The Audience on a Role

Sidney Homan

I start with a seemingly innocuous simile. Staging a play before an audience is like hosting a cocktail party without a guest list. Anyone can come and, believe me, in the theatre you never know what to expect.

Most members of the audience play their role well — and more of that in a minute — but there are gross exceptions.

During one performance of King Lear at the Acrosstown a cell phone went off and soon we all heard a spectator in the second row say to the caller, "Yeah, I'm watching this play by Shakespeare, King something or other. Yeah, Yeah. It's pretty good…what?…about an old man who's got these three daughter, see?"

Before he could go further, my house manager had him by the scuff of the neck and escorted him outside. Once there, I asked him, plaintively, how he could do this, how could he be so callously self–centered. Like the guy incredulous at the cop who has pulled him over for speeding, he shot back with, "Listen, buddy, he called me. I just picked up the phone."

We have had a woman on the first row, five minutes into a show, fall drunk onto the stage.

And the "talkers," self–styled critics who feel compelled to share their inane reactions to every line of dialogue with the person next to them, as if the house and the stage were reversed, and the actors were the audience.

Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class requires a live lamb onstage. Having found out that lambs are often disease ridden, and daunted by the logistics of having a live animal brought to the theatre each night for a four–week run, I opted for a fake lamb, artfully concealed in a cage with opaque sides. The character Wesley puts the lamb into the cage, feeds it, later takes it offstage, and then returns with its skinned carcass. My actor and I spent hours rehearsing such movements to preserve the illusion, but then one night, as the audience left for intermission, one curious fellow went onstage, opened up the cage, felt around, and later, halfway during the second act, in a loud voice, announced to his wife—and everyone else's wife, for that matter—"The lamb's a fake."

Shepard also requires Wesley to urinate onstage—in his anger he empties his bladder on some charts he has scattered on the floor. My Wesley was nervous about this. Could he perform on demand?

My state manager was concerned about…well,… the stage. We solved the problem by borrowing a foley bag from a physician friend in Shands's Department of Urology. With the bag tucked into his pants, my Wesley would unzip his fly, pull out the nozzle—somewhat penis–like in shape—while pushing on the bag with his other hand concealed in his pocket. Out came water dyed with yellow food coloring.

As the actor became more and more skilled in the performance, he progressed from peeing facing upstage with his back to the audience to turning full frontal downstage. Yet one night a woman—she must have been a relative of the man who exposed the lamb—noting a bit of pee that remained on stage during intermission, went up, examined it with her finger, sampled it, and announced to anyone who would listen, "My God, it's real piss!"

But enough horror stories about audiences. Audiences can also discover things for you, can have reactions that enhance the performances.

During a performance of Romeo and Juliet, my Tybalt, a master of stage combat, by accident lost control of his sword in that duel with Romeo. It went flying through the air, heading point down toward the middle section of the audience, finally landing between the legs of an elderly woman in the second row, the sword literally sticking in the floor.

Seeing this from the tech booth, I raced into the theatre, made my way between spectators, got to the woman, and, fearing a law suit, apologized profusely to her for the accident. The kindly grandmother took my hand, patted it, and replied, "Don't apologize, sonny. I'm from Williston, and, heck, this is the most excitement I've had in years."

There is also a serious side to audience reaction. Years ago, we were part of a production called Florida's Madding Crowd, a collage of scenes from plays about life in the inner city, the suburbs, and the country. We toured all over the state of Florida, from large cities to small towns. It was our final performance at Miami Dade Community College, in north Miami, which proved most memorable.

Our large audience was a fairly even mixture of college students and senior citizens. We ended the evening with two scenes from Ionesco's play Rhinoceros. In the first, the compromising Frenchman Dudard tries to convince the hero, Berenger, to give in to the rhinos who, once a minority, have now seized power in the town.

Between the scenes I reminded the audience that Ionesco had fought with the underground during World War II, and that the rhinos, allegorically, were the Nazis, or any vicious group that corrupts a once civil society.

The performance ended with Berenger's monologue, which closes Ionesco's play, where he desperately wishes that he could be like everyone else, become a rhinoceros, with a rhino's skin, protruding horn, raucous voice. Berenger longs to become one of the beasts, but cannot. Then he concludes that since he cannot be a rhino, he is determined to stay a human, even if he is the only human in town.

Afterward, we had discussion with the audience over coffee and doughnuts in a large room adjacent to the stage. One of my actors and I had been become wedged into a corner, surrounded by a crowd telling us their favorite scenes, their least favorite scenes, most often making connections between what they had seen on stage and their own lives.

Then, from the far corner of the room an elderly couple appeared, a little gray–haired lady tottering on her husband's frail arm. He was wearing a yarmulke. They must have been ninety–five if they were a day.

The crowd parted respectfully as they made their way slowly towards us. The old man thanked us for a fine evening, and then his wife added that they she especially enjoyed the two scenes from Rhinoceros. In my best teacher's style, I asked what in specific about the performance had impressed them.

"Oh, it wasn't anything you did, young man," she replied, placing her hand in mine. "It was… ." and then she hesitated. The old couple looked at each other, communicating with their eyes the way two people who have lived a long life together speak to each other without words. She seemed to be asking her husband's opinion on something, and when he nodded a silent "yes," they both rolled up their sleeves.

There, embedded in their upper arms were concentration camp numbers. I burst into tears, as the old woman squeezed my hand and said simply, "It wasn't your fault."

As we drove home to Gainesville, the long tour over, I thought: imagine how those two precious audience members were receiving the play! How, beyond any conscious effort on our part, they were re–weaving the performance into the rich, profound, tragic fabric of their own lives. And how shallow, how uninformed my narrator's remarks about the Nazis or Ionesco's allegory now seemed in comparison to what they had brought to the performance.

It is also easy to misjudge the reactions of an audience. I recall sitting behind two young couples at a production of Pinter's The Lover that I had directed in Constans Theatre. I often do this, sit with the audience, as obscurely as possible, to feel, to measure their reactions. Is this bit of business working? Is that scene playing the way we intended?

Audiences will also discover things you never intended, laughing at a line that in rehearsal didn't seem all that funny, latching onto a character who before the opening seemed a minor, even dull figure.

The two couples were having a wonderful time. I could sense that early on, before the arrival of Max ( the alter–ego of the husband, his wife's "lover" ), they had figured out the couple's little secret: Richard, the husband, plays Max. But half–way through this short play the couples got up and quietly made their way out to the lobby.

Why were they leaving? What had I done wrong? Weren't they enjoying the show? I raced to the lobby, catching up with them just before they were about to leave the building. Breathless, I asked, "Is something wrong? Don't you want to stay for the rest of the play?"

In a polite, sophisticated voice, one of the men replied, "Oh, we loved the show. But we've seen as much as we wish to tonight." Somehow a sign atop a local restaurant flashed through my mind: "Ryan's Buffet—'All You Care to Eat!'" There is no accounting for audience taste, or attention span!

And speak of uninvited audiences! When I was teaching at the University of Illinois I staged a production of Edward Albee's Zoo Story one evening in the courtyard of an apartment complex. In this appropriate setting, with a real bench under real trees, including a fountain gurgling nearby, the sounds from the street helped enhance the illusion that we were watching two characters, the conservative Peter and the neurotic Jerry, during a chance encounter in New York's Central Park.

Everything went as normal until the final scene where, forcing Peter to assert himself, Jerry so enrages the otherwise timid man that he stabs him in the chest, all this to "thank–you"s from the victim.

Just at the climatic moment, two Champaign–Urbana policeman drove up having heard the commotion, and burst onto the stage, handcuffing Peter and calling 911 for Jerry.

Half laughing at their mistake, half–shocked, by their reactions, the audience only drove the two cops to focus more intently on their job. Fortunately, within a few minutes everything was explained away; we all had a good–laugh, though, as I recall, as the cops departed one said to his partner something to the effect that this was "just what you'd expect from those theatre types."

Audiences will not only take on roles, good or bad, but they have, I believe, a role to play that is inherent in the very nature of their sitting in the house.

Anne Barton, in her book Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, tells of an interesting experiment in Rome in the 1590s. Two audiences were invited to see a play, each audience entering from opposite sides of a larger rectangular building. Audience A was at the north end, in the house, facing the curtain concealing the stage; Audience B was at the south end, facing the opposite side of that same curtain. When the curtain was parted, audience A assumed that the people they saw onstage were part of the production. That is, they were watching a performance about an audience watching a performance. Audience B made the same assumption, but from their reverse perspective.

Each audience assumed that what they were witnessing was a play and so the slightest movement, let alone a cough or a word, was meaningful, part of a playwright's vision. It took some twenty minutes for A and B to realized they had been had, were the victims of a practical joke.

The audience is significant. I never think of them as passive receivers, but rather as the "other half" of the production, no less important than whatever is happening onstage. As I like to tell my actors, an audience watching an empty stage is not an audience but simply a bunch of people watching an empty stage.

Likewise, actors performing to an empty house are not in a play, but, at best, just in rehearsal. As with love, it takes two. If a play starts with the author's text and vision, and then makes its way through the director's concept, as complemented by the work of his or her designers, and then is given "life" by the actors, the play doesn't end there. Rather it takes on an ever larger life once it is witnessed, ratified by an audience, a co–creative force that, leaving the theatre, hopefully takes the play into their hearts and minds, giving it an expanded life offstage.

If this co–equal status for the audience has any meaning, then it follows that, like the actor, or director, or designer, or playwright, the audience has an obligation too, a role in the production. And to play their part badly is to fail the role, and to violate the principles of the theatre.

Put more bluntly, unless the production is so bad—in your judgment since nothing is absolute—that you would become violently ill by remaining for the second act, the audience should stay and see the entire performance. If they do not do this, then any opinion they have about the performance is incomplete and hence invalid—in a phrase, without merit.

I love my students dearly, but I will confess that I have a particular contempt for students who come to see a production because they think they have to, as a requirement for, say, a theatre appreciation course at the UF or Santa Fe.

I've seen this happen at Constans, at the Hippodrome, at the Acrosstown: playbill in hand, they leave during intermission, racing back to campus, I will assume, to write a paper for the course, a paper for which they have just rendered themselves grossly unqualified. We've even had students try to get my signature or that of the house manager on a program before the play started—so that they could skip both acts.

And on two occasions—I am not kidding!—we caught people stealing programs from the desk outside the theatre, thereby avoiding both paying and the play. We have since taken corrective measures.

One night during a run of Hamlet, we held the curtain for eight students who arrived late for the show, pleading with us that they had to see Hamlet for a course. Letting them in after the show started, of course, proved annoying to both actors and audience, and I must confess that in this instance my bleeding liberal heart got the better of me.

The wretches didn't even have the shallow courtesy of waiting until the intermission to leave! They left halfway through the first act.

Some of my actors sitting on the back porch of the theatre, not having to go onstage for a few scenes, saw the two cars racing out of the parking lot. Knowing we had gone out of our way to accommodate this "Gainesville 8," my actors, in a display of righteous anger that I am quite sure Saint Augustine would have justified, shouted out a "Fuck You!" which was returned in kind.

Later, we joked about the issue, and two bright suggestion were made. We buy a neon sign with an upturned finger, located on the inside wall leading out to Main Street, which we could flash at anyone so rudely walking out on the play.

We should also install some of those angular spikes you find in parking lots in the big cities, to keep people from trying to leave without paying. Perhaps giving them the electric finger and puncturing their tires would drum some sense of etiquette into their heads—but I am not sure.

I think audiences should also try to focus on what is happening onstage. This doesn't mean leaving your real life behind. Quite the contrary. You will be weaving what you see onstage, what you experience in the house, with your experiences outside the theatre.

A member of a local gay and lesbian organization told me in eloquent language that she was moved by the focus on gender bending and sexual freedom in the ART's recent production of Shakespeare's As You Like It. And an elderly audience during a post–play discussion of our King Lear related their own anguish over children who had dumped them in nursing homes to the plight of Shakespeare's "child–changed" old men.

No, what I mean is that audience members should put their own egos, their own needs on a back burner and give the production their attention.

This seems so obvious that I am almost embarrassed to say it. Make–out after the performance, for God's sake.

Don't come to the theatre drunk. A production isn't a social occasion in the same way a cocktail party or disco bar might be (do I date myself with the last reference?).

Read the program before the plays starts or after intermission. Use the restroom before act one, not during.

A play is not quite like an open–air rock–concert, and since what happens onstage is live, and not a movie, the basic minimal rules of conduct are not the same as for the Regal Cinema. And arrive before the curtain!

I always wear a coat and tie, I dress up whenever I go to the theatre, even if it be the scruffiest East End playhouse in New York. My wife says I overdress, and she is probably right, yet I always reply with something to the effect that I think of the occasion as somehow sacred, a meeting of two groups, actor and audience, who together can and often do create something wonderful, significant, sustaining an illusion that makes a parabolic curve back into our reality, to our human condition.

But I am old–fashioned. I've gone too far! I better stop short of prescribing dress codes. My kids call me an "outdated college professor," and I guess I am.