Special Thanks

One of the reasons why I love the theatre is because it is, at its core, a collaborative experience. This collaboration exists in many forms including the director and designers, the director and actors, and among the actors themselves. Each of these combinations is integral to creating a work of theatre and yield beautiful, magical results that are sometimes unexpected and often greater than the sum of their parts. However, a collaboration that I think is often overlooked is that between the actors (or rather what is on stage) and the audience.

I have heard people say that technically theatre can take place without an audience. While this may be technically true (the key word being technically), I just can’t seem to wrap my brain around the concept. In my opinion, the audience is another character, no more or less important as the characters cast from the beginning. The audience breathes life into a play, bringing a palpable tension, excitement, and spark to the piece. Without the audience, the piece would ultimately become stale.

In regards to Uncle Vanya, I have heard that some found the doubling to be a bit confusing and hard to follow at times. While it is important to think about how the doubling concept may have been made clearer, I think that challenging the audience to think critically and differently is one of the best things a piece of theatre can do. The audience is smart and should be treated as such. To spell everything out for the audience would, in my opinion, be boring and a bit rude. Additionally, in asking the audience to take part in figuring out what is going on, the collaborative aspect is heightened and as a result, the feeling that we’re all in this together (a feeling that I refer to as “the happiness”) fills the space. “The happiness” creates an unbreakable bond between everyone at each specific performance and everyone who has ever seen the show – a bond that lives on, way past when the curtain comes down.

2 thoughts on “Special Thanks

  1. Jules Odendahl-James

    A piece of info along the lines of the actor-production-audience triangular relationship that you might find interesting regarding your next mainstage project ; )

    From Jerome Dickey’s biographical section of the book *Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell* (pgs. 151-152):

    “For the original Broadway production of Machinal, Treadwell teamed up with two theater artists — producer and director Arthur Hopkins and designer Robert Edmond Jones — who shared strikingly similar thoughts to her own about the power of the theatrical event to stimulate the unconscious minds of those in the audience. […] In his 1918 publication “How’s your Second Act?”, Hopkins articulates his staging theory of “Unconscious Projection.” Briefly summarized, this theory espouses an attempt to create a stage illusion of such hypnotic power that it will stimulate a response directly in an audience’s unconscious. Hopkins stressed this unconscious appeal due to his belief that one could never reach a consensus of reaction, and therefor a complete illusion, in the theater through *conscious* appeal. […] Hopkins sought to render the conscious mind inoperative by eliminating from the stage all non-essential features, such as unnecessary scenery, props or acting tricks that might arouse the curiosity or focus the conscious mind. Realism, for Hopkins, should be avoided at all costs due to its appeal to the audience’s consciousness:

    “An attempt at exact reproduction challenges the conscious mind to comparison … the result of the whole mental comparing process is to impress upon the auditor that he is in a theatre witnessing a very accurate reproduction, only remarkable because it is not real” (26-28)

    Ultimately, Hopkins hoped that his approach to Unconscious Projection created an environment in which “All the repressed desires burst forth into flames in the theatre, and for a few hours they have full say, to be silenced again until dreams have their way” (24). As with psychoanalytic technique, however, success depends on the ability of the conscious mind to integrate the expressions of the unconscious. Hopkins wrote that, in the end, his approach must “abide by the conscious verdict … all the unconscious reaction is wasted if the conscious ultimately rejects us” (9).”

    So it’s a delicate dance. To challenge, provoke but not shut down, refuse. And one we do slightly differently with every project in its own time, place and surrounding context.

    –Jules

  2. Madeleine Pron

    I completely agree with you! This was something I was trying to articulate in my blog post as well. I think theater is a dialogue between the audience and the performers, with one informing the other. The audience gives something to the actors that is valuable to them and helps them deliver something in return. The audience is super important and the more engaged they are, the better– for everyone. The actors perform better and the audience gets a better performance.

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