Like a lot of people I know, I used to love going to movies, until I simply couldn’t take people pigging out around me any longer. The constant crunch, munch and slurp—the junk, the smell, the noise, the talk, the charming fuck-you mentality that goes with it all—ruined movie-going for me.

The writing is now on the wall for our theaters, where, until only recently, eating and drinking at your seat were forbidden. Now even those ritual warnings about unwrapping candy and cough drops before the curtain goes up are out-of-date. “This let-them-eat-snacks philosophy,” The New York Times reported on Jan. 5, “has been embraced at the Helen Hayes, Hilton, New Amsterdam, Eugene O’Neill and Walter Kerr Theaters, as well as all nine houses owned by the Nederlander Organization.”

The Nederlander, Disney, Jujamcyn and Clear Channel theater owners are the ones involved in this latest unacceptable example of greed. “This is part of a broader attempt to enhance the audience experience,” rationalized Jim Boese, Nederlander’s vice president.

Mr. Boese, a word in your ear: Imagine you’ve paid $200 for you and your guest to see a revival of Death of a Salesman at one of your lovely Broadway houses. You’re sitting there wishing there were more legroom at these prices—but let’s not go into that now. The excellent new production is about to begin when the couple nearest you start to dig into a giant bucket of buttered popcorn, to be washed down with Coke and ice rattling through Act I in Arthur Miller commemorative plastic cups. In front of you, another couple is enjoying hot dogs with onions and beer, while someone behind you is saying, “Pass the soy sauce, sweetheart.”

Tell us, Mr. Boese—how come none of this distracts you in any way from what’s happening onstage, but somehow “enhances” your theater-going “experience”? Am I exaggerating? With all grudging respect, Mr. Boese, please resist responding that you don’t sell hot dogs in your theaters.

You will. Popcorn today; wraps, salads and dogs tomorrow. Why not? It happened at the movies.

Why can’t America stop eating for two hours? The Times theater story was ignited by a stunned Patti LuPone telling us that when she was playing Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd last season she found herself distracted by a couple in the front row wrestling over the remains of a bag of popcorn. The Times went on to report, however: “All the theater owners whose houses serve food said they were investigating packaging that would reduce wrapper noise.”

Thank God for that. It’s certainly comforting to think that Rocco Landesman, president of Jujamcyn, and his fellow Broadway producers have hired a crack team of Nobel Laureate research scientists to solve the mystery of wrapper noise. Coming soon to a theater near you: the world’s first silent bag of potato chips! But how will the world’s finest minds solve the problem of eating the chips silently … ?

“Broadway is about a theatrical experience. It’s not about pulling out Marie Callender’s chicken pot pie and a Sterno,” Patti LuPone argued. “Would you go to church and pull out a ham sandwich? I don’t think so. Then why would you do it at the theater?”

I demur only in that the theater isn’t a church: It’s our refuge and respite from the clamor of the world, and the unholy place where we might better understand and enjoy the world. It’s our sanctuary and home where eternal stories are told, words are heard, and music and poetry are cherished in the two-hour traffic of the stage. But our faith in theater is a secular religion, and Broadway has always been a rough-and-tumble hybrid of art and commerce.

As was Shakespeare’s theater. When the remains of the 16th-century, open-air Rose theater were discovered buried in Bankside, London, in 1989, among the artifacts excavated were various coins and peanut shells.

“To be or not to be”—“Get your peanuts!”—“That is the question”—“Peanuts here!”

Theater has never been pure, and the masks of the tragedian and the clown are its two-faced Janus. Which came first in today’s newly guzzling Broadway: audience members who now want to eat and drink during a show, or opportunistic theater owners who saw the potential for more bottom-line profit?

It’s been quite a while since our established Broadway power-brokers led public taste. All praise, then, to Gerald Schoenfeld, the chairman of the Shubert Organization, for refusing to jump on the gravy train. Mr. Schoenfeld acknowledges that allowing eating and drinking during shows annoys many patrons as well as the performers. The Shubert’s 16 Broadway houses will continue to restrict the food to the lobby.

It may not be much in this cockeyed caravan, but we can thus defect from all the annoying Broadway theaters and patronize the Shubert houses only. We can also hope that the performers themselves will stand up to be counted.

During a now-renowned performance of The History Boys last season, a cell phone rang three times in the audience, upsetting its star actor, Richard Griffiths, who was in mid-scene. Mr. Griffiths stepped forward to the footlights and announced in no uncertain terms that if a cell phone rang again, he would stop the performance and wouldn’t appear again that night. No cell phone rang again. None dared.

Next time Patti LuPone is disturbed by two pigs in the audience fighting over the last handful of popcorn as she’s busting her chops onstage, she might consider stopping the show, as Mr. Griffiths did. She could tell the chomping culprits in so many sweet words, “You’re ruining the show for us and everyone around you. Either you stop or I do. You’re not in a movie theater. It’s live!”

Unless the star performers themselves protest, I fear the worst. The good Gerald Schoenfeld is 82 years old, and his long reign at the Shuberts cannot last forever. It’s conceivable there will soon come a time when every Broadway theater functions like a movie house. And our big nonprofit theaters on Broadway—the Roundabout at the American Airlines Theatre, the Manhattan Theatre Club at the Biltmore, Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont—will surely follow.

The Disney, Nederlander and Jujamcyn organizations et al. must reverse their grasping bottom-line foolishness and follow the lead of the Shuberts. Those who want to eat and slurp during a show should go to a supper club. All we are saying is let the curtain go up in food-free peace. Let the real theatergoers enjoy the show.

The news that the folks behind The Producers plan to set aside at least 50 premium seats for every performance and charge an unprecedented $480 a ticket must surely amount to the most laughably unacceptable example of greed in the history of beautiful Broadway.

But remember, these same producers of the biggest hit show in recent memory are really sensitive people. They had intended to announce the plan last month, but delayed because of the Sept. 11 tragedy. Equally sensitive to the timing of the announcement, they have also pledged that a percentage of the new ticket price is to be donated to the Twin Towers Fund. Isn't that thoughtful?

Let's look at the facts and the rationalizations, as reported in The Times ' front-page story on Oct. 26. "What we're trying to do here is strike a blow at the heart of the scalping operation," explained Rocco Landesman, one of the show's principal producers and the president of Jujamcyn Theaters (which owns the St. James, home to The Producers ). "The scalpers and their profits serve no one but the scalpers. Those monies belong to the people who created the show, pure and simple."

In other pure and simple words, Mr. Landesman believes he's taking "those monies" from the pockets of evil scalpers and putting it back into his own. He's robbing the rich to feed the poor! Never mind that this Robin Hood of showbiz is already sitting on a Producers gold mine and that all concerned are already making small fortunes from the show. In what conceivable way is the new $480 ticket going to put the scalpers out of business?

I've just visited www.the-producers-tickets.net, one of the Web's ticket brokerage sites. Seats for the show are readily available any time, at all prices! This Saturday's matinee and evening performances: 156 priceless seats for sale, from $285 to $877.50 a pop. Thanksgiving Friday? One hundred and sixty-five seats for sale, same price range. Halloween night? Take your pick from 50 seats, from $195 to $810. How about New Year's Eve? Difficult, but not impossible: 20 seats for sale from $405 to $1,080. From this one Web site alone, tickets are available for any night.

Mr. Landesman and his fellow producers aren't about to put scalpers out of business. To the contrary, they want to be in on the business. At best, they're undercutting their top price. "Don't go to the scalpers," they are saying. "Come to us." In effect, they're making the shady scalping business legitimate.

In what cause? Not for profit, of course. (Profit is never mentioned in all of this.) Their target customer for the $480 ticket is described as "large corporations, first-class tourists and individuals seeking prime locations, frequently on short notice"–a group that previously "had been forced to obtain these seats through brokers unaffiliated with the show."

Nobody's forcing anyone to do anything. People–even "first-class" people–are never obliged to deal with rip-off brokers. But apart from the business, what Mr. Landesman and his merry men have in mind is revenue more comparable to the price that big shots pay for corporate suites at Madison Square Garden or the World Series. Except, of course, there aren't any corporate suites groaning with buffet tables and open bars at the St. James Theatre. Well, not yet.

They'll just have to pretend. The theatergoing corporate types will have to pretend they're not sitting next to Joe Public, who's paid a top ticket price of a mere $100. The hundred smackeroos a ticket was itself a record on Broadway. And who set it? Why, the producers of The Producers , who upped the price of admission just as soon as decency permitted following the rave reviews.

It's now only a matter of time before other Broadway shows jump on the $480-a-ticket bandwagon–just as the $100 ticket is now considered normal. Where does that leave the rest of us? I mean, people who love the theater and like to support it. This latest example of greed cleaves the already huge rift between those who can still afford to go to Broadway and those who cannot. It's a damaging and shameful thing for them to have done–without social responsibility or conscience, without a sense of community, and horribly out of touch with the times.

Wasn't it yesterday that Broadway was on its knees begging us all to "support" it in its darkest hour? Who feels like supporting it now? The dishonest idea that the $480 ticket is "doing good" is the last straw. The producers say they will help the victims of the World Trade Center, pledging to donate $150 from every $480 ticket to the Twin Towers Fund for several months. And after the several months have passed?

They are cravenly trying to make price-gouging seem like a selfless act by hooking into a tragedy. Who are they kidding? It's simple: If they would like to make a generous donation on behalf of the show to the Twin Tower Fund, let them donate the entire revenue from the $480 ticket. Let them give a gala benefit. Let them offer 50 free seats a night to the grieving families of the firefighters and so many others. But don't let them tell us they're doing it for charity.

I hope the Broadway artists themselves–and the stars of The Producers , in particular–are horrified by what's happening and will make their voices heard. It's difficult to believe that Mel Brooks, of all great men, had anything to do with any of this. But he's also one of the show's producers (which, along with his royalties as creator, composer-lyricist and co-author, is currently earning him an estimated $3 million a year). This wonderful show famously celebrates Broadway by poking affectionate fun at roguish producers. But we have run out of affection now, and this is no fun.

The cheap opportunists behind the $480 ticket must think again about their crass rationalizations and cancel the plan.

My love for Rocco will doubtless surprise some people, including Rocco himself. He is, after all, the president of Jujamcyn Theaters, whom I once challenged to sit in one of his own awesomely cramped Broadway houses and swear to the theatergoing world that there was enough legroom for even a severely depressed dwarf. He did not rise to the challenge. Not only is our Rocco well over six feet tall on a good day, he would have had to sit through his own production of The Sound of Music one more time. He's no fool! To the contrary, this leading commercial producer (and former professor at the Yale School of Drama) turns out to be trouble with a capital T, which rhymes with "we"-and we are delighted.

In a stunning attack on nonprofit theaters-stunning because it came from so unexpected a source-he accused the nonprofit movement of selling out by modeling itself on-of all low things-the commercial theater! Now that must surely be a first. In effect, a Broadway producer is saying to the nonprofit opposition: Don't be like us. Writing in the June 4 Arts & Leisure Section of The New York Times , Rocco took particularly lethal aim at the Roundabout Theatre's artistic director, Todd Haimes, for playing it safe with star-driven, mediocre subscription fare and for selling the name and dignity of his theater to American Airlines for a few more pieces of silver.

"It would, I suppose, be hyperbolic to say that Todd Haimes has had a more pernicious influence on English-speaking theater than anyone since Oliver Cromwell (and it wouldn't be nice, either, since Mr. Haimes is a personable and honorable man)," Rocco wrote in his best I-come-not-to-bury-Caesar style. "But it can be reasonably argued that the forces of the marketplace through the years have been just as effective a censor as government edicts."

He was boldly arguing that subsidized theaters like the Roundabout have lost their way by pandering to sleepy subscribers and Broadway values, or that they function increasingly in open, unembarrassed alliance with the commercial producers themselves. In other, bitter words: There no longer exists a clear difference between the commercial and the nonprofit, between the bottom line and the artistically independent-and for some of us, the lifeblood of American theater is at stake.

When Lincoln Center jumped into bed with the Broadway producer Garth Drabinsky in 1998 to co-produce an expensive new musical, Parade , my strong objection was that the independence of our nonprofit theaters ought to be sacrosanct. What do we see all around us but more compromise, more and more conformity-a diminishment, if you will, of individualism and freedom of choice. I look to our nonprofit theaters not to compromise more, but less . I look to them as the last stronghold where certain stories may be told in liberty. The enduring strength of nonprofit theater-of the very identity which accounts for its unique contribution and artistic vision-resides in the rejection of Broadway values.

It's argued that without Broadway investors and their "enhancement money," nonprofit theaters like Lincoln Center, the Public Theater and the Manhattan Theatre Club wouldn't be able to produce big musicals. My answer to that is: Then produce small musicals. And let the theaters that are held in public trust remain proudly independent-producing musicals and plays that Broadway daren't risk, which is why they're in business in the first place.

Why, then, do commercial producers make alliances with nonprofit theaters? Not for art's sake, surely. There's only one reason: It's a safer and cheaper way of producing. From New York to Los Angeles to Seattle to San Francisco to San Diego, the nonprofit theaters of America are being used simply as try-out houses for Broadway. A musical version of The Full Monty is currently in production at the nonprofit Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, where it's partly financed by Fox Searchlight, the producers of the 1997 hit movie. The show, once tested in the less pressurized regional marketplace, is heading for Broadway (where it's due to open at one of Rocco's Jujamcyn Theaters!). But the question of whether the Old Globe should function as a try-out house-or whether The Full Monty , the musical, is a particularly thrilling idea-has been lost in the typical commercial opportunism of it all.

Then again, the nonprofit artistic directors argue back with their glib mantra of righteous defensiveness that their artistic integrity is always maintained and that their theaters share in the Broadway profits that help to subsidize their "real" work. They never mention that they also share in the losses and could lose their shirts-thereby jeopardizing everything else they do. Nor is their artistic independence truly maintained, any more than one can become a little bit pregnant. When the Public Theater's recent Wild Party opened on Broadway to a thumbs-down Times review, one of its principal co-producers, Scott Rudin, wanted to close the show immediately. The idea of nurturing a show or an artist through rough times is itself uncommercial.

The "right to fail" is a more typically English concept. That hallowed right-created by the legendary George Devine at the nonprofit powerhouse Royal Court Theatre-is the bedrock of government-subsidized theater in England. "Failing," like not making a profit, is an un-American activity. Yet this country's own subsidized theaters-supported primarily by endowments, corporations and philanthropy-were actually created in the 1960's as a daring alternative to commercial theater. They created their own "right to fail," or the nerve to take uncommercial artistic risks. But today, the line has become so blurred that Gerald Schoenfeld, chairman of the immensely powerful Shubert Organization on Broadway, can claim that the differences between profit and nonprofit are essentially obsolete. There are differences, even so. When was the last time the Shubert independently produced an unknown dramatist on Broadway? But when the Roundabout produces such hackneyed, sure-fire commercial crap as Neil Simon's Hotel Suite -a collection of one-acts taken from Mr. Simon's well-known Plaza Suite , California Suite and London Suite -we're entitled to ask whether this is the most adventurous work a nonprofit theater can offer us.

Our theaters are compromised enough. The nonprofit theater is nontaxable. If it can't behave, it should pay tax like the commercial theater. If it sleeps with Broadway producers, it should forfeit its special status. Let our compliant nonprofit theaters wake up from their smug, slumbering capitulation and return to their unique raison d'être , which is their fierce artistic independence, their social contract with the community, their belief in the intelligence of all audiences, their faith in new talent and in our theatrical heritage, and their joy in creating lots and lots of trouble.