Cat on a Hot Tin Homophobe

WWPD? (What would Patti do?)
THE WRAP: Actor Fired After Tossing Anti-Gay Heckler From ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ Performance (Updated)

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What a terrible story.

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The house staff should have been on that immediately, it's such bu*l**** they fired the actor when they just should have thrown that loser patron out.

Scary ****.

I think this is the most depressing part.

Low added that Troy's character, Brick, is gay, suggesting that the heckler's anti-gay slurs may have been appropriate.

“And, the truth is, Brick is, after all, a gay man,” she wrote. “The material is strong, and it elicits strong responses from an audience, different every night.”

Seriously, wtf?

Fellow actress Emily E. Low, who plays the female lead, agreed that violence should not have been the answer, adding that part of acting is accepting criticism from the audience.

“As actors we must take the positive audience responses with the negative. It's not always about cheers and standing ovations,” she wrote in the same Facebook thread before deleting the post.

A really bad actress with no brains or integrity would say something like that.

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Not if it wasn't his decision to leave the show.

"Fired" is definitely the wrong word. "Removed" is probably better, since he wasn't even being paid. Ridiculous nonetheless.

In situations like this, you don't know how you're going to react until it happens. That said, whatever constituted the front house staff here should have done something. It is their job, after all.

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I wonder, based on what tobiasragg has said, if there really was any "front of house" staff to speak of, or if maybe it was (as is the case at many community theaters)just volunteer older ladies & gentlemen (the ladies carrying their purses with them, which always throws me off because I think they're part of the audience), who are in no way equipped to deal with a loud and possibly violent heckler. I can just see them all cowering in the back wondering what to do.

That said, I think that had I been the actors, I would have stopped the performance, signaled for the curtain to go down, then had someone come out and speak to the audience and the (hopefully present) staff, explaining that the play could not continue until the disturbance was taken care of. But I'm saying all this now - who knows if anyone was able to think that clearly at the time. I am sorry that the actors lost their jobs/felt they had to resign; even if they were being paid little or nothing, a job is a job and something that can go on the resume.

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i've seen heckling and drunken hooting in broadway theatres. i've seen audience members falling down drunk at broadway plays stumble back to the bar at intermission and down even more booze and spend a second act even more obnoxious. it happens. it's live theatre.

in a small house it's difficult to manage. from the article on playbill it's pretty clear the producers were well aware how loaded this audience was and how obnoxious. that nothing was done at intermission is indicative of how they value their show.

good for big daddy. i hope someone offers him a better job as a result.

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Miss Low (or are we to use her stage name Jolee Blon?)says she must accept criticisms along with the ovations? I don't know how many ovations she has gotten but since when is a hate heckling a criticism? Is she for real? So if we happen to see her in a show we can just yell out at her if the mood strikes us? But we can't really take her seriously because after seeing her facebook I realize that she must be from a new Christopher Durang play. She is (or rather was) playing Maggie the Cat as played by Marilyn Monroe. That had to be worth a boat load of laughs. Someone might want to tell her that developing her own persona might be more beneficial to channeling Marilyn unless she is auditioning for Bus Stop, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Sugar or maybe Playboy.

Nah, Anton Troy/Brick seems pretty legit in his comments on FB. (Of course he also seemedhappy that The Advocate's coverage of the story had a picture of him shirtless in the play that got many complements on his abs.)

And man that Cat poster is so wrong...