It is not unusual to hear actors talk about the nature of audiences on different nights of the week, as if a crowd of a thousand people can suddenly have a singular personality. But actors swear that they do: Saturday nights audiences are particularly lively (perhaps because the crowd had time for drinks before the show), Friday nights tend to be subdued (because it’s the end of a long work week), and so on.
But proof that audiences respond en masse, and sometimes inexplicably, was very apparent the other evening when I went out to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to see Ian McKellen as King Lear.
At roughly the time the show was to begin, the very chatty, energized audience suddenly fell silent – literally, a hush fell over the theatre. But there had been (absent a curtain to rise) no change in lighting, no one on stage, no specific cue that the show was about to start. And that’s because it wasn’t.
The audience was suddenly sitting in mystified silence – obedient, but undoubtedly wondering why everyone had gone silent. Who knows how this started: had the people house left gotten a glimpse of the actors gathering off stage left; had one lively couple suddenly decided they needed to get ready and did their sudden decorum spread like wildfire? I have no way of knowing.
Had this occurred for a second or two, it would have been forgotten, but by my guess, the hush enveloped the crowd for 30 to 40 seconds, an awkward seeming eternity. This inexplicable mass act of will (and manner) ultimately served to undercut the opening moment of the show: when a flourish of trumpets sounded, its startled the audience from its uncomfortable stillness, grabbing attention that was already rapt with anticipation. I can only assume that had the audience been behaving as most audiences do – waiting to be silenced by some visual or aural cue – the trumpets would have served to silence the rabble of the court (those of us in the seats) and prepared us for the entrance of Lear and his court.
Certainly this one small incident didn’t mar the show, but it was a peculiar moment that pointed up just how much the audience can effect the theatrical experience by a collective, unpredictable will – defining the event not just for the actors presenting it, but for everyone in the theatre as well.
Posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
by
Howard Sherman
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