‘Hadestown’ Audience Member With Hearing Loss Urges Social Media Users To “Stop Harassing” Lillias White: Actress Is Not “The Enemy”

Greg Evans
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The Hadestown audience member with hearing loss who was reprimanded from the stage by Lillias White when the Broadway actress mistook a captioning device for a recording device is urging social media users to “please stop harassing” the Broadway star.

“Ms. White is not a malicious person, nor is she the enemy,” said Samantha Coleman in a tweet this afternoon, noting that White’s social media pages, particularly Instagram, “have been flooded with ageist & racist comments.”

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On Wednesday night, Coleman was in the front row of the Walter Kerr Theatre using a venue-provided captioning device during a performance of Hadestown when White, one of the stars of the musical, reprimanded her from the stage “not once but twice, at least.” The actress mistakenly thought Coleman was illegally recording the performance.

The incident has drawn considerable media attention since Coleman went public with a tearful Instagram post on Wednesday night. Hadestown producers and Jujamcyn Theaters, the company that owns the Kerr, apologized yesterday and said they were reviewing their policies and internal protocols “to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

White has not commented on the incident.

Today, Coleman beseeched the public to stop harassing the actress, and to recognize the larger problem: “systemic abelism in society and in the industry.”

“I ask to extend kindness and forgiveness to Ms. White,” Coleman writes. “Her social media pages, particularly Instagram, have been flooded with ageist & racist comments. Please stop harassing her.”

Coleman also notes that she recognizes “the privilege of being a white woman” making an accusation against a Black woman. “Ms. White is not a malicious person, nor is she the enemy,” Coleman writes, adding that the villain “of this tale is systemic abelism in society and in the industry – not her. Education is key. Please be kind.”

Nor was Coleman the only person noting racist undercurrents in the social media backlash against White. James Harkness, one of the Grammy-nominated stars of Broadway’s 2018 hit musical Ain’t Too Proud – The Life and Times of The Temptations, pointed out the disparity in reactions to White’s reprimand and those of the white Broadway star Patti LuPone, who famously stopped a 2009 performance of Gypsy when someone in the audience repeatedly used a flash camera to take photos (listen to the enthusiastic audience response to LuPone’s angry scolding here).

Last season, LuPone’s take-down of a maskless audience member at a post-show talkback session with the cast of Company immediately became the talk of Broadway and a repeated punchline on this year’s Tony Awards.

Although the White-LuPone comparisons go only so far – White did not interrupt or stop the show as LuPone did with Gypsy, and the Company incident did not take place during a show – Harkness points out the gulf in public responses.

“You do not get to pedestal ‘your’ icons and attempt to tear down others,” Harkness said in a lengthy Twitter post today. “Enough with double standards for behavior. Lillias mistook the hearing aid device for a cell phone. From the stage that is an easy mistake so the catalyst for her actions were the same as Patti’s.”

The actor continued, “Ms. White did not deliberately attack a disabled theater goer. Yet many are phrasing comments that way deliberately in order to shame Ms. White. This is unfair and shameful. Frankly- NO person has the right to stop a musical or play to address an audience member over a device. That is why we have stage and house management. But if you are going to praise Patti but remark to Lillias ‘it’s not your job to interrupt a show over a phone issue’- there is bias at play and it must be pointed out.”

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