What it Means to be in the Crowd: How the Audience Role is Evolving

There is nothing like the shared experience of seeing a live theatre performance. Sitting in your seat, watching as the lights dim and the sounds of the room go quiet. Suddenly, a bright spotlight shines onto a set of actors sitting at a kitchen table. These characters are going about their days, and you slowly sink into their world, believing that this story is all real, until one of them tells a joke. Suddenly, a wave of laughter erupts all around you, and you are reminded of where you are. Although you thought the only two “players” in this show were on stage, there is another one in the room: the audience.

The audience has as much to give to the actors and each other as the actors give to them. This relationship, this rotation of energy around a space is what makes theatre unforgettable. Unlike film, every night in the theatre is a little different, and a lot of that has to do with the spectators in the crowd. Some nights, there might be a rowdy audience who laugh at everything, while the next night, it’s silent. Sometimes a moment on stage is so tense that you can hear the entire room holding their breath. The audience can be annoying, from the little coughs, to the person in the middle row getting up to use the restroom, or, god forbid, a cell phone goes off in the middle of a scene. However, they play a key role in the storytelling, whether they like it or not. But what happens when that shared space to laugh together, cry together, breathe together, is taken away?

In the New Yorker’s article “How are Audiences Adapting to the Age of Virtual Theatre,” Vinson Cunningham discusses what the role of the audience has been in the past and how that is evolving due to COVID-19 and this new digital theatre age. Cunningham stresses the importance of the community found in theatre audiences, utilizing examples like the “Radical Black Theatre of the New Deal”, which occurred during a time in history where theatres were also in crisis. He then compares these moments in history to the present, a time where we sit at home alone watching performances on our laptops and TVs. Cunningham then continues the piece by giving us hope: he discusses a virtual show they enjoyed called “Theatre for One: Here We Are.”, in which performers were paired with audience members one-on-one for intimate, 10 minute plays. I agree strongly with Cunningham’s points about how important the community space theatre creates is for audiences, but I struggle to find the hope he has about the digital theatre space.

For centuries, people have practiced the ritual of going to the theatre to engage with social topics, especially during times of hardship. The first people known to come together and learn as a society through theatre were the Greeks. The Greeks hosted week-long festivals to celebrate Dionysus, the God of Wine, who was thought to be the first actor. Back then, theatre was used as a way to communicate news to society, as there were few other times this amount of people were all present together. An audience of as many as 15,000 people would sit in a round stadium, carved into the hillside, to watch these performances. In modern times, the audience plays a mostly quiet role. This is quite the opposite of the Greeks: “Greek audiences were talkative and unruly. If they disliked a play, they would drum their heels on their benches, jeer loudly and throw fruit.”

The Greeks were the creators of comedy and tragedy. They used these forms they created to present their ideas about moments in history for the audience to consider. They discussed plague through Oedipus Rex, and the role of women in society in Antigone. They realized that one of the best ways to make complicated ideas understood is through art, as “the stage is an integral element of history, of understanding the societies of situations past and present. It is not simply hard facts we see on stage, but human emotion and human processing.”

Cunningham takes us to another important moment in time for the theatre world: The Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a program under the Works Progress Administration of the 1930s. This was during the Great Depression, yet another crisis in our history in which many people lost their jobs and were going hungry. Not only was this program important for helping keep theatre makers afloat during the economic crisis, but it also served as a space for audiences to learn how to heal. Hallie Flanagan, head of the FTP, strived to decentralize theatre from New York City and Chicago, and instead make it accessible to everyone across the country. Flanagan, like the Greeks, saw theatre as a place to encourage social change. One of the most well known projects of the FTP was the Living Newpapers, a collaboration between playwrights and journalists to put real issues on the stage. One such show, “One-Third a Nation”, was a raging success and “played in New York City “for ten months in 1938 to a total audience of 217,458. Nationally, it played 7,641 times on stages in cities including Detroit, Cincinnati, Portland, Hartford, New Orleans, Seattle, and San Francisco.” Its success was only possible because the audience felt engaged and seen.

Another extremely important program during the FTP was the Negro Units. During this time, Black performance groups were given the space to bring Black theatre away from minstrelsy. For the first time, the stories of Black Americans were being portrayed more seriously, with all of their complexities and struggles put on stage. Not only that, but Black actors were given the space to perform Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a show only accessible to white actors during the time, instead presented with an all-black cast set in Haiti. Cunningham quotes scholar Kate Dossett, who stated,“A Negro Unit drama was their first experience of theatre as a black event for black communities. In Harlem, opening night of a Negro Unit production was the place to be.” During crises, the theatre has always been a space for the audience to come together to heal.

But how do we bring that sense of community to the digital era? The online audiences do not have the same luxury of being able to exist in a space to experience art together. Cunningham discusses this thought in the article:

Our great crisis, the coronavirus, forces us to watch plays alone, in the crannies of our homes, instead of drawing us into proximity with strangers. Our current government, unlike that led by Franklin Roosevelt, doesn’t see a connection between economic privation, social estrangement, and the kind of nourishment that can come only through an encounter with art—and has no sense of responsibility to encourage the flourishing of art and public life…The work of playwriting, acting, and theatrical production today might be to reintroduce us to one another, one at a time.

Broadway shut down more than a year ago on March 12th, 2020. Theatre artists have been unable to produce theatre in the same way for over a year and have been forced into a digital space, a place live theatre isn’t built for. Some may argue that all industries have had to move online, so theatre is no different. However, due to the important role of the audience, no live show industry seems to have cracked to code in replicating the magical experience found here. Cunningham argues that “The work of playwriting, acting, and theatrical production today might be to reintroduce us to one another, one at a time,” but I think we need to find ways for whole communities to come together, as one-on-one is all we have had for so long.

As a theatre artist myself, I have been struggling to engage with digital theatre the past year. I long for the days where a theatrical moment was so powerful that the energy in the room was palpable, electric even. These days, I sit behind a screen, watching theatre like it’s a movie; I am a faceless and voiceless viewer with no connection to the actors or my fellow audience members. How can we replicate the role of the audience in the digital space? We can’t really. But we can reimagine it.

Cunningham discusses a piece of theatre they saw, “Theatre for One: Here We Are,” in which they were put into breakout rooms, one audience member to one performer. The performer then dived into a 10-minute piece, speaking directly to this audience member, and sometimes even interacting with them by asking them a question. This experience felt valuable to Cunningham because it kept them alive and attentive, as they now had a responsibility to this actor to be present in this moment. However, one on one audience and performer interaction is not always a realistic experience; theatre audiences are frequently hundreds of people with only a few actors. Not only that, but one-on-one FaceTimes are primarily how people have communicated “face to face” throughout this time. We are missing those group gatherings and the chance to share our thoughts with strangers. What are some other strategies theatre artists can use to connect to their viewers in a digital space and keep them engaged?

A Northeastern University Theatre Alum, Des Bennett, completed their capstone in Fall of 2020 by directing a virtual performance of Scenes from Metamorphoses: based on the Myths of Ovid written by Mary Zimmerman. This performance was broken into six digestible “episodes”, and each episode ended with some sort of interactive prompt for the audience to complete before moving onto the next. Sometimes it was just a question: “If you could change one thing about our world, what would it be?”. Sometimes it was a game, A Metamorphoses-themed ‘Flappy Bird’, coded into the beautiful website by Northeastern Theatre and Computer Science student Matthew Hosking.

What made these additions wonderful is that you could see other people’s responses, right there on the website in live time. Because it was an anonymous space, people were very vulnerable, much more vulnerable than they could’ve been in any normal theatre space. I read about strangers’ hopes and dreams, what they were struggling with, and all of it related back to the themes of the play. And of course, there was a leaderboard to show the top five current game champions, inspiring some friendly competition among viewers. These interactions allowed audience members to not only interact with the material on a deeper level, but it also created a community space for the audience to interact with each other. It wasn’t the classic audience experience I missed, but it left me energized and curious in a similar way.

There are many perks of digital theatre that I didn’t expect to love so much, like the ability to watch productions whenever I want, from wherever I want. Theatre art can now transcend state lines and even across the vast oceans to the ears of people across the globe. Being displaced into digital theatre has also forced theatre artists to wake up and break away from what theatre has been, re-examine structures that have been in place for hundreds of years, and come away seeing the deep flaws in the industry and the craft itself. Despite these perks, Digital theatre, as Cunningham says, “is still in its vulnerable infancy”. For every ten digital performances I see, I feel intrigued by one, and bored by the other nine. This does not mean we should give up in the search to connect in this new digital performance world, it just means we have to work harder.

Although the “end” of the digital theatre era could be fast approaching with COVID-19 vaccines being more readily available, I hope we don’t forget the constraints and the freedom we found through digital theatre experiences. Throughout time, from the Greeks to the Federal Project, we have found new delights in the role of the audience. Now, it is time for theatre to evolve again, despite the challenges, because the opportunity for new, thought-provoking performances is within our reach if we work a little harder.