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The other week Laura gave me tickets to one of the OCT plays, a musical featuring music sung by the cast. There was also dancing. Myself and two of my acquaintances were shown to our seats, front and center two rows back. It was amazing.

Those seats would cost upwards of 4000 dollars in NY. There were however two seats slightly to the right and in front of us that remained empty, the whole of the presentation.

It made me remember all those great movies that used the empty theater seat as a plot device, perhaps overusing the cliche in fact to render it more of a deus ex machina. In Waiting for Guffman, the empty seat is famed critic Mr. X{fact department, please research this and fill correct answer before publication} Guffman who will save all these performers from the dreadful ignomy of living in Missouri. I won't ruin the denoument, but Guffman is in all actuality just some average halfwit who had once been the White Guy on The Jeffersons.
The other famous open seat in a theater set in a movie is from Rushmore, where young Max Rushmore played by that young boy who looks like Tom Cruise but more Jewish attempts to seduce his second grade teacher by inviting her to a play, a play that he wrote. The attempt fails when the empty seat is in turn taken up by the ghost doctor of her former lover. The ghost doctor lover is coincidentally played by the brother of the director, even though I don't think this is mentioned at anytime during the film.


The final famous empty seat is from Kramer versus Kramer. Drew Barrymore in one of her pre-coke binge roles, plays the youngest Kramer who is trying to stop her parents Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep in her first onscreen role) from finalizing their divorce. In a slight differentiation, the empty seat for a performance of the Vagina Monologues is not used to bring her parents together, but Drew cunningly gives the empty seat ticket to Mrs. Kramer's former tennis instructor, played ably by Peter Scolari, who's physical daliances led to the Kramer2 breakup in the first place! The final fight scene is remarkable mostly for it's highly stylized choreography, but also for the security guard that breaks it up, played by a very young Michael Richards, many years before his star breaking turn on Fridays. Astute readers and watchers would simply guffaw at the fact that this makes the scene actually Kramer versus Kramer versus Kramer versus Kramer.