Social Distancing and the Power of Audience
It may be possible to play a basketball game or tape a TV show without anyone in the stands. But when it comes to theatre, there will be no quick fixes. Because here the audience is the show.
[NOTE: As of March 12, 2020, all Broadway shows have been cancelled through April 12, 2020 and producers are refunding all ticket orders. Visit your point of purchase seller for details.]
Professional sports teams are competing for goals, scores, baskets, etc. without the fuel that is the noise made by fans in the stands. Late night television talk show hosts are delivering their sharp wit to empty studios. Sunday night Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden will take to the debate stage in an empty hall. Festivals have been canceled or postponed. The state of Washington has just announced a ban on gatherings of more than 250 people.
And yet, remarkably, as of this writing, Broadway remains open for business as usual. I wonder how long that gambit can possibly hold. A few weeks ago, my friend Gordon and I spent a Saturday afternoon and evening in a dark theatre with about a thousand other warm bodies taking in the astonishing two-parter, The Inheritance. The several hours flew by for the most part, until the last 90 minutes of the second part when the temperature of the theatre began an inexorable climb as the AC seemed to falter. Coronavirus had only just grabbed headlines from China and Iran, mostly, and so any discomfort we may have felt sweating in our seats wasn’t compounded by fear and panic about which microbes we may have been breathing in.
All playwrights understand that without the audience, the play doesn’t really play. Playwrights, I would argue, know and feel this truth on a deeper level than other artists who make work for audiences.
We write dialogue to be brought to life by actors who speak and move and breathe in ways that help us understand the universal humanity at the core of whatever our play’s characters might be up to. But the actions of our characters, the words they say to cover their tracks, the way they choose to look their fellow humans in the eye (or not) from moment to moment, the inevitable accumulation of sorrow, laughter, garbage, disappointment, resentment, generosity, surprise, etc. is all dependent on the way the audience see and hear what’s going on on stage.
The people who sit in the dark, (perhaps in part empowered by the darkness) are the final judge of what it is that’s happening and what in God’s name it all might mean as it relates to the complicated lives lived outside the theatre in the real world.
When an audience feels something deeply, the playwright feels that shift viscerally. As playwrights we wait for it. We need it. We write toward it.
Truthfully, it is what we live for as artists, those moments when we can feel — palpably — the feelings, the allegiance, the point of view of an entire room shift at once. And as that happens, when it happens, IF it happens, we understand that we have succeeded in writing the play.
Composers may feel the mood of an audience at the premiere of a new symphony or song cycle or whatever, but their work is not nearly as inextricably tied to the ebb and flow of its audience. If you doubt this, consider for a moment that most music can be enjoyed by listening to an audio file at home just as much as it can be in the concert hall. This is also true of sporting events, although honestly, I know so little about sports that I shouldn’t say more. Suffice it to say, people tell me the Super Bowl works really well as a game enjoyed by most people in the comfort of their living rooms.
Even a filmmaker, (and I am one), doesn’t have the same relationship to an audience as the playwright has. For one thing, by the time the audience files in and takes their seats, every moment in the story that’s about to unfold has been set in stone, every shot placed in the edit to draw the attention here or there, every music cue refined and placed with an unparalleled precision. When I’m sitting in the audience watching a film I’ve directed, I am much more relaxed than when I’m sitting in the house watching a play I’ve written unfold on stage. If an audience fails to respond to a beat in a scene in a film, there’s nothing I can do about it. If an audience fails to respond to a beat in a scene in a play, there’s also nothing I can do about it but I sit in the dark with the illusion that those people living and breathing my characters on stage might just respond to my telepathic intentions.
The most important distinction between a play and a film is that the actors in a play are aware of the audience’s reaction moment to moment. Actors in a film are not. And so, nothing the audience does during the screening of a film can in any way impact any aspect of any actor’s performance.
But in the theatre, audience and actors set out on a journey together. And nobody can really be 100% sure of how (or even if) it’s all gonna work out.
In the theatre, anything is possible and most of the uncertainty hanging in the air can be traced to the unpredictable hearts and minds of the crowd that has gathered to bear witness in the dark.
So, here’s the thing. Plays really shouldn’t be performed without their audiences. Because in the theatre, unlike anywhere else, the audience plays a role. Sure. The characters on stage are performing an illusion, acting as though they are alone in life without you, but, what you all feel in the end about what has taken place… That is intimately shaped by the audience in real time. Ask any actor who has played hundreds of performances of the same play and they will tell you, it’s never the same play twice. The audience brings the play to new places, and so brings the characters to new discoveries.
I feel sorry for the athletes and talk show hosts who are now faced with the awkward task of creating drama without audible gasps, guffaws, sighs cheers and the like.
But make no mistake. The playwright and the actors she employs, cannot possibly complete the work of making theatre without you, the audience sitting in the dark making noise or not making noise, bearing witness to every bit of it.
So…
If a play runs to a house of empty seats, does it make a noise?
Hell no.
Originally published at https://www.extracriticum.com.
