Now, when I say "oldster," I mean no disrespect. Not as a 57-year-old who a couple of generations earlier would've been retired by now, not to mention kicking it in an East Hampton Village house secured for an eminently reasonable sum on just my salary as a humble editor at the local weekly, while my wife stayed at home and my son paid for his university tuition solely on the strength of his earnings washing dishes in the summer.
But this is 2024. And so I say, oldster, I know how it is. I'm weary of them too, these devices. Don't fully understand them, the electronic tethers, the Distracto 5000s that are our phones today. Still, please, when you're sitting down to take in a stage play, hit the switch that silences the damn thing.
"Trill! Trill!" went the iPhone alarm of someone sitting a mite too close to the front row of the Todd Haimes Theater. I could hear it from the very last row up in the mezzanine. Everyone in the theater could. And I was 70-percent sure Liev Schreiber was going to pause his lines as Father Flynn during a crucial exchange with young Sister James in John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt" until the phone was silenced.
Instead of managing that, however, or hustling it through the exit doors, the theatergoer stayed put and tried to muffle it. The digital bleating could still be heard, however, only . . . muffled.
The party responsible should've been given the bum's rush, collared and sent tumbling out into the carpeted lobby. Thenceforth to be banned.
Amazingly, that wasn't the end of it, the odd beep here, an alert there. Sign of the times? Scourge of the times.
This was Sunday, the end of that morally complex, conscience-rattling show's revival run. Which is too bad, because, now more than ever, every American should see it.
After Father Flynn gives a sermon in which he illustrates the effects of gossip with a story of a priest ordering a woman to cut open a pillow on a rooftop, and then imagining the difficulty in trying to retrieve all the feathers, he admits to Sister James that he made it up. Parables are direct, the message conveyed clearly. The truth, on the other hand, is far too convoluted to serve as any kind of lesson.
We're in a new age of conviction, creeping fundamentalism, simple-minded certainty, all aided and amplified by the souring of the digital dream. But in reality, the more you live, the less you know. No?