I might have to yell at some delinquents to get them to clam, something I am loathe to do, as an imaginary Buddhist. This, I feared, might be a long, fraying afternoon. My concern was not assuaged when I headed to the men’s room for a pre-curtain pee-always a prudent move at the more venerable Broadway houses, where the bathrooms usually haven’t been expanded since Elaine Stritch tried on her first pair of nylons-and a group of boys in school-uniform white shirts and ties were spritzing water on each other from the fountain until their adult minder told them to knock it off, shrewdly singling out the chief culprit: “Okay, Jeremy, that’s enough.” I was concerned that this predominantly pre-sixteen crowd would get the fidgets at a show that didn’t have laser beams and go tribal sometime deep into act one. Everyone up on the latest propaganda knows that “young people today” are ADHD jumping beans sexting each other nonstop and twitching like addicts in the cold turkey ward when they’re denied access to their cell phones for longer than fifty seconds. However: When I showed up for a matinee last week of Peter and the Starcatcher as a guest of Elvis Mitchell, the long, waiting line was thronged with teens and tweens, the sidewalk outside the Brooks Atkinson ringing with the laughter and cries of their eager anticipation, a junior jamboree of hugging, jostling, and mutual picture-taking. It’s an unfortunate, ageist stereotype, and yet one grounded in truth, as almost any actor can attest, and let he without sin cast the first gallstone. When people think of Broadway matinee audiences, they usually picture blue-rinse ladies with cough drop wrappers they can’t wait to rustle, tour groups dressed in sherbet colors, theatergoers who’ve been hanging in there since Lunt and Fontanne toned things up in short, the old, the lame, and the halt.
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