The Gay Uncle went to see a Chekhov play the other day, performed in a friend’s backyard upstate. This is the third of these annual summer Chekhov Saturdays he’s been to at this house, but it’s been a couple years since he saw The Cherry Orchard, and they’ve run out of real plays, so they had to do one called Platonov. This play is rarely staged, in part because it was shuttered in a drawer until long after Anton’s death, in part because it’s a sprawling mess, and in part because it’s seven hours long. Literally. Fortunately, the production Gunc saw had been edited down, so it was only five hours long. (However, there was a barbecue in the middle stretching it out to the full seven.) This isn’t meant to imply that G.U. didn’t find the “evening” entertaining. He liked the play. It felt like a first draft for all of Chekhov’s other plays, with all the same themes and ideas. The acting and direction was top quality. And the staging–at this old lakefront house, and using it’s yards and the lake itself as sets–was magical. There were a few notable drawbacks: The lack of booze at the barbecue; the marathon-like length; and the dearth of real hotness among the male actors. Oh, and one other thing. That in the intervening years since his last attended performance, literally everyone that the director knows had a kid, so the audience was littered with 18 month-olds. This wouldn’t have been an issue in and of itself–G.U., as you know, likes children. But for some reason, parents forget that tots this age aren’t invisible…or inaudible. So, for example, when their baby begins making noise during the performance of a seven hour play–and Gunc doesn’t mean just the occasional gurgle or coo, but hours of constant gobbles, shrieks, and squawks–they tend to just sit there and pretend like nothing’s happening. He wants to tell these parents something. This “response” does not solve this problem. Gunc’s advice? When this happens, do everyone a favor: leave. And that doesn’t mean just taking a few paces backwards. It means Walk Away. Far away. Out of hearing range. (Test: if you can still hear the sound of the performance clearly, the audience can still hear your screaming baby; you are not out of hearing range.) This is not only better for your child, who sincerely believes it’s having a two-way conversation with the actors, but for the rest of the audience who–contrary to what you may think–came to listen to the performance, not your barking offspring. We call this “Play Time Etiquette”, but it applies equally to most other public productions like movies, ballet, or fashion week. It doesn’t, however, apply to NASCAR, because it’s so fucking loud at those races already.