Death of the Audience

It seems hard to believe these days, but the technique of brining the house lights down in a theater when a show begins didn't come into practice until about the turn of the last century. It was a phenomenon that corresponded with the rise of the professional director, who came in the late 1800s to replace the actor-managers who had dominated Western theater since the Renaissance. Suddenly, the spectators of a production were being told--quite literally in certain theoretical writings from the time--to sit down and be quiet. There was a show to watch. And as those house lights went down for the first time, the audience--as a state of being unlike almost any other in the course of our lives--was born.

But in all honesty, I can't say I wholeheartedly support the idea that the house lights should go down at the beginning of a theatrical production. It's not that I actually prefer productions where the audience is as visible as the actors. I've only been at two shows in recent memory where that was actually the case: one at the New Globe Theater in London (which by its very nature makes it impossible to turn down the non-existent house lights) and one at the American Repertory Theater (where the house lights only stayed up for the first 20 minutes of the show). Both productions came close to achieving what I think is possible through the illumination of the audience. But it was a production put on by the A.R.T.'s Institute for Advanced Theater Training--a production which kept the house lights down--which best illustrates my ideas on the subject.

But before I explain that, let me give you a little background. I'm probably behind the times on this issue, but I believe that the theater can be a moral force in human life. Perhaps sympathetic is a better word. The late Victorian technique of bringing the house lights down at the start of a production did something that had never been achieved in human history before: it gave human beings the opportunity to observe others with the absolute certainty that they themselves would not be observed in turn--if not by the actors themselves, then at least by the characters they were meant to represent. It is an almost God-like position to be in. And in this position, rather than passing judgment on characters as we might in everyday life, we often find ourselves more accepting of other people's faults. Characters whom we might find repulsive were we to meet them on the street--Chekov's Trigorin or Mamet's Don in American Buffalo--take on a surprising pathos in the theater. Much of this is undoubtedly due to the skill of the playwrights, actors and directors involved, but I would argue that just as much of it is due to the fact that the audience can't be seen by the actors, or at least the characters, they are watching. In this state of invisibility, our defense mechanisms are lowered and we can allow ourselves to view others with an almost alarming amount of compassion.

And yet, when we are in an "audience" state, we can't really say that we exist. Everyone knows Descartes' famous axiom "I think, therefore I am," but Sartre came closer to the mark when he argued that to exist is to be perceived. To be invisible is to be dead. Thus, being part of an audience is a state entirely different than any other state during our lives.

So how does this relate to the issue of house lights? In my mind, one of the great shortcomings of theater--at least as a moral force--is that the sympathy we extend to characters while we are part of an audience rarely carries over into our everyday lives. The darkness of a theater may allow us to feel compassion for a Trigorin or a Don on stage, but when daylight returns and we meet similar people in our lives we revert back to judgment and condemnation. We have to. We are no longer unobservable. We exist, and so long as we choose to exist we have to defend that existence. Judgment and condemnation are means of self-defense.

How to remedy this problem? Keeping the house lights up throughout a production is not necessarily the answer. Doing so might prevent the audience from entering that sublime state of non-existence where compassion becomes easier than judgment. On the other hand, keeping the house lights down the entire time can create a troubling dichotomy between the world of theater and the external world. It's easy enough to check our judgments at the theater door along with our coats if we know we can pick them up again on the way outside.

One way around this problem is to catch the audience off-guard, to confront them with their own existence while they're in that state of nonjudgment. To have the actors in a production approach individual members of the audience during the production--to surprise the audience with the fact that they can be observed--might just work. This is exactly the technique used by the Institute for Advanced Theater Training in their production of Bertolt Brecht's St. Joan of the Stockyards three weeks ago in the Loeb Ex, and it works wonders. To feel sympathy for a beggar on the stage and then have that beggar approach you to ask for money forces you to acknowledge your own feelings. To feel compassion for the central villain of the play and then have him ask you personally, in front of everyone in the theater, if you judge him is an even more powerful juxtaposition of the mental states of observation and non-observation.

To confront the audience in such a manner during a production is, in a sense, to kill that audience. But the audience itself is a deadening mechanism. The darkness of a theater allows us to think compassionate thoughts but deadens us to the full implications of those thoughts. And it allows us to enter a temporary state of non-existence. To kill the audience, then, is to give birth to a new type of person, a person who is suddenly aware of his or her own temporary non-existence and the thoughts that characterize that world. The death of the audience may just fulfill the moral mission of the theater: it may just create a person who can extend that sublime nonjudgment of the darkened theater to the less-than-sublime world in which we live the rest of our lives.

Responses to Stage Direction are encouraged. Please send letters to David Kornhaber, c/o The Crimson, 14 Plympton St., Cambridge, MA 02138. Send emails to dkornhab@fas.harvard.edu