THEATER: *&$! unhappy customer

Yesterday I took my family, at substantial expense, to see the matinee of a play, “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.” It was promoted with a cartoon drawing of some nerdy looking middle schoolers as “Six awkward spelling champions learn that winning (and losing) isn’t everything. While candidly disclosing hilarious and touching stories…This show is a riotous ride…”

I thought this would be a fun play to which I could take my 12-year-old granddaughter. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

While the adults who portrayed the middle schoolers did a fine job of acting and their singing skills were superb, the play itself was utterly inappropriate for children. It did contain some good, truly funny lines; however, much of the material was quite “adult” in nature and some of it was downright raunchy. But the most offensive thing about the play was that there were several instances of using the name of our Lord as a curse word. I was sorely tempted to stand up and walk out after the first instance, and perhaps I should have; however, I was seated in the middle of the third row and felt it would have been rude and disrespectful to both the actors and the rest of the audience.

I am very disappointed in The Modern Theater and feel I can no longer trust them to tell me ahead of time if there is offensive material in one of their plays.

SHARON KING

Post Falls