Professional Audiences? It could happen...

BY Lawrence Bommer

We critics spend a lot of time in the dark (that’s meant literally, thank you), surrounded by strangers. For two hours one profession gazes at another, hoping for the best, eager to see who blinks first. Sometimes it’s hard not to remember Oscar Wilde’s remark on an opening night: He assured a friend the play would be a success—the only question was whether the audience would be.

If actors are supposed to be professional, what are audiences? Amateurs? They’re the reason for the show and, presumably, for its success. So, a question inevitably arises: Did they rise to its occasion? If not, should they be blamed for letting down actors, authors and everyone else? And, if they encourage mediocrity (like TV couch potatoes addicted to “reality” shows), can they bad mouth the drivel they’ve deserved? Do critics succeed by shrewdly guessing what’s crowd pleasing? Or by resisting the rush to trash?

There’s a reason for these not so rhetorical questions: The plays of 2007 seemed to coast on audience approval while at the same time defying the very expectations they were raising. The House Theatre’s curiously-touted mediocrity The Sparrow, a half-baked rip-off of Carrie and The Sweet Hereafter, traded on evocations of a cozy downstate Illinois hamlet in the Eisenhower era where outsiders get accepted even if the resident Goth mutant massacres a bus full of middle school kids for no reason. The cutesified staging was enough to convince critics that something was really happening. Audiences, refusing to see that “there was no there there,” bought into the well-packaged make-believe. If you wanted more than industrial-strength nostalgia and literal flights of fancy, well, you were selfishly asking too much from such a sweet little story.

Here’s where audiences wise up in the worst way, if only because they have more to lose than critics or producers realize. Imagine paying $50+ to see Goodman Theatre’s execrable Passion Play, a stunningly inconsequential mess of self-indulgence by an obscenely over praised playwright. The average theatergoer must work two to four hours at his job to pay for the one or two tickets. That’s time not invested in basics like food and shelter. Then there are the inflationary incidentals like babysitting, gas, parking and a dinner costlier than home cooking. After that outlay, they end up spending nearly four hours watching talented actors in a stupid spectacle that goes nowhere very slowly. That ticket buyer has lost 10 hours of his life he’ll never get back again and paid dearly to be bored deeply. It’s little wonder he’ll be wary about taking a chance on a lesser known winner like Bohemian Theatre’s small-scale musical gem The Life. As Mark Twain said, “A cat that’s been burned by a hot stove will never sit on one again. But he’ll never sit on a cold one either.” Badly burned theatergoers can easily over learn the wrong lesson. Meow!

Critics, who of course don’t pay for their tickets, shouldn’t dismiss the full cost of anything they recommend. Audiences willing to take risks should have a reasonable chance of being rewarded. Perhaps because critics see more shows than is good for our souls, they get jaded enough to confuse outrageous with progressive (Spinning into Butter), bleak despair with outspoken realism (The Glory of Living), and calamitous events with earned tragedy (August: Osage County). Wow, they opine, this bottom-feeding, slime-slinging misanthropic mess is so hard on humanity that, gosh, it must be real! It’s too smart to spare a single soul! Anyway hope is for dopes! Or else we’re drawn to attention-deficit disorders like the aforementioned Passion Play (which had no passion whatsoever) that sets up a gay love affair in Nazi Germany, then blithely abandons it for another red-herring plot twist. Why? Because we’re just too busy multi-tasking to follow things through. Cut to the chase. Just the highlights, please. The messy, human context is a bore. Theatre, they seem to perversely argue, must rise above life by refusing to resemble it.

So many plays (and films) today feel like slow-motion car crashes, their only catharsis the relief that we’re just helpless onlookers, not casualties. Maybe these near misses actually increase our compassion (“There but for the grace of God...”) but I doubt it. I’ve seen too many pretend plays whose real payoff was the sheer pleasure of walking away from ignorant losers and never looking back. Red Orchid’s Blasted did everything to debase its characters in the name of…what? Implacable veracity? Scum-sucking naturalism? Irresistible despair? It left us curiously unconnected to these creatures (because otherwise we’d be dead or wish we were).

The best plays this year, like every season, told stories so well they bound us in spells. They didn’t punish us for suspending disbelief by suddenly turning phony—you know, opportunistic acting, late-blooming and preposterous exposition, a failure to engage the conflicts they create, repetition for defect. Lookingglass Theatre’s Black Diamond could have opened eyes about the real cost of “blood diamonds”; instead, it reduced it to a trivial pursuit by a how-I-spent-my summer-internship narrator. Equally wrong-hearted, Lookingglass’ The Wooden Breeks turned cute and quirky into incomprehensibly whimsical. But, trusting Stoppard all the way, Court Theatre’s Arcadia let a brilliant script speak through trustworthy thespians. TimeLine Theatre brought similar conviction to Clifford Odets’ family tragedy Paradise Lost, whose very flaws made it human.

Despite its grim diagnosis of once and future witch hunts, the year’s best offering, Steppenwolf’s searing revival of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, couldn’t have been more curative. For six years opportunistic fear has poisoned this former republic. Nothing less than the return of the rule of reason will end the slaughter of innocents, in New Orleans or Baghdad. Maybe that’s why the gentle failures of the stranded dreamers in Raven Theatre’s The Sea Gull seemed so redemptive. Like the eavesdropping audience caught up in their familiar, familial frustrations, we caught ourselves in the act of being human. Let’s applaud ourselves for the simple, constant miracle of seeing ourselves in strangers!

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Abarbanel:
A Changing of the Guard in Chicago Theatre

Reid:
The Audience You Deserve

Vire: Backwards and Forwards

Goddu:
Bon Mots on Shows

Zarrus: Emotional Vocabulary Lessons

Piatt:
Theatre in the Blogosphere