Image courtesy of Pixabay.
Last night (August 7, 2019) in New York City, following a weekend of more mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso, Times Square had a false alarm that demonstrated just how adrenalized our society has become. I posted the following on Facebook after the incident, both to share the story and to process the event for myself. I thought ANIMA Blog readers might want to hear the details as well.
We are a nation on edge and, of the many, many times I’ve seen Hamilton, this easily marked the most unusual.
Literally two minutes before the very end of the show in the Richard Rodgers theater on Broadway, just after Aaron Burr’s character had killed Alexander Hamilton’s, we had a shooter scare in the building.
Aaron Burr had been singing about having become “the villain in your history” and was just about to tell us how “I should have known the world was wide enough for both Hamilton and me.” In other words, how the violence between opposing sides proved unnecessarily destructive.
My friends and I were up in the mezzanine and could hear a bit of commotion from the audience below us to the left, down in the orchestra. People talking, and then more people talking, and then people moving. The sound grew until Daniel Breaker, playing Burr, paused and the music stopped, and the PA system asked that the “actors, please clear the stage.”
At that point, a wave of panic swept through the building. Folks started running for the exits, trying to get out of the building as quickly as they could. Some ducked behind souvenir desks. Others crowded into stairwells scrambling to get downstairs. But the Richard Rodgers Theater is not made for quick, mass egress, so traffic kind of stopped. In desperation, still others just lay down between seats, covering their heads and staying still amidst the gasps and the urgent voices. I watched and listened as one of the ushers spoke into her walkie talkie, “I need to know what’s going on.”
After what seemed quite a while but was probably just a minute or two (maybe it actually was three or four?), the stage manager came on the PA to assure us to “Please remain calm. We have a medical situation. There is no danger in the building.”
At that point, though the house was now half full, you could hear a collective sigh and the group begin to recollect itself. But folks were clearly shaken. One of my friends that I was with had had a child in two mass shooting situations and trembled in my arms for a few minutes. I saw many people, especially younger folks, with tears in their eyes. Two of my other friends, just in from Australia for a conference we’re all attending, noted with sadness that this was another event that qualified for the “essentially American” tally of experiences they’d recently started keeping.
I’m not sure why I didn’t panic more. Mostly I just sensed that something more innocent was happening and the crowd was overreacting because of El Paso and Dayton and our president’s rhetoric.
We later found out, when the stage manager came out for a third time—the second time was to tell us that they were deciding whether to come back out to finish the show—that the whole thing had been triggered by a few motorcycles backfiring on the street outside the theater. People panicking from OUTSIDE the theater in Times Square rushed INTO the Richard Rodgers and the rear orchestra and the whole chain of events cascaded from there. Nobody else knew much of anything except that other people were afraid and that quickly escalated to assumptions and the wider terror. Wow. No fun.
As it turned out, the performers—and all credit to them—did come back out to finish the last few minutes of the show. Some of them were clearly shaken too, but I imagine it was probably comforting to finish the show as well: “You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story.”
I’m thankful that the scare proved to be only that, just a scare. And I’m sad for what we have become as a nation, where a horrible interpretation of stray sounds seems just as plausible as any others. I get it. And it’s a bummer.
If you get to see Hamilton someday, I sincerely hope it remains free of such an event. May you be safe wherever you are. May we keep bringing beautiful art into the world. And may we stay strong in the face of all this madness.
Big hugs to you all.
P.S. If you haven’t yet seen the show and you’re concerned that I didn’t give you a spoiler alert about Hamilton’s death before mentioning it, worry not. Burr tells you about it in the opening number. 😀
P.P.S. For more details of the scare, you can check this piece in the New York Times.
P.P.P.S. We did actually enjoy the show.
