This happened moments before the play went up at the Booth Theatre and Playbill notes that the audience member jumped onstage while the pre-show music was on and plugged his phone into a socket. Naturally the show’s crew members did not want a cell phone there when the performance started so they hustled it off.
The plugging of the cell was a pointless act anyhow. Why? Because the socket the man plugged his phone into was a fake one, part of set designer Beowulf Boritt’s set for the show; not being real, it was not capable of charging anything.
Marc Kudisch and Sarah Stiles are cast members of ‘Hand to God’ and, as you’d expect, neither were impressed, and each tweeted about it. They were surprised and so was a man named Chris York, who was in the audience and posted a review on Facebook – of the man, not the play.
“At ‘Hand to God’ tonight I saw an audience member climb onto the stage right before the show and plug his cell phone into a (fake) electrical outlet on the set,” York wrote. “ON. THE. SET. The crew had to stop the precook music, remove the cellphone, and make an announcement as to why you can’t do that.
“Truly. I am a quiet and reserved person and I took great joy in loudly heckling the idiot when he returned to take his phone back. Moron. Has theatre etiquette–heck, Common Sense–[really] fallen that far??”
Apparently, Chris, it has.
