Thread by @BCDreyer

I'd like borrow this, if I may, for live theater:

What's the most visceral collective audience response you've ever experienced in a theater?

Mine was the response to "Well, it would be your lucky day if I was" (in Angels in America: Perestroika).

The laughter stopped the show for at least three full minutes, and as the audience quieted down someone let out a late guffaw and IT STARTED ALL OVER AGAIN.

[h/t @audonamission]

[This was a very early preview of the original NYC production, so basically no one in the house knew anything at all.]

Second place: Penelope Ann Miller's big speech at the end of Our Town (1988):

What's the sound of an entire theater sobbing?

Ugh, I'd like *to* borrow this, for pete's sake.

And when I say three I mean five, so it was probably four.

And you know how I like to sneak in after dark and delete tweets with typos in them?

WELL, CAN'T DO IT THIS TIME.

Here's an opposite-of-this story (stop me if you've heard this one, or don't):

A matinee of The Lisbon Traviata at the Manhattan Theatre Club.

John Slattery makes his entrance stark raving nude. He is quite the spectacle.

From somewhere in the theater a single voice cries out, boomingly:

OH. MY. GOD.

Does the audience burst into raucous laughter and applause?

Nope.

Not a titter, not an iota of audible response.

The actors, and the audience, just proceed as if nothing at all has happened.

(I dunno, perhaps everyone in the theater thought that that OH. MY. GOD. was a voice inside their own head.)