The first show I attended at the Blackfriars Playhouse was Love’s Labors Lost. The year was 2002. I was in fourth grade, and my mom and I had roadtriped to a B&B in Staunton, not even knowing that the ASC was there. We sat in the Lord’s Chairs. The playhouse was comfortably full, not packed. I got the gist of the pay, if only in a fourth-grader’s interpretation of love and duty and sacrifice. I came home hooked on this mysterious wood-paneled, honey-lit world. Why?
One of the players had winked at me.
During one of the clown subplots in L3, while I didn’t-quite-follow the innuendo and comedy hijinks, Don Adriano de Armado leaned on the low wall separating the audience and the stage and gave me a roguish wink before turning back to the stage to get back to the plot.
“They can do that?” I whispered to my mother at intermission. I was half elated, half terrified. If the actors could acknowledge we were there, sharing in delights and sorrows openly, without the ‘fourth wall’ veneer: what else could they do? Could they talk to us? Expect an answer? Could they reach out and grab us, pull us into that world?
Othello, 2009: Iago tests the limits of audience participation and sympathy. He confides, he chides, he derides. As he spoke his asides, the audience sucked breath though their teeth—the playhouse a sudden hissing mass. Iago’s smile spread wider, and he reveled in the sudden hostility of the groundlings, the narrowed eyes from above. His performance was transformed, his evil electric.
When the dark descends on an audience, it is easy to sink, dreamlike into a world of the theater’s creation. Yet it can also cast a veil over eyes, lulling the audience info false comfort, sleepy complacent acceptance of that world. When the universal lighting illuminates the audience’s world in the same radiant glow as the player’s stage, the play can—and does—reach out and drag us, with a roguish wink, into a world of imagination.
One of the players had winked at me.
During one of the clown subplots in L3, while I didn’t-quite-follow the innuendo and comedy hijinks, Don Adriano de Armado leaned on the low wall separating the audience and the stage and gave me a roguish wink before turning back to the stage to get back to the plot.
“They can do that?” I whispered to my mother at intermission. I was half elated, half terrified. If the actors could acknowledge we were there, sharing in delights and sorrows openly, without the ‘fourth wall’ veneer: what else could they do? Could they talk to us? Expect an answer? Could they reach out and grab us, pull us into that world?
Othello, 2009: Iago tests the limits of audience participation and sympathy. He confides, he chides, he derides. As he spoke his asides, the audience sucked breath though their teeth—the playhouse a sudden hissing mass. Iago’s smile spread wider, and he reveled in the sudden hostility of the groundlings, the narrowed eyes from above. His performance was transformed, his evil electric.
When the dark descends on an audience, it is easy to sink, dreamlike into a world of the theater’s creation. Yet it can also cast a veil over eyes, lulling the audience info false comfort, sleepy complacent acceptance of that world. When the universal lighting illuminates the audience’s world in the same radiant glow as the player’s stage, the play can—and does—reach out and drag us, with a roguish wink, into a world of imagination.
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