When humans get out of LINE

Imagine that you’re standing in line to pick up your prescription at the pharmacy, right? There’s someone in front of you, and he asks if you can hold his spot for a minute. He wants to pick up a pack of Ace It - test taking gum. Sure, you say, no problem. Now, it’s hella busy in there, right? Everyone is getting really frustrated because the woman at the counter is chatting with everyone as if no one else is wasting their lunch hour in that line, but when the guy comes back you’re only a few spots away from the register and the guy behind you protests. No, no, he says. She stepped out of line. She’s got to go back to the back of the line.

So this guy is really, really selfish. That’s just not the way the game is played, right? It’s understood that people are allowed to leave lines and come back if they ask and if they don’t take way too long. If they don’t abuse the privilege and screw things up for everyone. Most people would feel really embarrassed around someone with the brass to be so gauche. In fact, you might even decide to defend your decision to hold the guys spot and let him back in.

A line’s “justice” is mostly policed by its members, but many of us sort of feel like the protesting guy. We hate it when anyone ahead of us slows us down. When we’re in line, we love it when people ahead of us have to step out and leave their spot for good. When confusion happens, we are very tempted to use it to our advantage to jump a few spots ahead in line.

That’s our selfish individuality, but civilization has created a endless conventions and traditions that we’ve all learned to follow, such that, if everyone does really follow them, life works as optimally as it can for everyone. Lines capture these conventions so well. Lines are at once both cooperation and competition.

Israel Horovitz wrote a play about five people waiting in a line. It’s called Line. It ends in Philadelphia this Friday, and I saw it today. The same company that did Grace, The Luna Theater, put it on, and this one was comparably good. Imagine the scenario I’ve described above and then multiply people’s willingness to be unreasonable about their place in line by about 100 times and you’ve got the basic concept of this play.

The whole set is just some tape on the floor. Otherwise, it’s five people jockeying for position in a line for… well, you never quite know. They all really want to be first in it, though. You know, before the crowds come. They want to be first so badly that they are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to move up a spot or two.

It made me really uncomfortable to watch the misbehavior. The thing is, as unbelievable as the actions might have been, the emotions that motivated them did not seem unbelievable at all — at least to me. The only disbelief I had to suspend for this play is that people really could lose the inhibitions that make them behave. It’s not so much.

I hate watching people so uncivilized that they are willing to ignore basic conventions of cooperation for whatever their petty little immediate desire might be. When I hear stories of old women fighting over Christmas gifts at Macy’s, for example, it makes me want to go all Kaczynski and bug on out to a log cabin somewhere. That’s precisely Horovitz’s point, and the production reminded me of Best in Show, the movie about the American Kennel Club’s signature competition and the barbarous behavior of its competitors.

Best in Show was so good that I never, ever want to see it again. Line was much the same experience for me, so good that I suffered.