Why Do We Fall For Sob Stories? - Page 2

Through it all, ticket sales have soared, which raises an uncomfortable question: are people paying to see calamity? At a preview last Tuesday, members of the audience seemed conflicted. Outside the theatre, Alaina Schwartz, aged twelve, who had come from Long Island with her family, was asked if she hoped to see someone fall. “Yes! Yes!” she said. “I’m weird about that stuff. Like, there was a roller coaster and it kind of fell backwards, and I was kind of wishing that I was on that roller coaster at the time that it fell.” Her father, Steven, looked concerned.

“I hope somebody falls but they’re O.K.,” her sister Alexa, fourteen, said.

A third sister, Stephanie, nine, objected: “If something goes wrong, that’s bad luck for us!”

In the lobby, Allie Bauer, a Yale junior, said, “There’s a certain allure to this being a very dangerous performance.”

“You’re more evil than I am,” her classmate Will Moritz said, eating a Twizzler. After thinking it over, he added, “If I could see someone fall from the rafters but not go to the hospital—just magically get up—then I’d be down.” (He’s majoring in psychology.)

Matt Clements, a cameraman from midtown, had come to the show with his girlfriend. “She wants to see blood,” he explained.

The girlfriend, a lawyer named Carol Barbeiro, didn’t deny it. “It’s like Formula One,” she reasoned. “You want to see the car crash.” She added, “We like to go to Rockefeller Center to watch the ice-skaters fall.”

Possibly to Barbeiro’s dismay, the show went off that night without a hitch. (To say nothing of its dramaturgical flaws: in an early review, a Bloomberg critic called it “an unfocused hodge-podge of storytelling, myth-making and spectacle that comes up short in every department.”) During the flying sequences, the occupant of seat E114 wasn’t even tempted to put on the hard hat he had packed in case of emergency. But he was nevertheless troubled. What did the bloodlust of his fellow-theatregoers say about humanity?

“It sounds like morbid curiosity,” John Portmann, the author of “When Bad Things Happen to Other People,” said the following day. In his book, he argues that Schadenfreude can be socially useful when applied to the sinful. “St. Thomas Aquinas, writing more than seven hundred years ago, asked, ‘Will the people in Heaven get to see the people in Hell, and what should their attitude be?’ He says yes, the sainted will be able to laugh and jeer at the damned, but the primary reason is that they have proof of God’s justice.

“Remember that pride is the worst of the seven deadly sins,” Portmann went on. “Maybe what people are saying is ‘I think that Broadway is getting way out of control and I’m happy to see failure, so I’m willing to see actors get hurt. Then the producers will see that they are walking down a path that I didn’t endorse.’ ”

John Munder Ross, a psychologist and the author of “The Sadomasochism of Everyday Life,” said that we all have an unconscious desire to experience pain vicariously, and that theatregoing can ritualize these tendencies. “If it’s collective, it attenuates the individual guilt.”