While negativity in theatre reviews is hardly anything new, and I’m relatively sanguine about it after a decade as a press agent, I was struck over the weekend by the unanimity of the condescension on display in reviews of a new Off-Broadway show, Flamingo Court. The production, apparently set in a Florida development, is in fact three one-act plays featuring the same actors in each portion, a new riff on Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite, perhaps, with the lead characters all in their 70s.
The condescension I speak of was not only to the plays themselves but also to what the critics supposed was the intended audience – senior citizens. The reviews were filled with comments about the “early buffet dinner crowd” and the “AARP generation,” as if those audience members were in some way fundamentally different from all other theatergoers. I was really disturbed.
This follows on the heels of a producer, upon hearing that I was taking my father to a certain show, saying, “Oh, your dad will like it,” but tacitly suggesting that I wouldn’t. The implication was that at 81, my father was sufficiently undiscerning that he wouldn’t be bothered by the production’s shortcomings, while I, a theatre professional, wouldn’t have such a good time. The fact is, while the show wasn’t breathtaking, we both enjoyed it.
I don’t believe that advancing age erodes one’s tastes and these recent examples of age-ism suggest that both producers and critics may not have a handle on how to appeal to the ever-growing senior portion of the national population. While everyone wants to applaud what’s newest, and to build tomorrow’s audiences, we cannot forget that there’s a sizable chunk of the population that’s at or above “retirement age,” and they’re probably looking for the same variety of stories and styles as audiences in their 30s or 50s, be it populist or elitist, on a case by case basis.
When working at an Off-Broadway company in the mid-80s, I recall someone making a generalization about the supposed intolerance of older audiences for the experimental or the confrontational in theatre. One of the senior staff quickly pointed out that the elderly die-hard subscribers to the company were probably the people who first started supporting Off (and Off-Off-) Broadway in the 50 and 60s, seeing the first works by Albee, McNally and Shepard, among so many others. They knew more about experimental than we probably did. And for plenty of seniors, I bet the same holds true today.
Posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
by
Howard Sherman
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