Offending the Audience

If you have any doubt that audiences are stupider than ever, travel to your local Blockbuster and count the number of Norbit DVD's that are rented. You will be staggered.



(overheard at a regional theatre performance last season, two older, well-dressed men in conversation:



"You see they announced the next season in the program?"



"Yeah. A Flea in Her Ear....what is that? A comedy?")



If theatre people worry about how well they're doing in a show, they absolutely despair about audience reaction. It's a small wonder that all the metaphors for success involve the death of the audience. So grateful is the actor that the doltish, sluggish, many-headed beast had deigned to laugh (or just shut the f*** up for two minutes) that naturally they associate theatrical communion with conquest.



David Mamet, in lamenting the ills that beset the theatre, suggested that a root problem was the repetitive, mind-numbing work of acting. He exhorted the actors to approach a performance as one would a hot date. Any actor can tell you that if the actor/audience relationship is like a date, it is usually a blind date with a deformed gargoyle who has a limited grasp of the language.



An Artistic Director once said to JOMO, "Why can't they just give us their money and go home?"



Of course, all of this is just posturing. We love audiences, and not just for their money. We want them to walk out of the theatre smarter, bolder, better than when they came in. We know they want to be in the theatre, at our show, on this night; and not just because The Sopranos is over.



But clearly audiences aren't bright, and at the risk of offense, here is one reason why--a statistic from The League of American Theatres and Producers: over two-thirds of the Broadway audiences acquired their habit for theatre-going from their parents. Not because they went to shows in school, or because shows came to their schools as special events, but because mom and dad dressed them up and hauled them off to Cats. If that becomes your yardstick for entertainment, no wonder a critically lauded (and Tony Award-winning) show like Journey's End closed at a total loss last weekend.



In one respect the educational system has failed the theatre. Schools (and thus teachers and students) do not treat going to the theatre like a hot date, a good-looking companion with lots of potential. Budgets have curtailed field-trips of that sort (indeed, arts education in general), and mandatory standards have shifted the focus of education from the well-rounded student to the marketable job-seeker.



And one thing more:



Empathy is dead.



Remember empathy? The feeling you got when you saw somebody else in a bad situation and you felt for them, really felt for them, and also realized that you yourself you be in that situation just as easily as they could? Empathy is the root element of an audience's relationship to a character in a show. As Lt. Cable notes in South Pacific, empathy--like hate--can be carefully taught. Schools don't teach it, because they rarely teach novels (or plays) that require it. And the Great Satan, the movies, have all but banned empathy from films geared to teen-agers (see anything by Will Ferrell), preferring audiences to laugh at characters rather than with them.



Most plays take empathy as their given. Can any woman not feel for Emily in Act Three of Our Town? She had died in childbirth, and everything she held of value now seems trivial and she weans herself away from life. Or Vivian, suffering from cancer, as her mentor reads from "The Runaway Bunny" in Wit? (This is not to suggest empathy is limited to the dying; read or see Much Ado About Nothing and try not to feel for Beatrice)



But we in the theatre have also failed our audience. We have failed to attract them from an early age to this great art form (there are always exceptions; think of TheatreworksUSA, who creates and tours shows for children from 6-17. One of their best shows was When the Cookie Crumbles, a musical revue about divorce from the kids' point of view. JOMO has done that show, and it moved every child who saw it. When JOMO toured with a different Theatreworks show, the same kids came to see that. They understood what theatre was capable of, because it had touched them).



While many of our resident theatres have student matinees, very few are of shows specifically for students (sit--or act--through a student performance of Death of a Salesman--as JOMO has done--and you'll know). Again, budgets constrain, but so do our imaginations.



People talk about a theatre for all ages, especially in the regions. Theatre for all ages is mostly a myth, like the Yeti. And when it does rear its ugly head, it touches nobody. If we really want to educate and attract an audience, we must cultivate them. We must speak to them at their level early on and journey with them on their path to enlightenment. They want to grow. Let's offend them by speaking directly to their dreams and fears. Let's weed the garden of trivial weeds and give the audience an experience that shakes them to their core. You think you can't do that with The Odd Couple? Then don't do The Odd Couple. Do Godot. It's the same story. It's just as funny and twice as immediate.



And speaking of gardens, our next post will focus on the weeds.

C-r-r-r-itic!