What happens when a theater critic can’t sit down?

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NEW YORK – Here’s a story I’ll tell at parties: A few minutes into a big, splashy Broadway musical, an usher whispered over my shoulder to ask if I was part of the performance. Under different circumstances, it might have been flattering. (Who? Me?!) I was flustered, but not because I thought I’d been mistaken for a star.

I had requested to stand off to the side underneath the box seats, where I was inadvertently in full view of the audience, notebook in hand. Someone had complained, and the usher was asking me to take a seat. I couldn’t.

Very few physical feats are required of a theater critic. Compared to the rigors of putting on a show, sitting down to watch one is supposed to be easy.

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If I were superstitious, I might think suddenly losing that ability this past fall was cosmic retribution for one too many barbs leveled at artists. The reality was far less poetic: Thanks to an absurd fitness class and the resulting slipped disk, for two months sitting down diverted my attention from whatever was in front of me to the pain dancing a cell block tango down my right leg. Humbling as it was for my body to betray its (one!) professional duty, it forced an eye-opening change in perspective.

Stepping into a tradition that unites the ancient Greeks with some of today’s most ardent theater fans, I stood through the better part of a dozen shows. Critics are generally spoiled with seats in the middle orchestra, where producers hope we’ll have the best possible time. But instead I was on my feet and (lesson learned) out of sight. Gazing over hundreds of heads and shifting my weight around in the dark, I was reminded time and again that theaters are just rooms full of people whose vulnerability, uncertainty and imperfections – including my own – are what bring them alive.

I could see just fine. (A colleague quipped that sitting any closer wasn’t going to make a show better or worse.) And I understood why it’s called standing at attention: My senses felt heightened and my focus was sharp.

My field of vision expanded to include the entire seated orchestra, foregrounding an audience’s response to the show as part of my experience. Everyone in a theater can hear the gasps of surprise at an unexpected twist or the crickets when a punch line bombs. But overlooking an engaged or comatose crowd, even from behind in silhouette, offered an acute sense of the temperature in the room. You can imagine directors pacing around back there, muttering and puffing cigarettes if such a thing were allowed. (I didn’t bump into any; maybe they were avoiding me.)

The maxim about playing to the last row ought to hold true regardless of the show, and I was in a unique position to judge. The marriage in scale between a production and its theater is crucial. The campy comedy of “Death Becomes Her” would read from across 46th Street, like high-glam air traffic control. The darling romance of “Maybe Happy Ending” is delicately pitched to fill the jewel box Belasco. Watching these shows from the back enriched my view of their symbiotic relationships with audiences, whether they shake shoulders with laughter or ask people to lean in.

Taking up a position where I wouldn’t normally be, there were the reasonable gaffes. A woman with a pleading expression asked me if she had time to run to the ladies room. (She did but should hurry, an usher cut in.) Because I almost always stood near a back aisle, many more asked me for programs.

There are architectural details I had never noticed. Dome-shaped indentations in back-orchestra ceilings are acoustic features that predate microphones. Some last rows have a walkway behind them, others don’t, meaning I had to stand directly in front of my assigned seat. (When I didn’t know the person next to me, I’d alert them beforehand so I didn’t seem always on the verge of walking out.) I beat lines of any kind at intermission.

And there is a world of theater people whose work purposefully flies under the radar. A house manager with a stopwatch around her neck gave me a knowing look as she firmly announced into her headset that it was go time. (In New York, that’s nearly always seven minutes past what’s advertised. In D.C., it can be even more and sometimes less.) Technicians operating lights, sound and projections are often set up near the back few rows like discrete DJs, their eyes glowing from computer monitors. Camera bans are enforced by eagle-eyed ushers, like the one I saw darting down the aisle to the front row, where a patron tried several times to record a Tony-winning star (who, fortunately for them, wasn’t Patti LuPone).

The very logical idea of audience seating is an old one: Most Greek theaters were built into hillsides outfitted with stone benches, a style the Romans largely replicated but without the hills. There’s some evidence of audiences standing at these sites, but the practice was more typical of early performance in Britain – from the Middle Ages, when townspeople would gather around traveling pageant wagons, to Elizabethan London, where city folk jostled for floor space at Shakespeare’s Globe.

Standing room has been populist since the term’s first recorded usage in 1603. A travelogue from 1761 features a bargainer who insists, “I’ll be no more bamboozled,” while setting a price of “no more than five and twenty shillings a quarter for standing room.” An 1899 New York City ordinance required that “standing room only” be displayed outside public amusements when all seats had been sold, to protect ticket buyers “buncoed” into assuming they would have one. Theater managers decried the constant putting up and taking down of signs as “unnecessary” and “oppressive.”

A 1941 column in the New York Times extols the virtues of seeing Broadway shows “on the hoof,” arguing that standing room is preferable to some balconies where “parachutes and oxygen masks ought to be required dress.” The writer offers such practical advice as “don’t drum your fingertips on the head of the bald guy in the last row.”

For those who can muster the endurance, forgoing a seat can drastically lower the cost of attendance, theater’s most significant barrier to entry. Nowadays, discounted standing room tickets to Broadway are offered only at select productions (including “Six,” “MJ” and “The Outsiders”) fortunate enough to sometimes sell out. On Reddit, fans regularly weigh the standing room pros and cons: sight lines, the availability of walls to lean on, the bonus excitement of occasionally witnessing actors enter from behind the audience.

The legacy of standing room assumes an eagerness on the part of the spectator to make it into the theater, seated or not. A boom in the past two decades of immersive shows like “Sleep No More” and “Here Lies Love” has turned navigating a show on foot into a premium form of entertainment. People may prefer it solely given that theater seats are the least human friendly you’ll experience outside of airplane coach class: narrow in every direction, enemies of elbows, knees and lower backs.

Since 1990, the question of where and how patrons can comfortably watch a show has been governed by the Americans With Disabilities Act, which requires equal opportunity access to public businesses. All 41 Broadway theaters, which except for a handful were built around 100 years ago, are wheelchair accessible, though specific accommodations vary. Several current theater managers say that requests to stand through a performance due to health or disability are rare but have been welcomed depending on audience configuration and the particular production.

For the duration of my body’s refusal to conform to theater’s natural physics, I was surprised and moved by the sympathy I received: a box office manager who confided that they also deal with chronic pain, ushers who double-checked that I was situated, press reps who went out of their way to reserve a seat for me just in case. Some of that treatment was because I’m a critic. Most of it was because we’re all human.

I walked into those theaters in a diminished state, but stepped out filled with gratitude. I could still do my job, and there was a lot of kindness propping me up.

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