Audiences

The snow on these trees will not look exactly like this next winter. It might look similar, but it won't be the same. It's also that way with live performance.


Introduction

I’m pondering theatre again and I felt a strong urge to write about what I believe is theatre’s most important element: The audience. The audience is not only a spectator, but a performer, because it has such a profound range of influences on the rest of the show. Notice that the more input the audience gives, the more output the performance gives. If you laugh, will the actors be louder? I had a recent opportunity to try this, and it worked! The audience is your most important factor. Aristotle’s six elements only help to build to a goal: the experience of performer and audience.

In order to set up my argument, I want to mention trajectory. My high school speech and drama teacher, Gloria Stumme, told us that an anonymous person said “The actor is forever carving statues of snow,” and it has always been something I have believed to be truth in live theatre. Every performance is unique. Tiny variations in performance result in major differences in how a spectator or performer reacts to the production as a whole. Theatre has the ability to change the way people see a situation. It can incite someone to action. It can teach. It can entertain. It can do all of these things and more, even simultaneously. There are smaller factors it depends on in order to achieve the desired result with the audience. Our choices during these small moments are vastly important in the final trajectory (outcome) of a production.

Something else that affects the overall reaction by a given person to a performance is each variation in how the spectator feels. His reaction is not only influenced by the performance but by factors we can’t control (whether or not he hasn’t eaten all day, if he’s having trouble in a relationship, the death of someone close to him, personal connections to the work, being tired, having an illness, et cetera) and factors we can control (the temperature in the theatre, the arrangement of the seats, the accessibility of the restrooms, et cetera). Of course we can’t control a spectator’s reaction to what we can control, but we can do our best to make the facilities work for the spectator.

Our responsibility as artists to the audience is, firstly: To defy expectations and give them an experience like no other artistic experience they have ever had or expected to have in their lifetime, and secondly: To inform them and educate them through what we present, whether it is meant to incite social change or chiefly to entertain. We’re not effective enough, and we can tell that because we’re losing our audiences. The theatre’s effect on the audience isn’t enough of an effect. In my essay “Just Quit Now” I emphasized ways in which theatre fails to draw audiences. In this paper I want to stress how we can hold onto our audiences, and how we can do it through factors we can control.

We can Hold on to an Audience with our Choice of Material

Your best chance at reaching your audience is to choose the best possible approach for what you desire to say to that audience. It isn’t the set or costumes. It isn’t the makeup design. It isn’t the script. It isn’t anything but what you are saying. Everything else just helps to build it up.

It’s common knowledge that the pre-evening lives of spectators influence their theatrical experiences. If the people in your community all work at emotionally-taxing jobs from nine to five and go to the theatre at seven-thirty, they’re probably going to want a show that takes their mind off of theirs and others’ problems. Seeing Arthur Miller’s All My Sons probably isn’t going to do that for them. In some areas, audience members who have children want to bring them to the theatre, so a lot of plays are eliminated from selection in that case. If you don’t want to cater to the audience in a given area, go find your audience somewhere else. Ann Bogart writes in And then, You Act that the audience does not come to you, so you can go to the audience; and that may be your solution.

Yet if you so have to stay in your favorite area, you can quit producing plays for the wrong demographic. For example, if you’re in an area full of people who like Golden Age musicals, they usually don’t seem to appreciate anything unlike a Golden Age musical. I once watched two women walk out of a blackbox performance of Dr. Faustus, saying “This isn’t theatre.” That was when I wondered if some people even wanted intellectual stimulation after a long, hard day. So give them what they want if ticket money or "putting butts in the seats" is your objective.

We don’t tell the truth in our plays, either. Not only do we fail to choose productions that speak to the audiences in our geographical areas or hold relevance to our time period, we don’t write these plays. We tend to write plays about the way we wish things were rather than the way they are or could be. Theatre is becoming a place where we put our thoughts on current issues out for everyone to see, and many of our audiences want us to be precise rather than speculative, so why don’t we take advantage of that? Our choosing to write material may be what our audience needs at a given time.

I remember when we went to a play and my father fell asleep. When he woke up he walked out of the theatre and slept in the car. When I asked him why he did that, he said he was too tired from work to sit through a play. Yet I’d never seen him fall asleep during a three-hour movie. I began to think perhaps movies captivate better than theatre does. Ann Bogart writes about the seven aspects of being compelling, and I agree with her. We’re not captivating enough. We let the action get away from us, or we take too long to change scenes, or the play isn’t important enough to individual audience members on a personal level. I recommend And Then, You Act for a discussion the of seven elements of magnetism that make theatre compelling.

It’s true, though, that sometimes the plays that appeal to the demographic don’t draw a crowd any more than other plays do. There are reasons to counter this, which I will explain here.

We Can Help Audiences Tolerate Being There

We should be able to keep our audiences physically comfortable (unless we want them to be uncomfortable in order to better take in a play’s message of unease). Earlier I wrote that small variations in the performance could affect how any given member of the audience reacts to the performance as a whole. We don’t pay attention to this, though. We let our buildings be either too hot (because we won’t turn a fan on—it sucks up electricity and money) or too cold (we won’t turn the heater on—it burns up electricity and money). It might occur to us that if theatres were as comfortable as living rooms, more people would go back to them, but we ignore that. Why? Why do we think we can’t have a heater or air conditioning? We’re afraid it would take away from our “spectacle budget”, but if in the final trajectory more people showed up to the theatre, our "spectacle budget" for the next show would be bigger. I wish we’d take the concept of investment into account.

We can take better care of our spaces. Why don’t we take as good of care of backstage as we do of the house? I know we don’t have the money to renovate the theatres in our communities, but why don’t we at least clean them? You don’t need to hire a janitor. Do it yourself. We didn't let the janitor into our high school auditorium, not that I remember, anyway, and the place stayed pretty much immaculate. Why don’t we vacuum? Do we not have time? We claim we don’t, and that we don’t have the money for cleaning supplies. As a result, our theatres look like something from Silent Hill. One theatre I know of has a good inch of dust buildup on a ledge against the wall in the house. It also has heaps of moldy sawdust and piles of mouse excrement in the dressing rooms. Another theatre has stalactites of dust and grime hanging from the ceiling. Many theatre restrooms I’ve peed in are a disgrace. All they need is someone to go through them with a mop, not a thousand-dollar cleaning job. Forget that the cleaning time and money can go toward your set and your costumes and your makeup. That is nothing compared to the audience you will lose. If messy theatres are the case too often, the audiences will tend to think “I don’t want to go back there because the bathrooms make me sick” rather than something about the new show the theatre had in there and how at a later date they might want to see another one that was just as inventive. We must be more responsible for our spaces, including the parts the audience doesn’t see during the show. Two years ago I argued with a designer about this. He would rather have had a flawless design and no audience than a full house and a set made of less-expensive wood. Yet aren’t we masters of illusion? Can’t we make something look expensive when it isn’t? Aren’t most designers great talents who can create whatever they want from a pile of nearly nothing? Isn’t that part of the magic of the theatre? I guess not according to someone who is a designer for the sake of spectacle alone. Bogart says spectacle is an aspect of magnetism, but I’m telling you that it is not the only aspect.

Yet we ought not to take necessities away for aesthetics. By this I mean the basic tools for lighting and sound. In one theatre I know of, they’ve ripped out the lighting in order to paint and carpet the house, even if it didn’t need to be re-carpeted. As a result, the theatre has been rendered nearly useless because the type of space it is does not allow for performers to be seen or heard without the aid of lighting and sound equipment. So it is possible to go too far.

We Can Avoid Neglecting the Audience’s Intelligence

By "neglecting" I mean both underestimating and not nourishing it. We’re not serious about our spaces and we’re not serious about the audience, either. I was mad at a community lightboard operator for turning the lights on and off rapidly instead of going house-to-half. That was before I was into theatre, when I was maybe thirteen years old. I as an audience member knew that the lights were supposed to go house-to-half. That was a lesson for me that audiences are a lot smarter than theatre people tend to think they are. When I think back on it, I feel that as audience members we want the artists to acknowledge our intelligence by not insulting it with baloney, either. Too many theatre artists might be thinking about physical reactions to a play rather than the audience’s internal reaction to it, so we as artists start acting like complete idiots with our writing or directing or whatever we’re doing in order to make the audience physically react (laugh, cry, pee their pants, gasp, have a heart attack, spew compliments, write hate mail, etc.) rather than pose questions the individuals in the audience can take out of the theatre and think about in daily life, even if perhaps they only think about them by accident while taking a pee or a shower or taking the dog out to pee or scrubbing out the shower. We don’t take into account that if spectators have these questions, whether they know it or not, they might come back to the theatre a second or third time because of the feeling they have when they go there, whether or not they are aware of it. We let mediocrity happen, though, and then say, “Oh, well, it’s just community theatre anyway.” Why do we treat audiences like they don’t know what we know? Too many of our new productions aren’t intellectual “conversations” with the audience. Rather, they’re lectures to the audience. We don’t treat our spectators as though we are on the same level, especially when our aim is to teach. We don’t do our research when we write plays, either, almost as though nobody in the audience is going to be smart enough to know whether or not we did our research. Getting the audience to come back to the theatre is going to take effort on our part to humble ourselves and not see ourselves as always right and the audience as toddlers.

We must tell the truth in our programs. One lie we need to stop telling is using budget problems and saying it’s the “style.” That is weak! Audiences know the real reason your set is unfinished. If audiences think theatre people are full of crap, then they just might think twice about seeing a live performance again. If you had a million dollar budget and still did it in t-shirts and jeans on black acting cubes “because it illustrates the message that life is bleak,” then I’ll believe you. Otherwise, it is a weak excuse, and we’re going to know the real reason is the budget anyway. Never make an excuse. If you can’t tell the truth, say nothing. Saying nothing is by far the nobler thing to do than making excuses. Stop covering up the truth, stop being ashamed of your performance, stop thinking the audience will want some justification. Believe me. They know your work is needs-based, and oftentimes they don’t care. “Style” is no excuse. Never try to cover anything up with excuses involving the “style” or the “meaning” or the “metaphor.” When you do that, you are assuming your audience is stupid or infantile, and in reality they are anything but.

In Conclusion

One of my theatre books by a wise theorist (whom I do not remember at the time but will add later) asked the age-old question: “If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?” (Meaning if there is not even the smallest insect ear to hear it). If there is nothing to hear the sound, in theory, there is no sound. It is that way with performance. Unless we are performing only for ourselves, we must remember that no part of our performance is as important as the audience. If they aren’t there, there is no point.

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