Theatre Could Be as Exciting as Sports — In Fact, It Once Was | Diane Paulus | Big Think

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 edition 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 many 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 where 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. 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 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 filmmakers, and all the theater people looked at the filmmakers 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. 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, particularly 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 presence, 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.

When 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 kinds 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 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 spectacle theater and Vaudeville houses in America where you talked back, 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 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.