Sense Of Boundaries

Friday night at the "Hairspray" movie: about a half hour in, I realized that the two people behind me were fully intending to chat throughout the movie. I asked them to stop talking. They were mildly surprised.

Saturday night at the musical "Xanadu:" about a half hour in, I realized that the two people behind me were fully intending to chat — this time out loud — throughout the show. I asked them to stop talking. They were mildly surprised.

At that same performance, a couple of men down the aisle were not just laughing but braying like donkeys and bouncing in their seats after about every third line. A movie critic once designated a campy movie of 1980, "Can't Stop the Music," as aimed at "eight-year-old boys whose favorite movies, when they grow up, will be Auntie Mame and All About Eve." Well, here were some of them all grown up in 2007 at Xanadu, based, as it happens, on another bad, campy movie from 1980. Their heehawing was a performance. They thought the rest of us were interested in them showing that they got the in-jokes.

I, for one, was not. However, there are always people in an audience who lack any sense that they are to keep to themselves during a performance. I will never forget a performance of the play "Topdog/Underdog" some years ago, when some Williamsburg-type hipsters behind me were noshing on sandwiches during the performance, including rattling the paper bags they were packed in. I found the crackling, the chomping sounds, and the wafting odor of onions and cold cuts incommensurate with taking in a serious piece of theatre. Yet when the usher asked them to put the food away during intermission, they were mildly surprised.

And I should not be, I suppose. We must remember the factoid that Shakespeare's audiences ate and chatted throughout performances. Audiences at proto-vaudeville performances in 19th-century America were as vocal and rowdy as people at a soccer match are today. Sitting silent through lengthy performances is an artifice, a learned ritual, which became standard practice as a status-conscious middle class burgeoned starting in the Gilded Age.

An affectation it remains, however. There will always be less cossetted audience members who suppose that the rest of us have no problem with the sounds — and even smells — of strangers accompanying our entertainment that night. This is a human norm; we are social animals indeed.

In Germany, the person behind you in line often stands just a few centimeters from your neck. It's normal there. In Russia, at the airport people often do not even form a line, but bunch together as if they were making a run on a bank in 1930. Since cellphones became default, we have learned that most people would rather chat during most of their downtime than read or stew in their own thoughts.

Thus expecting to see a play or movie without listening to audience members' ongoing impressions or sampling the bouquet of their pastrami is, in the end, unnatural, weird. To normal people, I sense that every show is rather like what I saw Sunday night, Patti Lupone's final performance in City Center's "Gypsy" revival.

Now, here was where I did feel a sense of communality with the audience. The theater crowd knows that Ms. Lupone has never been allowed to quite hit the highest note, so to speak, in terms of her career trajectory. Plus "Gypsy" is one of the best musicals ever created and Ms. Lupone is at precisely the age to play Mama Rose.

The audience went nuts for every song. People usually talk through overtures, but the inevitable clump who expected to do that Sunday night were actually shushed, something I've never seen before. When Ms. Lupone finished Mama Rose's musical nervous breakdown "Rose's Turn," there was a standing ovation. We were in the play ourselves, applauding Mama Rose in her delusional dream of becoming a star; we were applauding Ms. Lupone getting to play Mama Rose; and perhaps also, to an extent, congratulating ourselves for being theater buffs.

Now, that was communal. You wanted to hug the person next to you. But for me, that kind of thing is very occasional.

I wish I could feel that communal at every play or movie I attend as so many people seem to. The world must seem a warmer place. These people's sense of boundaries is one I should try my best to accommodate as a matter of "diversity," I suppose.

But their diversity cannot accommodate mine, which is a desire to watch things without the decoration of other people's conversations, noises, and aromas. The new thing, for example, is people text-messaging during plays and musicals, with the lighted screens of their phones shining next to you in the darkness. SEE U SOON, they tap out, loudly snap the phone shut, and then open it back up five minutes later to read the response "OK :-)"

Communal über alles. Oh well — at least texting doesn't smell like lunch meat.

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.