What an incredible couple of weeks these have been. There have been ups and downs, to be sure, but all in all, it has been a glorious experience. Exhausting, yes, but glorious, and totally worth it.
As an actor, I’ve been aware that the presence an audience has and how they react to the action onstage has a significant effect on the outcome of a performance. Yes, it is true that performers shouldn’t let an unresponsive audience effect their performance, and I don’t think that it ever really changed our performance per se. For example, I personally felt (don’t know about everyone else) that in our first matinee, I gave a performance on par with the one I’d given the night before, which had gotten a nice response from the audience (laughter, etc.). However, the audience that Sunday simply didn’t react very much, which was a bit disgruntling. Despite that, I kept doing everything that I usually do, and was content with my own performance, as well as those of everyone else in the cast.
The only times I felt our performances have changed (for the worse) were on opening night and “second opening night” (the second Thursday). This was more a product of having an audience again and remembering all of the things we needed to do after a short hiatus. In other words, we were doing everything that we had to for each scene, but it was more mechanical and disjointed than it should have been, which resulted in a less responsive audience. This was entirely justified, because our (or at least mine) performance was not as engaging as it could have been.
Having an audience helped me cement some aspects of my character and performance, such as the scene between Waffles and Astrov. On the first night, I’ll admit, I tried to play that scene for laughs, and it didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. After that, I let it go: either the audience would find it funny, or they wouldn’t. And, somehow, that scene has gotten progressively more funny as the run has gone on. Now that I’m not actively trying to get a response, but rather actually working with Nick, it feels more natural. Waffles is certainly not trying to get laughs; he’s genuinely pissed off at Astrov and shows it. That is what the audience finds funny, not Rory Eggleston being Waffles and trying to be funny.
I feel like that should have been an obvious conclusion that I could have come to a long time ago, but there it is. Now I know.
-Rory Eggleston
I find very interesting how different were Rory and my approaches to the audience’s perspective. I was thinking of how the audience saw us and did not acknowledged our reactions to their reactions.
Rory’s post, and especially when he said “I tried to play that scene for laughs” made me think when we are acting, are we doing so more for an audience, more for ourselves or for the others on stage with us. And when this center switches, how would that affect our acting? Compared to Waffles, Maria is not searching that obviously for a comic and interactive relationship with the audience, instead my performance relies strongly on other’s performances. So the importance is not fall into the vicious circle where audience’s responses affects actors, and once attain the stage propagate to the others actors.
Everyone holds the stacks, because the vicious circle comes from the audience’s reaction affects the actors and then themselves affects the other actors on stage.
And from several examples we had in our show, even with a less responsive audience we know they still enjoyed it as much. I somehow think it depends on the atmosphere if the night. If one from the unresponsive audience was put into a very responsive audience, he or her may have dropped a few more laughs occasionally. So as Rory said, we shouldn’t depend or performance on the audience’s reaction.
While I personally do think that my performance was effected by unresponsive audiences (despite my best efforts), I completely agree with what Rory said about act two in regard to my own performance. I never considered the scene to be overly comical, but last weekend (on Friday and Saturday nights) we received a lot of laughs, and I definitely then expected them on the Sunday matinee and second Thursday. When these laughs were not as forth-coming, I was surprised to find myself a little thrown. I had to check back in to how I had been originally playing the scene. Like Rory said, its really about the interaction between Waffles and Astrov, and if we’re really playing each other, the scene reads better. This is something we’ve been working on in every scene throughout the entire process, but sometimes we have to check in and remind ourselves, especially when an audience is added to the mix.