The thing about theater is that it actually only can happen with an audience and that
is a defining feature of this art form.
You can write a poem, you can paint a painting put it on a wall, you can't write a book;
it can exist in the world.
But theater really cannot exist except with an audience.
And one might say well you've got your play script in your hand, you've got your Penguin
Pocket classic addition of a Shakespeare play, that's theater as literature, but live theater
not only can only happen with an audience but in many ways it happens inside of the
audience's head.
So for me as a director I've always felt the audience is the partner.
And we think in our profession you think about the writers you work with, the actors, all
the people that make the art form, and yet for me the audience completes it.
And that has not always been I think a point of view that has been shared.
I think because so people feel that an audience can pollute your artistic intention or bring
it down or you can't pander to an audience.
And I think especially in the 20th century art there was a move towards a kind of cultural
elitism were there was a sense that an audience doesn't really know what they want so you've
got to give them something that they may not know what they want.
I think for me my roots are in a kind of populism so I have total faith and confidence in an
audience and I believe an audience wants to be, yes entertained, but they also want to
think; they want to be stretched; they want to feel alive; they want to feel their heart
pound that's why we go to the theater.
So I've always found the audience as a driver of the process.
And I've sat on the many panels with other artists who say well why do you think about
the audience?
No, I've got to think about my art.
For me art comes from the end result of thinking what does the audience want?
Why are they going to bother to come out of their busy lives to be in a theater for two
to three hours?
To me that's a super generous act.
So I want to think about the audience as a collaborator.
The great thing about theater is that it is live and even though you've made a thousand
decisions when you direct a production and the play has been written or the music has
been scored, there is this presence of performance that can change day-to-day and it's what makes
our art form so special, it's also what drives us crazy.
Being a theater person I remember being in a seminar with a number of film makers and
all the theater people looked at the film makers and said oh my God you've got it so
easy.
You get to that performance on tape and you've got it forever.
And in the theater you've got to rehearse it, you've got to re-create it, maybe it happens
once, in a rehearsal how do you get that actor to that level the next time when you hit the
scene again, let alone eight times a week in a show that's running on Broadway?
And the funny thing is, and I'll never forget this, the filmmakers in that group said but
you can change.
You can change what you're doing.
You can respond.
And it was an anecdote that was told about Jacques Tati, a very famous filmmaker, and
I've never forgotten this story that he would screen a film and then in between the showings
he would go to the control booth and with the scissors try to edit the film because
he had learned something from the audience and he was like madly trying to just cut and
paste his film to change it based on what he had learned.
And I always say to the artist I'm working with, particular actors, we get to respond.
The earth is rotated.
It's a new day.
Events in our lives will impact what an audience is feeling when they come to the theater tonight.
The air we're breathing is actually different.
And if you can actually embrace that then you will achieve that kind of presents, which
you can only get in the theater.
Now having said that, I think we all know we've been to the theater and you don't feel
alive.
I mean I have done theater all my life and I go to see a lot of theater and I've even
felt that myself.
You can actually go to a theater event and feel like it's hermetically sealed, like you
could be there or not and you're not impacting it.
You could, as an audience member, perhaps fall asleep at a show, which I've done.
Which you go to any member of shows you've seen you kind of look up and down the theater
and maybe somebody is sleeping and it doesn't have an impact.
So I think this question of how does an audience actually impact a show is at the heart of
what makes theater theater.
And I think for me I, in the 21st century where I sit making shows, I want to push that
presence of an audience.
What do I mean by that?
I want an audience to feel entitled and empowered to respond.
I do a lot of Broadway musicals and when I'm in my shows in the audience and I hear people
around me singing the lyrics, I love it.
I love it that an audience is so connected that they want to sing along.
Now, of course, for some other audience members it drives them crazy.
They turn around and they're like will you please ask that person to be quiet?
I like to push theater because that's what we do in our art form to a place where an
audience can express themselves like you would at a great sporting event.
I often say the problem with the theater is you say what professions are you in and you
say well, I do the theater.
And I used to think would you ever say like oh what profession are you in?
I do sports.
You never say that.
And there are codes of etiquette for all different kind of sporting events and you can appreciate
that at a golf match, or I was just at the US Open, you have to be quiet or you'll be
asked to leave.
The serve goes you can't influence, you have to kind of be invisible and that's serving
the concentration of the game.
You go to a basketball game you're behind the net and it's a foul shot, you're supposed
to pick up your foam finger and like to do everything you can to distract the player.
That's your job as an audience.
So those are two different audience behaviors all on this continuum of sports and I think
we tend to feel that in the theater your job, because most of us have this experience when
you go to the theater as an audience, you arrive; you get your program; you might arrive
with friends but you then sit in a line in seats bolted to the floor; the lights go out;
you're supposed to be quiet.
If you talk back to the stage you probably will be asked to leave because that's not
good audience behavior.
And then the show happens you either are very entertained, you cry, you laugh, maybe you
fall asleep; the show ends; you applaud; the usher says please leave.
And to me that's not the history of theater.
That's one example of a behavior of theater and that behavior was very much defined by
a radical turn at the beginning of the 20th century with naturalism.
When we were coming out of a time of public spectical theater and Vaudeville houses in
America where you talked back and there was this radical movement of like no, the audience
should be invisible.
You should be a voyeur looking through a peephole.
And that's right in the line with Richard Wagner saying, "I can't stand the polluting
of the art form.
Turn the lights out.
Put the audience in the dark."
The audiences weren't in the dark always.
The audience was lit in the theater because that was part of the social experience.
You went to the theater not only to see a show but you went to the theater to be seen
and be seen.
A 19th-century opera house with its gold guild ornate balconies and chandeliers was like
the modern day nightclub, you know, you were watching an incredibly evocative opera but
you were also looking at who was in the box and sort of flirting with them because that's
what you did and it was a social space.
And it was radical to say put all that aside.
That's all distraction.
Let's be invisible.
Let's just silently watch.
And all the art that came out of that, you know, the Stanislavski and Chekhov, that was
radical in its time.
But I think we've inherited that and we think that's all theater is or can be.
And I now believe that if we're going to make the theater vital and necessary we have to
return it to its roots where the audience's voice matters.