Family Walk-Out

From my previous post some of you know that the Ten-Minute Play Festival just opened at the Paul Harris Theatre at UNLV. Well, we had a pretty good house today. I was helping with taking the tickets and passing out the programs and there was this family with three small kids, I would say they were all around 6 or 7 years old. They asked if the shows were kid appropriate and the House Manager (who happens to be my roommate and the director of my ten-minute) informed them that most of the shows are intended for a mature audience. Well, they still decided to walk in and see the shows. I thought, 'let's see which show they walk out on.'

The first show starts and right at the beginning two characters have guns pointing at each other, they shoot and collapse to the floor. The whole play is about trying to figure out how they killed each other. The main point is that there's violence on stage and the parents (who were sitting in front of me) were okay with letting their kids see the violence.

The second show, is a fun play about two unconventional people finding romance at the Hoover Damn. The only adult content in this show is when the two characters have a passionate kiss on stage, which is not really adult content, but let's go with that. But the parents didn't seem to mind the passionate kiss.

So now the third show begins, which just happens to be mine, everything is going fine until one of the characters says, "That's right you just like to have sex with men and not call yourself a-" The character gets cut off before he can say the word fag or queer. This is when the dad turns to the mom and within a minute, they gather their three children and leave. 

I wasn't surprised by this, I was just waiting to see how long they were going to last. But what I don't understand is how they can let their kids sit and watch two guys shoot at each other, not once, not twice, but three times and be okay with it. And when one male actor says to another male actor, have sex with men, they go running to the door. I just don't understand in what kind of society we live in that this is okay. I mean granted everyone is allowed to raise their children how they please, but if I was them and the House Manager tells me there is adult content in the shows, you better believe that my kids will not be entering that theatre, especially when they're only 6 or 7 years old. It's not "Charlie Brown" for crying out loud.

I don't really know why this bothers me, I just thought that we're getting passed all of this, but clearly people's actions are showing that we're not passed this. And who knows when we will. I just have to remind myself that the rest of the audience did stay and they seemed to enjoy the show. And I shouldn't let some ignorant people rain on my parade, but it's still annoying.