San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Lily Janiak: COVID19 theater audience survey: A parody
Even though this isn’t a teen magazine quiz, we’re going to tell you who you are based on your responses anyway.
Dear patron,
Thank you for once buying a ticket and thus getting weekly emails from us for the rest of your life. Would you help us return to inperson indoor performances in two to 36 months by telling us, in this brief survey, how you feel right now?
1. What’s your overall feeling about coming back to our indoor venue?
(A) I feel whatever UCSF Department of Medicine Chair Bob Wachter, UCSF infectious disease expert George Rutherford and San Francisco Chronicle health reporters Erin Allday, Catherine Ho and Aidin Vaziri tell me to feel.
(B) I know I should be (A), but I haven’t heard from any of those people in at least five minutes, and I feel trapped under an anxiety cloud.
(C) I don’t read the news myself, but I presume others around me do. I move with the prevailing winds. I swim in the middle of the school of fish. If others jump off a cliff, so do I. I have no will, and also I mix metaphors.
(D) My feelings come from within. No news or behavior by others can touch me. I am invincible. I live dangerously.
2. What precautions would make you feel ready to come back?
(A) Astronaut suits with oxygen tanks for audience, staff and actors. Maybe you could stage “Hamlet” in outer space? Consider the new resonances! “I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”
(B) I have never felt ready for anything in my life.
(C) Um, I’ll feel ready when you tell me it’s safe? When other people have gone and haven’t died?
(D) I am outside of your theater right now, waiting for you to let me in so I can lick some armrests. Hi! That’s me in the bushes.
3. Are you willing to wear a mask at our theater?
(A) I am newly alarmed, saddened and angered at the state of our world that this is even a question. Why are other people so much more selfish than I am?
(B) This survey is making me realize I’m a bad person.
(C) Am I still allowed to drink $12 concession wine in plastic cups?
(D) I have never followed a rule, not once. I find masks mildly uncomfortable, and I never prioritize the collective good over my convenience. In fact, I actively undermine the collective good even when it’s inconvenient. Also, I’m so bad that I’m going to say (A) even though (D) is my real answer.
4. How important is it to you that we keep offering streaming options?
(A) Streaming has solved all my theater problems, including prepandemic ones. Now I never have to stick my butt in someone’s face as I’m sidling down a row to my seat. Now I never have to wage silent but savage kneeandelbow war over the invisible line between my and my neighbor’s space. Now I can revel in my love, which is theater, while avoiding what I hate, which is humans.
(B) Do I even exist? I haven’t spoken to another human being in weeks. Quick, ask me more questions about myself.
(C) Are we saying out loud yet that most streamed theater is very bad?
(D) I am going to vigorously demand both inperson and online options and attend neither but also object when I see higher prices.
5. What even is safety anyway? Do you know? Do I know? Help!
(A) I knew it! I will never attend a theater again unless all its box office staffers have doctorates in epidemiology.
(B) I’m just an audience member, equally lost. Wait, are you and I meant to be, questionasker? Could this be love?
(C) Well, guess it’s not too late for me to start loving a less intense art form. Like opera.
(D) Yes, my pretty, embark on that existential crisis. For that is what audience members like me live to provoke in theater workers like you. I don’t even exist outside of the times when I make your life miserable. I am a spirit, a force, a miasma. I haunt your box office 800 number, your inbox, your glass windows outside the theater. I never turn off my cell phone, but I haughtily shush others who don’t either. I attend plays specifically when I have a cold. I hijack postshow Q&As with comments that meander for minutes on end.
6. Ugh! How do we defeat you?
(A) En garde! (B) Part them; they are incensed!
(C) Hey, I’m Fortinbras; I just got here.
(D) Why, as a woodcock to mine own springe, Osric, I am justly kill’d with mine own treachery.
Answers! Even though this isn’t a teen magazine quiz, we’re going to tell you who you are based on your responses anyway.
Mostly A’s: Yes, you’re better than everyone else, but you already know it, so you don’t need us to stroke your ego.
Mostly B’s: Your poor mental health probably leads you to make generally good public health decisions, so keep at it.
Mostly C’s: You probably bowed out before the end of this survey.
Mostly D’s: You are Laertes in “Hamlet,” evidently?