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Before the stage lights went up on Ingmar Bergman’s visually glorious
red, black and gray production of Schiller’s Maria Stuart, a handful of
people were seated on the front steps of the Brooklyn Academy of Music,
reading the play. How happy to be among audience preparing for an
evening of Schiller! How happy to surmise that, if there were a handful
of readers on the steps, likely several more handfuls had read the play
before reaching the theatre! Bergman’s Maria Stuart
featured Swedish-speaking actors and BAM offered simultaneous
translation by non-actors on headset. Because I wanted to hear the
acting as well as follow the sense of the dialogue, I flipped back and
forth from headset to stage. Then I split the difference: right ear to
the headset, left ear to the stage. For Act III I dropped the headset
altogether to relish the confrontation between Mary and Elizabeth
unadulterated. Played by actresses Lena Endre and Pernilla August, the
Queens met in an open park under a massive orange-red sky that turned
black when Mary, insulted by Elizabeth, abandoned decorum to loose her
fury.
The couple sitting in front of me donned headsets at the top
of the show and kept them on, except that the woman immediately fell
asleep and didn’t waken until intermission when an acquaintance stopped
at their aisle to ask: “Who was that man in red trying to embrace Mary?
Wasn’t he supposed to be on Elizabeth’s side since she’s dressed in
red?” To which the woman who had been asleep replied, “Yes, it’s very
hard to follow.” If these folks had read the play, they would have
understood that Mortimer, the man in red in question, was, yes, supposed
to be on Elizabeth’s side, but in reality was a rebel enamored of Mary
and scheming for her freedom. In fact, these folks could have understood
the plot without having read the play. The events of the production were
lucid, especially with a headset, but of course one had to pay attention
and at least stay awake.
Members of the audience for Christopher Nolan’s (movie)
Insomnia, on the night I saw it, also seemed to have trouble following
the story, although not because they were asleep. When someone gets
confused at a somewhat complex movie, I imagine it is due to a habit of
watching television. It’s true that the voices of the Insomnia actors
were sometimes quiet and their diction was not Shakespearean, and it’s
true that the plot was intricate and required attention. But isn’t that
the pleasure of viewing a mystery thriller, paying attention, so as to
solve the mystery while experiencing the thrills? In the lobby
afterwards, people were complaining: “Where did Al Pacino get that
bullet and what did he do with it?” Or, “How was I supposed to know
whose gun that was in the radiator?” When I caught the movie, a group of
teenage boys, besides talking out loud on a cell phone, paced the aisle
to the concession stand and back, singly or in pairs, until leaving up
front via the fire exit, singly or in pairs, about half-way through the
movie. Surely they had lost interest and how not? What had they done to
follow the movie?
There was a nice young couple (no cell phone, no food)
sitting next to me in the front row for Steve Martin’s adaptation of The
Underpants (an early 20th century German ironic masterwork by
Carl Sternheim). They were reading their programs prior to the start of
the show, when suddenly the man exclaimed, “You mean Steve Martin isn’t
in it?” Voicing irritation that they must have been deceived, he
wondered if they ought to get up and get their money back. It seems
extraordinary that anyone could harbor an expectation that a movie star
would appear live on stage before their eyes, practically in their lap,
at a small Off-Broadway house, as is the theatre on Union Square where
the Classic Stage Company (producer of The Underpants) resides. The
couple had paid no more than $45 per ticket, and possibly as little as
$20, and yet they were anticipating the appearance of Steve Martin. How
fantastic to imagine Steve Martin performing Off-Broadway when Steve
Martin doesn’t even perform on Broadway. For the record, Steve Martin is
a comedian who performs the male lead in comedic movies and to this day
is not a stage actor even if he is an author of stage plays. As for the
nice young couple, they stayed for the production and laughed out loud.
Audiences go to the theatre with varying degrees of
preparation and cultural sophistication, varying degrees of the capacity
to pay attention, and varying expectations. The variegated nature of
audience renders their responses unpredictable and uncontrollable, which
is reason enough for an actor to relinquish any thought of trying to
please an audience. Which member of the audience would the actor try to
please? Would the actor aim his performance at the person who had read
the play, the sleeping woman, her awake husband, their confused friend,
a busy teenage boy, adults with wandering minds, a couple who wants a
different actor, or at me? The conglomerate nature of audience argues
against the actor ever playing for the audience. What the actor needs to
do is play for the scene partner in the presence of the audience.
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