something magical

During one of the performances of complete works this week, there was a group of middle school kids sitting on the front row of the audience. Usually the guys are great with dealing with the audience, because they don’t really talk at them.

This was not the case.

The kids went beyond responding to the guys, at some moments it seemed like they were in their own play, competing with the show on stage. Everything logical in me said that these kids are being delinquents, invading art, just being rowdy.  

but instead, i began to wonder, is this a new form of participation in theatre? commenting on what’s happening on stage, out loud, in real time. Not that I think these kids were hitting any groundbreaking ideas on theatre, but the live experience is one of the unique things about theatre. Live interaction, not gazing into a fishbowl of life. We already have that with tv, and now streaming video online. 

Is theatre considered boring because the patrons are forced to sit there for hours? being quiet? Should we give them an active role in the play? then you can go into the whole arguement of whether the playwright is the master of a play or not…. but it seems that we’re not connecting to something in our world. Otherwise, theatre would be much more a necessity than a novelty. but what are we not tapping into?

i mean, i can’t create an ipod or iphone experience for you. We have to use real bodies, in real time, in a real space. 

Something that may affect our change to the theatre, may have to do with our approach to religion. With attendance going down, the one place where people volunteer to gather together and listen and think (or there is the idea that you are supposed to come there to do those things) is lessening, or becoming fragmented even more with so many denominations and even churches themselves are being split in two. Fewer people are gathering together in large groups. Who goes to lectures anymore, town hall meetings? While our technology is becoming far more vast, it is making us all islands on our own. Think of the family unit itself, how many times do you eat with your family as a group, probably not as much as you did ten years ago.

but having those kids there, actually interacting, challenging the actors, whether it was antagonistic or not, gave me some glimmer of hope that the next generation of theatre will not be boring, but engaging, confrontational, and fruitful….

because sometime soon, i think people are going to become tired of this fast paced life, information overload, everything at the touch of your fingertips. Or at least I hope that they will wonder about something else, and step away from their computer, tv, guitar hero…. the list goes on. 

Are these things really edifying, or just filler? Theatre can fall into that trap too, by trying to appease their need of stimulation and zoning out. But I hope we are not on that track.