Let’s embrace (not grope) audience participation

In two viral incidents this season during live theater, the show was in the audience.

In the first, at a performance of “Beetlejuice” at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., was captured on video taking flash photography, vaping, groping and being groped by her date, Quinn Gallagher, before being expelled from the venue.

In the second, five members of the environmental activist organization Just Stop Oil climbed onstage during a performance of “Les Misérables” at the Sondheim Theatre in London to protest the country’s production of fossil fuels. Showing a sense of dramatic timing, the protesters waited for the song “Do You Hear The People Sing?” to mount their takeover.

In each incident, the actual performances — the art for which audiences bought tickets — remained in the background or didn’t even make it into the viral video’s camera frame. That’s not what was interesting. What’s interesting is us. The theater is merely a site for the execution of proper decorum, and the only possible narrative is the decorum’s violation.

Since COVID hit, the discourse about audience behavior has gotten more polarized, spurred first by two groups vying to share the same space and breathe the same air: audience members who won’t see a show if they have to wear a mask, and audience members who won’t see a show unless everyone is wearing a mask.

As mask rules have eased — and theaters have continued to suffer pandemic-related financial problems — the debate has expanded. In one camp are theaters trying to lower every social barrier to entry and make as many audience members as possible feel comfortable in spaces still stereotyped as shushing. It’s a social justice issue, but also a financial one: In an era of low attendance, why would you want to repel any paying customer?

In the other camp are commentators lamenting that the pandemic caused everyone to

Matthew Murphy/BroadwaySF

Stephanie Scarbrough/Associated Press 2023 forget how to behave in public, that it entitled us to treat the world as an extension of our living rooms. In this view, our lingering unprocessed COVID grief and rage has erupted in our acting out, even by abusing theaters’ ushers.

In any event, theater remains one of the few indoor public spaces where people with very different social norms, and at times from different social classes, pack in tightly and (mostly try to) abide by the same (mostly unwritten) behavioral guidelines for a couple of hours. That’s what can make for the real spectacle: that there still exists a space with rules about sitting still and quietly, and that those rules are so easy to violate and manipulate for social media clout.

The truth is that in a postEmily Post world, we don’t know how we’re supposed to behave. Members of the same family or social class have wildly different beliefs about whether it’s OK to take out a cell phone at the dinner table or post a photo to the internet, discuss a touchy subject on social media or break major news via text.

It’s worth noting that, in the Boebert fiasco, while most of her behavior was clearly beyond the pale, some of it — raising her arms and singing along — has come to be totally fine at some shows, while it’s also exactly what a lot of other potential theatergoers are scared might get them reprimanded.

Theater is now the crucible where these debates play out. Any play or musical must compete with all the “paratheater” in the audience, or at least the possibility that some might break out. Similar phenomena occur in other media, of course, as in an instance last year of moaning, that some theorized could have been an orgasm, in the audience of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Also in classical music, Minnesota Orchestra violist Sam Bergman posted

on social media that a drunken fight broke out in the audience during a New Year’s Eve concert at Minneapolis’ Orchestra Hall, in the midst of “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from “The Nutcracker.” In pop music, the phenomenon of throwing objects at singers to disrupt them rather than pay tribute has become so widespread as to merit a whole New York Times critic’s notebook piece.

One way for behavior-challenged companies to compete, perhaps, is to turn competition into cooperation. Maybe a path forward for theater is to write new rules of decorum — or to be the first to violate them. If theater goes viral, it should be on behalf of the artists’ intentions onstage, not in spite of them.

This is not a proposal for every show, but an acknowledgment that, like it or not, the stage is set for a new theater experience, one that doesn’t shoehorn uncomfortable, grudging audience participation into existing structures. Such a form would reject the very phrase “audience participation” as outmoded.

The fact that these types of incidents go viral shows that we yearn to see our fellow audience members — whether our peer everyday people or celebs who are offstage, watching other celebs — have such a powerful effect on the world around us that they stop the action and break the frame. We are galvanized by the idea that someone, somewhere, can change something, even something as contained as one performance of one musical. These videos remind us that things don’t have to be as they are — a thought both reassuring and titillating.

What would it look like for theater artists to build that dynamic into their projects — to acknowledge it, play with it? Performance artists have been doing that for decades; one recent wildly successful practitioner in San Francisco was Annie Danger, whose “The Hands That Feed You” at CounterPulse put the last segment of the show entirely in the hands of the audience. We even decided when the show was over and when to leave the venue.

But we needn’t contain such exploration to CounterPulse and other avant-garde venues. Taylor Mac at the Curran and Jackie Sibblies Drury and Geoff Sobelle at Berkeley Rep have already shown how bigger spaces can make the audience the star, however briefly, in a way that serves the art. Still, the popularity of the “Beetlejuice” and “Les Misérables” videos suggests that larger theaters and commercial theater are leaving a market untapped. Audiences want a say in the proceedings. Ignore that dynamic, and you’ll keep going viral only for the wrong reasons.

Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman/Broadway San Jose

Movies

Steven Boyle / The Chronicle

Do restrain yourself from humming — or singing — along.

Museums

Do be conscious of not obstructing people’s views of the art. It’s OK to linger, but if you’re blocking a painting, sculpture or other work and others are waiting to see it, move on and come back to it later, Post recommends.

Do be aware if a space is quiet and use your “indoor voice.” Grotts also calls this “your church voice.”

Do ask questions of docents about the art after you’ve read the wall texts.

Do follow rules about photography, video and the use of flash in exhibitions.

Do obey rules about bringing in outside food. If allowed, be considerate of the people near you and choose something without an overwhelming odor.

Standing concerts and music festivals

Do be aware that these are often crowded, difficult spaces, said Post. “And give people grace.”

Do respect people’s personal space when possible.

Do clean up your trash.

For everywhere

Do remember the magic words “please” and “thank you.”

A performance of “Beetlejuice” made the news not for the show but because of the bad behavior of an audience member — who also is a member of Congress.

Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., was kicked out of “Beetlejuice.” But some of her antics, like singing along, are increasingly accepted.

Members of the activist group Just Stop Oil thought a London production of “Les Misérables” — this one was at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts — was the right place to stage a protest.