The audience from Hell

I agree! Coming from a teaching background myself I have often seen students "behave" far better than adults. Just last week a friend of mine spent the entire night having the back of her seat continuously rocked while she was trying to watch a play and it was not a student sitting behind her! I would be very careful about alienating students in my theatre because let's face it an audience is an audience and without an audience there is no play! Also if they are trying to throw the actors off course the actors should suck it up and deal with it. For me, an actor bitching about someone in the audience throwing them off by pulling a face is like a person in a swimming pool bitching about the rain getting them wet. If we start not letting students sit in the front rows of our theatre. Where does it stop? Perhaps they shouldn't be allowed on public transport either... Perhaps we shouldn't even allow them to walk the streets at will. Perhaps we should start to lock our youth in cages when they are nto locked inside their schools. Perhaps I should discriminate against old people as we like to do against the young. How would you feel if I said I want no old men in my front row because their "Old man smell" is throwing off my actors... Or perhaps the faces they pull, that "here I am, impress me" attitude and look that many people like to attatch to the older generation. If we don't want our kids using mobile phones in the theatre, then we need to show them there is a consequence for doing so. If they are caught, take away their phones at intermission. If it happens again, all mobile phones are handed in before each performance to me the teacher and each phone is placed in an envelope with the students name on it. We have to find other solutions to our problems than simply pointing fingers and pushing people into corners where they can be ignored. Having said all this and despite my tongue-in-cheek comments below, 98% of the student audiences I have performed to have been absolutely delightful and I would welcome them back again and again.