Like a tree falling in the forest without anyone to hear it, a performance in the theater does not exist unless there is someone to attend it. The players need an audience, that strange, ominous, ever changeable mass of human beings seated out there in front of them, waiting for something to capture their attention.
That relationship has been a constant in the performing arts, yet it is difficult to define, and it is hardly ever analyzed. Now, however, one bold attempt to get hold of just how the performer and the customer relate to each other is being presented on stage in a vivid, compelling new performance piece devised by director Anne Bogart and the actors of her Saratoga International Theatre Institute.
Premiered last year at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, (where I saw it), “Cabin Pressure” is being brought here by Performing Arts Chicago for four performances, Dec. 9-12, at the Ruth Page Theater, 1016 N. Dearborn St.
Bogart is something special in the theater. She has already fashioned a piece on theater director Robert Wilson, and she now is working with her actors on original works dealing with Orson Welles, Robert Rauschenberg and Virginia Woolf.
About four years ago, with the help of funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts, she began work in Louisville on the audience project. For starters, 57 individuals from a wide range of social and ethnic backgrounds were asked to engage in a two-year workshop process, attending two rehearsals, a dress rehearsal and performances of Bogart’s staging of Noel Coward’s “Private Lives” at Actors Theatre. Bogart interviewed each one of the participants for a half-hour and recorded their reactions to what they had seen and heard. For their part, the audience members who were enrolled in the project were asked to engage in post-play discussion groups with other customers.
With this first-hand experience in mind, and with the aid of much research in theater history, Bogart went to work with her actors. “They hated it at first,” she says. “They did not like at all the idea of being watched by `civilians,’ as they called them.”
Gradually, however, the actors developed scenes and subject matter from the raw material, putting together an intermissionless piece that began while the audience was being seated, with the actors playing the final scene of “Private Lives” and then taking their curtain calls. This, Bogart says, was her attempt “to take all the conventions of going to a play and turn them inside out.”
The piece climaxes with an extraordinary “audience ballet,” in which the actors, moving about the stage as they sit in folding chairs, assume the various squirming, scrunching, twitching, shifting positions that customers can take while watching a performance.
Among the prime lessons Bogart picked up from this experience, she says, was this: “I learned that what you have to do in the theater is let the audience use its own imagination. Film is basically descriptive, but the theater is suggestive. You have to suggest things, which often means doing the least possible, so that the audience can take over. In a way, it’s a detective story. You leave clues; but the less clues you leave, the more the audience can enjoy solving the mystery by themselves.
“Young directors tend to make everything explicit. But the best way, I’ve found, is to give the audience just enough to take off on their own. You don’t spell out everything. You just cross the stage, look over your shoulder and exit quickly.
“It’s like Shakespeare, who drew pictures in which the audience could fill in the blanks.”
And what about that great moment, rare but wonderful and however brief, when actors or dancers or musicians are able to unite with their audiences in a bond of mutual enjoyment, enthusiasm and appreciation? How do you make that happen?
“Ah, Richard,” says Bogart. “That’s still the greatest mystery of all.”
