? The answer to that, almost without fail, is whenever there is a blackout. Blackouts signify that a scene has ended. In a one man show, like the one I'm currently working on, they signify that a completely new character is about to appear. A blackout is an opportunity for you to thank the performers onstage for entertaining you. It's good etiquette for you to do so, in the form of applause.

There are, of course, instances during which applause would seem awkward or uncomfortable. Audiences rarely clap, for instance, at the end of Cabaret as the giant Nazi flag is unfurled over the stage. Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues bounces between the silly and the tragic: I've never known an audience to applaud "My Vagina Was My Village," at least not without a good, long, uncomfortable pause and a few nervous coughs. But when the show is lighthearted enough, and the lights have gone down to hide the run crew or to facilitate a change of wardrobe, and there's no Nazi flag or reminder of Bosnian war crimes lingering onstage, it really is okay to clap. You should clap.

You still shouldn't talk in a theatre. You should still turn your cell phone off, unwrap your candy before the show, and control your children. But sometimes noise needs to be made. Let the actors know you care. You paid enough for those tickets.

Image via Moodle.