Ringing mobile phones, simultaneous audio interpretation for slow-on-the-uptake audience members, rackety cleaning equipment upstairs, booming HVAC gear—these are all part of the background rumble of sonic disruptions that have punctuated performances I’ve given or heard. At Woolly Mammoth’s old Church Street venue, the sound of police sirens just outside the door was so common that I’d begun to assume the sound designer had specified them as part of the plot. I’ve had building fire alarms go off twice, once in the middle of my first day room scene in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. When order was restored about 20 minutes later, our Nurse Ratched (Megan) picked up the scene with a “Now, as I was saying before we were interrupted…” Five minutes of Maura and Ted’s performance of Perfectly Good Airplanes in Geneva earlier this year was played over an insistent, strident alarm, one that was intended to alert every volunteer firefighter in Ontario County. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but the BEEEEP BEEEEP BEEEEP BEEEEP would cut out for half a minute at a time, making us think that the coast was clear and that the Chinese invasion had been called off, before resuming.
The most recent unfortunate sonic event took place Saturday, at a staged reading of several short plays, part of the Kennedy Center’s Page to Stage play development program. The Center packs professional companies into every possible small playing space, who present previews of their upcoming seasons as well as material still in development—sort of a fringe festival with book in hand. Every possible playing space: the two Millennium Stages, the Terrace, even the Theatre Lab gets used as a lab instead of a bordello for the moneyspinner Shear Madness. We were in the South Atrium Foyer (the foyer? I had to check a map to find it), with one set of doors separating us from the lobby of the rooftop restaurant, which had been rented out for a Cambodian wedding. (Are you getting the idea that Labor Day weekend is a slow time at the Center?) When the RATTA TATTA TATTA TATTA of the lion dance began, to celebrate the happy couple (think taiko drums with more attitude), several of us thought that small arms fire was being exchanged.