Walking Out

On leaving the theater at intermission

Last week, my wife and I went to the theater and saw a bad play. It was histrionic, predictable and overlong. The characterizations were universally thin to nonexistent, and the play—an adaptation of a purported comedy—was utterly humorless; even for a drama, it took itself way too seriously. It was a “problem play,” you see, but I found the central problem—can we acknowledge the importance of identity without destroying the idea of objective truth?—to be ridiculous, not really a problem at all. In part, that’s because the situation was so completely contrived—a doctor refuses to let a priest see a dying child because the child hadn’t requested his presence and she as the rightful authority in charge of the child’s care decided his presence would upset her in her final moments of life—and the solution so blindingly obvious—let the fricking priest perform the last rites you ludicrous caricature of an obnoxious atheist! The protagonist struck me as both utterly unsympathetic and completely unrealistic—and her antagonists, who all turn out to be antisemites, even more so.

Then there were the problems with the production. The play was weirdly cross-cast, with multiple characters played by actors of different races and/or genders than those identified by the dialogue, which I suppose was intended to avoid triggering the audience’s subconscious biases, but which just made it difficult to follow who anybody was. The staging was somehow simultaneously over-busy and static, the production design blandly vacant, and the sound design grating and obtrusive. To top it off, the cavernous space in which the play was staged was so echoey that we frequently couldn't make out the dialogue—not that I felt I was missing much.

In case you can’t tell, I didn’t like the play. Neither did my wife. So we left at intermission.

That’s something I almost never do. Even if I’m not enjoying a show, I feel a kind of obligation to stay put and see it through. That’s partly an obligation to the performers—it must be awful to come back from intermission and see the house shot through with newly empty seats. Partly it’s just the sunk-cost fallacy—I’ve already invested a certain amount of time and money in the experience, and walking out would be an unequivocal admission, which I am reluctant to make, that this investment was a total loss. And then there’s just curiosity, wanting to see how it turns out. I’ve certainly stuck with a full season of plenty of television shows for little more reason than that, and a play is a far smaller investment. But partly it’s an obligation to myself, or perhaps to the writer and director, whose efforts I’m never sure I can rightly judge based on only the first half of the show. Judging early feels like a refusal to take my own role seriously.

In the wake of leaving, I’ve been trying to figure out the principle behind my general reluctance to bail out of a sinking ship, and I think it’s related to my concerns about our era of distraction and what it’s done to our ability to give ourselves over to art. I’m cognizant that, when I see a film in a theater, I have a very different relationship to the work than I do when I see it at home. I can’t readily distract myself with my phone or anything else, nor can I give up on something I’m not into, knowing I can return to it later if I change my mind; I’m stuck there, in the presence of this work, for the duration, with the only practical escape being to fall asleep. That condition facilitates surrender to the demands of the work, with sometimes extraordinary results. It’s genuinely hard—for me, anyway, and I don’t think I’m alone—to watch a movie like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Andrei Rublev or The Last Emperor at home and achieve the necessary state of total immersion. I recently saw a handful of Ozu films in the theater, and I loved them, but I had the same feeling that, had I watched them at home, they might not have held me. And I can remember watching some recent films at home—The Irishman particularly comes to mind—and feeling like it had been designed for easy home-consumption, which is to say that it could survive a distracted or interrupted gaze. I don’t think that’s a virtue.

If there’s value in that state of surrender, then, surely the corollary is that there’s value in abjuring the right to escape even when it is presented, right? My wife has often expressed the opinion that plays without intermissions are inherently suspect, because perhaps the reason for the lack is that they’re afraid people will leave if given the opportunity. So if we value our bathroom breaks, we should commit to always coming back to our seats thereafter. Right?

Maybe so. But maybe not. Because it felt right to walk out of that theater. It didn’t feel like I wasn’t showing the work the proper respect—it felt like I was showing it, by expressing my honest reaction rather than suppressing it to give the work further and further benefits of the doubt—or to perform doing so. It felt totally different from the pervasive background distraction and irritability that causes me to pick up my phone in the middle of an episode of The Bear (a fine show if a massively over-praised one) rather than attend to it completely I’m not saying I wasn’t bored—the play was definitely boring—but my relationship to that boredom was completely different from my relationship to that feeling when I’m sitting on my couch. I’d given the play an hour and a half of my time, and in that hour and a half I was engaged. I couldn’t distract myself; I had to pay attention, and I did. And, in my opinion, it had utterly failed to justify that attention. Walking out wasn’t a refusal to engage; it was the result of my engagement. My mind was made up; staying in spite of knowing that would have meant sitting through the second half with gritted teeth, waiting for it to be over. That would have been the less-engaged choice, like staying at a party where you aren’t having fun because it feels awkward to leave too soon, and then sitting in a corner playing on your phone until you feel it’s appropriate to leave.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder whether committing to showing up and being willing to walk out aren’t two sides of the same coin, both ways of taking a work and your experience of it seriously. Watching a movie in fragments, or while also doing three other things, isn’t really engaging with it. But continuing to watch it after it can no longer keep your interest also isn’t really engaging with it—it’s refusing to bring your whole self, including your judgment, to the table. Same thing for sticking with a book, a television series, an album, even to paying equal attention to all the works of art in a museum exhibit—if you are genuinely engaged, then you know what compels you to pay attention in a deep way and what doesn’t reward that engagement. Differentiating one’s behavior on that basis is evidence of engagement, not of distraction.

I don’t want to overstate my case. There are difficult works that reward engagement but don’t reward it quickly, where you have to trust that there’s a spectacular view at the end of a long hard climb. But we have to trust ourselves in making that judgment as well—and we ultimately have to make it ourselves, and without reservation. I adore James Joyce’s Ulysses, and my advice to you if you are confused by it is to keep going: you don’t need to get every reference to fall in love with it. (My other advice would be to try listening to it rather than or while reading it; so much of the beauty of that book is in its sound.) But if you give it the time it deserves and still find it boring and pointless and not worth the effort, well, maybe it is boring and pointless to you, and not worth your effort. Its difficulty is no more a virtue than it is a vice; it’s just a fact about it, a reason to give it sufficient time and attention before judging it, not a reason to judge it positively. If you reject it because you think art should be easy, well, that says something about you, and you’ll have to live with the judgment of snobs like me of that opinion. But if you have given it that time and attention, and decided, before finishing, that it didn’t deserve any more of it? Then owning that judgment is part of being engaged.

As you can probably tell, coming to that conclusion is a real struggle for me. I want to engage with everything, as much as possible, on its own terms, to find what is worthy in its ambition even if I conclude that it failed to achieve it. I can’t always get there—some works of art I not only don’t like but deeply don’t get, and in some cases I conclude that it isn’t just a matter of failed execution, that what the creator was aiming for just wasn’t worth doing—and I’m sufficiently secure in my assessment that I question the judgment of anyone who disagrees. But that never feels good to me. It always feels like a kind of personal failure, even when I’m quite sure I’m right, like if I were sufficiently large-souled, I would have found an honest way to appreciate even the most cynical, incompetent or misconceived work. (It does have to be an honest way, though; in my experience, the condescension of a pretended appreciation feels much worse than an honest dismissal, both to the giver and the receiver.)

Then there’s the question of age. How much of my delight at walking out was just about getting that time back, being able to get to bed a bit earlier? That wouldn’t have been an important factor when I was 26, but at 52 it may be. There’s a wonderful bit in a Marc Maron special where he talks about going to a Rolling Stones concert and leaving early, and how he knew he was truly old when he realized that beating the traffic was his favorite part of the evening. I relate! But while that may be a legitimate reason to leave, it’s probably a mistake to judge a work of art on that basis. Finally, as someone who makes art of my own, my natural empathy disinclines me to truly vituperative criticism, at least when written for public consumption, because I know how I would feel were in on the receiving end. You’ll note, in that regard, that I haven’t mentioned the name of the play I walked out of, though I’ve provided the curious with an abundance of clues to figure it out.

So I remain ambivalent about the whole question. But walking out of that play felt so good. That has to mean something too. I may have to indulge that impulse more than I am wont to do, if only to find out what happens if I do.