Matinee Audiences

Matinee for The Crucible today. Well attended, though we got some odd reactions to certain scenes. When Abigail begins performing (or manifesting) spiritual possession in the middle of the trial, a clutch of audience members began giggling. They had been laughing off and on throughout the performance--and not just at the funny parts.

In the green room, the more experienced actors told the younger actors the same things we ourselves had been told countless times past: You just can't predict how audiences will react. Some people respond to tension onstage with laughter. Better that reaction than no reaction at all.

All that's true, but it wears on actors putting themselves wholly out there onstage for audiences to guffaw at high drama and vulnerability. The seasoning process that performers go through over dozens, hundreds of times on stage involves a fair share of disaffected or outright rude audiences.

High school drama matinees provide the typical such lesson. Generally cheery that they're getting out of class but generally bored with the sustained attentional demands of the live theatre, high schoolers test the mettle of production teams. Exquisitely reactive, they reward broad comedy, punish obvious missteps, and reject inaction or lack of intensity. They are easy to read, alternately great too have when engaged or wretched when bored. And high schoolers bore easily.

Worse, though, in my experience, are the college students at university shows. Practically every gen ed theatre course requires attendance at our shows, from student-directed pieces to mainstage offerings to our professional company. You might expect such audiences to exhibit more maturity, being college students and given that they most often have to write some kind of reflection on the show they're seeing.

Instead, you get an unhappy combination of factors. First, college students aren't getting out of class to see the play; the play is homework, time and money taken over and above class time. Second, college students are much more independent than high schoolers, much more used to being masters of their own actions. A good teacher-chaperone can, through charm or threats, usually restrict high school students' behavior. Some university students, on the other hand, have few compunctions about checking phones, texting, or even chatting with neighbors during the show. (There's a whole other conversation to be had about the ethics of season selection and assignment. Are the shows we produce really the best to show college students with little to no theatrical experience? Should that be the main consideration as we decide on shows and syllabi?)

It's the movie theatre phenomenon we've all complained about at some point: people not knowing or caring how a public audience experience differs from their private living room TV-watching habits. It's worse in live theatre, ruder, because the performers on stage are aware of inattention or distraction in the audience. That's one of the main lessons I try to teach early on in Intro to Theatre classes: your behavior as an audience member matters in the theatre.

But adults gonna adult. And that means that performing in theatre sometimes involves performing over and past people whose faces are lit up by phone screens, people murmuring or chattering to their neighbors, or people adopting a quasi-heckling attitude to what's going on.

Them's the breaks. And usually, such people are a minority. Even college students for the most part get that they're there to share an experience structured by conventions of politeness and listening. And the people who continue to come to theatre past the requirements of classes, the amateur audiences, the ones who come to see theatre for love of the art, usually more than compensate for the few who opt out.

At least, that's what we tell ourselves.

The next performance of Crucible comes Wednesday. It's a high-school matinee. We'll see what happens.

More tomorrow,

JF