Usually a trip to the theater is frustrating because getting any of the dialogue is such a challenge. Even the headphones available in larger theaters most often don’t do the job for me. But last weekend I went to see my friend Steve Cooper play a leading role in Blinders, a political satire put on by the Out of the Blue Theater Company at the Boston Playwrights’ Theater. The company is staffed by both veteran and up-and-coming actors in a small, intimate theater next to the campus of Boston University. And this time, I had two things going for me that made going to the theater enjoyable again.
First, Steve slipped me a copy of the manuscript to read before I went to the play. Second, when my wife Barbara made the reservations, she asked the New York-based telephone ticket agent to make a note that there would be a hearing-impaired person in the party in hopes of getting a seat close to the front. When we got to the theater, they escorted us to front-row seats marked “Reserved-Copithorne.” Wow. By and large I’ve found people very helpful when I speak up and let them know I need an accommodation, but when they go above and beyond the call of duty, it sure feels good. Then when the actors came on the stage, speech-reading was much easier because the manuscript was fresh in my mind. What a difference from the usual theater experience!
The only problem of the evening came when Barbara and the kids pressured me for details of the plot in advance. I held them off except when Barbara got concerned that Steve might be one of the characters who gets killed in the end, in which case she said she would leave at intermission. I reassured her he wasn’t going to get killed. (I didn’t tell her his actual fate, which is nearly as bad: after he helps his girlfriend get elected President, she dumps him and exiles him to Uzbekistan).