Ovation Fellows are current students or recent alumni from Los Angeles area universities.  Fellows are paired with a Mentor, currently serving as an Ovation Award voter, and see productions and meet artists around Greater Los Angeles throughout the year.  Their articles, posted on LAStageBlog, are intended to be their personal responses to their experiences, and not as critical reviews or representing the views of LA Stage Alliance.

Tyler McClain is an Ovation Fellow from Loyola Marymount University.

I’ve restarted this post a handful of times. I keep finding myself discouraged. Re-reading my words, it strikes me how much I’m starting to sound like Andy Rooney, beginning sentences with “People these days…” and then spouting some insane-person’s argument against wearing sweatpants in public.

This must sound awfully confusing, so I’ll start one more time:

I saw a production of David Auburn’s Proof at the NoHo Arts Center last week. If you’ve ever seen the play, you might recall a really important revelation at the end of the first act that weighs heavily on the rest of the play.

Well, I had never seen or read Proof but a gentleman behind me was considerate* enough to loudly spoil the play’s most important moment – you know, the one the entire play hinges on? – mere seconds before the actress had a chance to do it herself.

So what do you do when the punchy cliffhanger at the end of act-one is torn from you seconds before its proper delivery? Leave? No, that doesn’t seem fair to anyone, least of all the performers themselves, who did a fine job with the production. It would be easy to get angry but what good would that do? My mentor Dennis, my friend Natasha and I decided to collect our thoughts during the intermission, sip some coffee and return to our seats for the conclusion of the play. It was our only option.

I started to wonder, though, what David Auburn would’ve thought had he been in the audience with us.

Maybe it says something great about the production the guy who blurted out the line was that engaged he lost his sense of place, his sense of theater decency and his sense of what is and is not an “indoor voice.”  Maybe Auburn would’ve been flattered that someone was so swept up in his work, so captivated by his words.

Or not. As I thought harder, I realized it might also say something pretty unappealing about the state of American entertainment – even in live theater; we’re as mannered as we might be in our living rooms, watching the boob-tube, eating our TV dinners with plastic forks. This laziness, more than the particulars of my experience seeing Proof, is what I found myself most upset by.

The experience was alternately numbing and empowering, because as much as it irked me, I realized it’s my duty and yours to bring a little respect back to the playhouse and movie theater. Let’s use drama as an excuse to be quiet, to turn off our cell phones, beepers and Digi-PetsÒ, use our best inside-whispers and experience something together. That’s what theater is all about: participation between the performers and their audience. I left the theater charged with a desire to continue to participate – just not so loudly.

*Inconsiderate