Running through Aug. 16, Lincoln Center Festival’s “The Maids” — starring the formidable Cate Blanchett and French icon Isabelle Huppert — is off-Broadway.
It’s also off the charts — not only in terms of talent, but ticket prices.
A good orchestra seat at New York City Center will set you back $350 — this for a three-character play by the transgressive Jean Genet that runs all of 105 minutes.
Granted, some orchestra seats at the New York City Center are as cheap as $85.
Wait, did I just type “as cheap as $85”? Madness! Especially when you realize the top ticket was $105 when the same exact production played at the Sydney Theatre Company last year.
As for Huppert, she routinely packs them in over in France, but the priciest seats for her 2015 “The False Secrets,” in Paris, will cost $51 (thank you, public subsidies for the arts).
Sadly, “The Maids” is no anomaly, only the latest show asking theatergoers to crack open their 401(k)s if they want to avoid partial view. On Broadway, star Neil Patrick Harris fetches up to $450 in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” That’s sitcom star Neil Patrick Harris to you.
But back to the Lincoln Center Festival, which has discovered the wonders of “dynamic pricing,” otherwise known as “If you charge it, they will pay.”
I do have a soft spot for LCF, I really do. Remember when they built a whole venue from scratch for the extraordinary French company Théâtre du Soleil? Or how fun it was when they erected a replica of the Old Globe for the Royal Shakespeare Company? And those ticket prices were far from the dizzying heights of “Maids.”
What makes the current situation especially rich — pun intended — is that playwright Genet stuck to his subversive, anti-establishment guns his entire life. He never forgot that he began his career in extreme privation, writing his first novel, 1943’s “Our Lady of the Flowers,” in jail, on brown paper.
Even better, “The Maids” itself is very much about class warfare, with the title servants fantasizing about killing their mistress.
Perhaps one day audiences will have enough and charge theaters with pitchforks.
Or worse: They won’t turn up at all.