Emily Low is clearly an idiot, but anyone who is working a job and physically accosts a customer is going to lose their job, no matter how badly the customer deserved it.

I do find it kind of odd that out of all the people in the building at the time, an actor on the damn stage finally had to do something. Security? Audience? Stagehands? Nobody else? Someone could have at least called the cops to ask someone to come remove him, if no one else was willing to confront him.

i agree with Theodore Gorath. Where were the ushers? Heckling is generally not allowed at the theater unless clearly stated. The guy should have been appropriately thrown out by security after his first outburst.

The theater's ushers or management should have dealt with this. The actors shouldn't have had to put up with it.

Doesn't make the violence "right" by any means. But I understand the anger.

John Lacy should just take a new stage name, like, say ... Booth, and he won't get heckled again.

Where were the ushers? I might be able to answer this part, well actually I'll let Dan answer for me - "Welcome to America, where we must defer to bigoted idiots at all times because our bigoted idiots tend to be armed"

Ushers are usually volunteer, though there should have been a house manager somewhere who could have helped but I'll refer you back to Dan's statement.

I think people are becoming far less likely to address boorish behavior for fear of setting off someone who might be armed.

What happened to the heckler? This story shouldn't just be about an actor who was unfairly punished for stopping an asshole's boorish behavior, it should also be about the boorish asshole who started this problem. The linked article lacks any detail about him. Name and shame! If anyone deserves to get fired from his job, it's the one who was stupid enough to shout "Fag!" at a Tennessee Williams play.

Stop acting like wimps. This actor should get a medal and the ushers not invited back.

The cardinal rule of theatre is to NEVER BREAK CHARACTER. But as other people have noted, the real failing was everyone else in the theater. Why didn't the ushers intervene? Why did none of the audience ask the staff at the theatre to deal with it? Hell, why didn't the people sitting next to the heckler lean over and say "Say one more word and I am calling the police."

Bring the actor back on, re-visit or establish guidelines for the theatre staff to have taken this guy off the premises, and let everyone go on to the next show with this incident as a memory.

Maybe he was yelling "Boo-urns"

It's not necessarily the ushers who should have been intervening, but the house manager.

I predict a demand for refunds of season tickets and a loss of revenue. But until the theater fails, I'm hoping that some audience member is going to call Ms. Low's character a bitch every time she's on stage from now on.

Also, artsy crowds probably read Dan Savage, right? There's something amusing at the thought of Ms. Low possibly being a Savage fan and getting called an idiot by him.

As a former DJ I've had to deal with yahoos like this. I often wonder how sad and pathetic they are that they go to a function, get lit on some alcohol and embarrass the hell out of their families. They're bullies for sure but always when confronting them I think " do they have a gun on them?,,, or in their car?" Some people lead sad and limited lives.

A friend of mine recalls being in the audience for "The Great White Hope" in its initial Broadway run. He'd seen it the week before, loved it, and had gone back, this time with his parents. There were a group of teenaged girls sitting in the row directly behind him who were talking and laughing very audibly throughout a scene. Finally the actor playing the lead interrupted his own speech, turned to face the audience, thundered "SHUT THE FUCK UP" in a booming bass voice, and resumed the scene. The scene was an emotional one and my friend said it was possible to think that the command to shut up was part of the play, directed at the other character on stage. The parents thought the actor was still in character, but he knew otherwise, having just seen the play the week before. However, not everyone was unaware of who was being addressed: my friend said the girls realized it was directed at them and quieted.

The show went on. No one was escorted out and no one was fired. What happened to the actor who broke character and the fourth wall and yelled at the disruptive members of the audience? Well, his name was James Earl Jones. He went on to have a somewhat successful career as an actor.

It's been a long, long time since I dabbled in community-theatre:

The run of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” had been suspended Monday and the original performance schedule would not be completed due to cast loss from “an incident during the May 31 performance.” Because the play was slated to run for just two more weeks, the theater said, there was insufficient time to recast the two vacated roles.

I guess they don't do understudies for lead roles anymore.

[Actress Emily Low:] “All I heard was from the theater owner — those people claim to have come to this show based on [me],” she said. “I've sent out hundreds of invitations, social media, post cards ... if they said that they came to see me, I mean, well I sent out hundreds of invitations.”

I hope that's not a general expectation of non-professional actors these days.

Wait, Dan, I thought it was cool for allies to yell slurs?

Oh, right - its only bad when its directed at gay men - if its a slur against trans* folk, its ok. Carry on.

Clearly the ushers or management should have handled the issue by asking the guy to be quiet or leave. I've seen ushers at the symphony threaten to relocate kids simply because they are moving around too much.

But I'm reminded of a situation at a drag show where a couple audience members were getting a bit too grabby. It was hard to read because sometimes the performers know audience members. Once it became clear the performers were getting uncomfortable it was left to the sound guy to confront the audience members. Not a great situation since there was no clear person in charge, bouncer or whatnot, to deal with it. Luckily it didn't get violent or anything.

And, @16. No, just no.

Seattle theater people: Maybe you could hire this guy?

@ 1 is right. It's dangerous to confront people physically, no matter how wrong they are and how right you are. I hate to see him fired but it's a fact that he was risking the welfare of everyone in attendance. Pointing that out in no way endorses the homophobe's action, or sends the message that we should all sit there and take it. It just points out that this theater doesn't care enough about ensuring that their presentations are enjoyable for the actors or the audience. An equitable amount of anger should be directed at them for that.

As someone who works with the public, I can tell you that any type of escalation with a patron/customer is grounds for immediate firing. Dumb move.

This was a job for an usher or audience member. I don't know how people suffer this type of foolishness.

@14. Thanks for sharing the James Earl Jones story. I would imagine anyone called out by That Voice would shit their pants.Certainly that booming baritone is enough, but add to that the fear of being telepathically strangled...

@14: Darth Vader takes no shit from his audience!

Perhaps he had mistakenly thought he was attending a performance of "Our Town".

@19

But if someone is so unstable that confronting him endangers anyone, then you can do absolutely nothing, because even getting house management to talk to him diplomatically could still set him off. And doing absolutely nothing is also still no guarantee that he won't hurt someone anyway.

@20: "This was a job for an audience member"??? No. The audience's job is to watch the show. Ushers are generally not prepared to deal with this either. This was a job for the management -- house manager, general manager, stage manager, artistic director -- any of those people are the ones whose jobs are either directly or indirectly to handle this asshat. Barring that, I'm glad Mr. Lacy stood up for his craft and tossed the creep.

Dan, I think you should start yelling "Straight!" during any show that features a heterosexual character. Good for the goose and all....

"Welcome to America, where we must defer to bigoted idiots at all times because our bigoted idiots tend to be armed."

No, we must not defer to bigoted idiots. It is your fear that all bigoted idiots are packing heat that makes you choose to defer to them.

I choose not to live in fear of bigoted idiots with guns. If one happens to cross my path (then I'll pee my pants) and shoot me, so be it. Sad. It seems silly to sour my days with irrational fear.

Never break character, period.

@ 24, that's something of a slippery slope fallacy. Good theaters can cope with the situation. The Alamo Drafthouse cinema chain does it all the time, and they're based in Texas.

@16: It's numbnuts like you that are the reason all my UChicago-related news feeds have been blowing up with overwrought freaking out for the past two weeks or whatever.

Silly country, as an actor and a bouncer I would have tossed him too, here i would just be very quick because the audiance would have probably jumped him before i got to him.
For a nation that likes to throw its weight around you seem not only to have institutionalized but also collectively internalized paranoid cowardice.

Imagine if Woodinville were located at the foot of the Grapevine, with a huge stucco wall built around it.

I have no idea why no one handled the situation before the actor had to, or if a theater in another town would have kept the actor on staff, but I can't miss an opportunity to share that Santa Clarita, CA is very, very strange place.

@9: did he break character or confront him AS big daddy?

because that would have been so sweet.

@25 I don't think it is unreasonable for a crowd of adults to tell a bigot to STFU or GTFO. A bigot who is yelling during a fucking play of all places.

I do not think it is unreasonable, but it is not their job. They should not have to deal with this kind of assholery.

I wonder how Emily will react when the next audience member yells "Cunt" every time she opens her mouth.

If anyone needs to be fired it's the house manager and those ushers for not 86ing that bigoted loser after the first couple of outbursts.

Repertory East Playhouse is an Equity-waiver theatre with 81 seats. If you blink too loudly, they can probably hear you on stage, never mind someone drunkenly yelling at the actors. And the other part of the equation is that Equity-waiver houses have a really difficult time with last-minute cast changes due to the extremely low pay -- they have to look for someone who just wants to do some live theatre and not worry about how much he's going to earn doing it, or someone who wants a live-theatre credit on his auditions CV. In a situation like this, it would definitely be the house manager's job to deal with the disruptive audience member, and the manager should have been on hand to do just that.

The guy shouldn't have been fired. The theater staff should have done it - they didn't; so this guy reasonably called out the bad audience member and two other audience members physically removed him. The theater staff owe the actors and the audience and the world at large a sincere apology and ought to make things right. Also, the asshole should disclose himself so he can be suitably dogpoopgirled.

The producers say they weren't aware of the disruptive boor. The incident occurred after intermission. Are there no staff in the theatre? If the ushers aren't comfortable handling the jerk, surely they can tell their boss, no?

Apparently the patron had been heckling throughout the entire performance. The actor shouldn't have gotten violent, but the ushers or management should have taken care of the heckler LONG before it reached that point.

@15 - it's typical for actors at every level, short of stardom, to send out postcards to agents, casting directors, fellow actors and potential ticket-buyers. It's self-promotion, and they're hoping someone will come see them and cast them in something else.

@41, thanks. I do the bare minimum of social media, and so it was a little quease-inducing to think that an avocation (community theatre) I enjoyed during college now seemed to require a fair amount of devotion to it.

I was reading just the other day that Zappos no longer posts job openings; if one desires employment there, you must join their private social network to schmooze and flatter your way to an offer.

The theater manager should have been fired instead. And the actor given a medal.

Cad in a hot tin theater.

I was in a theater once where a loud drunken domestic dispute erupted between three, I assume related, patrons. It started as loud talking and quickly turned to screaming epithets. We were on opposite sides and behind from them.

At first we thought it was some weird part of the show. But you could see the actors on stage get visibly distracted and upset. I'm ashamed to admit my first thought was "man, I hope there is no gun play" as I made our 'get the fuck outta there' plan. Then it broke out into an all-out fight.

I got up and headed to the isle - and then three or four other dudes got up, too. And we moved towards them. It was kinda funny, like slapstick, seeing people all dressed up losing they're shit. But everybody else was fairly calm. Or dumb struck.

By the time me and this other old dude got there the house lights were up and the actors calmly said "We'll be taking a quick intermission." People got up and started filing out to the lobby.

A couple poor teenaged ushers and some older lady manager were there trying to get the attention of these people all tangled up tussling and screaming, totally oblivious. At that point I could tell they were drunk morons. So me and these two other guys - one probably almost my fathers age maybe 70 - just waded in there and yanked them down the isle to the fire exit. By that point they regained some composure and stumbled out.

And that was that. The show started up again. It was Hamlet. So somehow it all made sense.

Elaine Stritch told the story of Ethel Merman leaving the stage during a performance of Call Me Madam, mid-note during a song, to remove a heckler - after which, she returned to her place onstage, picking up the song mid-note where she left off. If Ethel Merman saw fit to do it, I think it's ok.