PANIC IN THE SEATS
Can interactive theater and an anxious audience coexist?
It’s been a difficult few years for theater lovers who have participation anxiety.
Many of the buzziest shows — locally and nationally — have had performers coming into the audience for an interactive experience. They ask for volunteers. The fourth wall disappears.
In some cases, the audience is actually onstage — because there are seats up there, too. In the American Repertory Theater’s 2023 run of “The Wife of Willesden,” audience members lounged at tables on a stage that was designed to look like a pub. In the ART’s 2019-20 run of “Moby-Dick,” some patrons opted to sit onstage in boats to help with the whale hunt.
At the Huntington right now, one of the most interactive shows I’ve seen in years, “Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight,” involves actor Jim Ortlieb calling on people at random, having them read from text he hands to them, asking them questions, and checking in every so often to see how they’re doing.
No spoilers, but at one point it’s on the audience to save someone’s life. (It makes sense in context.) It’s designed to be a beautiful experience that turns the audience into a community — and it is! I just wish I could have relaxed and enjoyed it more, as opposed to being anxious and freaked out about what I might have been asked to do.
I know I’m not alone in this. When I asked others to be my date for “Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight,” my loved ones — even those who eventually said yes — asked, scowling, “Will I have to do anything?” They expressed concerns about being chosen at random to participate. They wanted warnings about jump scares.
“People do come in with some anxiety,” said “Stand Up” writer and director John Kolvenbach, who usually watches his show from the back of the house. “We always say: No one’s going to be embarrassed. That’s the opposite of what we’re after.
“I know that there’s a long kind of vaudeville tradition of making fun of the audience and bringing someone up to embarrass them, and that’s not what we’re up to. And usually after people see the show, they sometimes will come back and bring a shy friend, because they can assure that shy friend that nothing’s going to happen.”
Interactive theater has always been a thing. The cats in Broadway’s “Cats” came into the audience and got feline with unsuspecting patrons. David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s “Here Lies Love,” a musical about Imelda Marcos that played on Broadway last year, is an interactive dance show.
The ART is known for championing shows that ditch the fourth wall, having produced the “Macbeth”-inspired “Sleep No More” during its US debut. The ART’s decade-long run of “The Donkey Show” at its Oberon space placed the audience in the middle of a nightclub amid “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”-inspired plot.
We should be used to this kind of engagement. But maybe some of us are worse at it since 2020, after lockdown and the social starts and stops that followed. Maybe a few of us (say, me, for example) are still figuring out how to be normal at parties, let alone in the middle of a theater, under house lights. For the record, it isn’t just that I’m worried about being asked to volunteer, I’m also worried about others who might get reeled into the show. I spent part of “The Wife of Willesden” wondering whether one of the audience members onstage would do something weird, or maybe their cellphone would ring, ruining a moment. At “Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight,” I feared that someone would cry publicly, or perhaps someone would be asked to answer a question and wouldn’t know what to say.
But this is one of the reasons why the Huntington is so excited to bring “Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight” to Boston. The show, which has had runs in Los Angeles, Chicago, Paris, and Wellfleet, pushes its audience to sit through the discomfort of participation and then relax and exhale — because it’s all fine no matter what. Maybe that’s something we need after years of disconnection, said the Huntington’s artistic director, Loretta Greco.
“There is something powerful about recognizing that you’re not the only one who is reticent,” she said. “There’s a moment where [Ortlieb] acknowledges, like, ‘How many of you are freaking out right now?’ And a third of the hands go up. For me, just watching … to be reminded that even in their anxiety they are a community, I think is so powerful.”
Greco suspects that there are also people who love this kind of show because they want “fewer rules about how they can behave.” In fact, the Huntington extended the run of “Stand Up” by three weeks, to March 23.
I went to the show twice, mostly for this story, but also because I really liked it. My heart raced for much of the first performance but slowed as I realized I was in good hands. It helped that one of the themes of the show (again, no spoilers) is that we all might be figuring out how to sit with discomfort and accept that we don’t know what will happen next.
During the second performance, I was able to be more present, ready to breathe during the awkward moments. I even chose a more action-central seat (none are assigned).
American Repertory Theater artistic director Diane Paulus compares experiences like these to going to the gym. Exercise stretches us in ways we don’t always love, but if we do it, we get better at it.
For me, “Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight” did feel like emotional exercise. Not only was it practice for enjoying interactive shows, but it was also a way to work through the discomfort of being in groups in regular life, where you might be called on at any moment and you never know what anyone is going to say.
“What I love about theater is that it’s an important place for all of us to go to train — to train our empathy muscles,” Paulus said. “To make sure we feel like the heart is still beating and that we see things in new ways. We can get exposed to points of view that are not our own.”
Of course, for people like me, there are still plenty of shows where I can disappear — because I don’t want to exercise all the time. I saw “The Book of Mormon” at the Opera House recently and reveled in the house lights staying off the whole time, except for intermission.
That said, I am interested in “[Expletive]-faced Shakespeare,” an interactive Shakespeare experience running at The Rockwell in Somerville.
I am also scared of it. The whole thing is about actors interpreting Shakespeare under the influence of alcohol. What could go wrong?
But Charles Vincent Burwell, a professor of theater at Boston Conservatory at Berklee, said anxious, introverted theatergoers should remember that performers can usually read a room.
Burwell assured me that even in a production where random people are being asked to volunteer, actors are paying attention to who’s game for the experience.
“As a performer, we usually know,” he said. “You’re looking and seeing who is leaning forward — and you might not pick that person because they’re too eager. Who is leaning way back? You might not pick that person because you don’t know how they’re going to react. And then there are people who are kind of in the middle. And that’s usually where I would go.
“We don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable for absolutely no reason.”
‘We don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable for . . . no reason.’
CHARLES VINCENT BURWELL, a professor of theater at Boston Conservatory at Berklee