Listening In
Posted by James Vincent Meredith on 4/09/2008
I love watching post show discussions. I don’t often participate in them, because I’m always concerned that I’m going to get a question to which I have no answer. But I’m always in awe of the way the moderators lead the discussions, coaxing the audience into lowering its guard and speaking freely about what they’ve seen. I’ve witnessed post shows where members of the audience couldn’t stop expressing the love they had for a show, and I’ve seen post shows where they couldn’t stop expressing how the show made them throw up in their mouth a little. And that’s cool with me. I know that people may be a bit reluctant to criticize a show when the actors are out there, so I sometimes sit unseen in the balcony so that I can hear honest opinions. And I really value them. Sometimes there’s a plot point that wasn’t clear or even audible (towards the end of a recent show, after I made a statement to Marilyn [Ora] critical to the plot, I heard an audience member whisper “Wait — she’s pregnant?”), and our moderators will need to clarify what some audience members might have missed, or misunderstood. Sometimes a character didn’t ring true, or a moment didn’t seem plausible, or the writing in this scene was great, but maybe not in that scene; the feedback that the audience gives is really valuable to me. You get to see what maybe worked that night, and maybe what didn’t. Perception is reality, right?
Completely unrelated, but here’s another cell phone story — I’m sure that if you’re reading this blog, you probably go to the theater fairly regularly, and surely have a cell phone story of your own. Last week, we were coming up on the end of a show. Probably 15 minutes from the end, so pretty high tension, climax of the show, all that stuff. A phone rings. Nothing new, it’s happened before. Loud, but still, it’s happened before. PeeWee’s in the middle of some dialogue with an important piece of plot. The audience member answers the phone. And it must be one of those Sprint or Nextel beep phones, because there’s no beep, but all of us (audience and actors alike) can hear the whole conversation, including the person on the other end of the line:
“Hello…Hello?”
“Hey, where are you?”
“Are you okay?”
“What’s wrong? Are you alright?”
I couldn’t see K. Todd behind me onstage, but I could hear in his voice that he was about to let our friend in the audience have it. He kept it together, which kept all of us onstage in the moment. I know he’s a professional and that’s what you’re supposed to do. But when you hear so many stories about actors stopping and saying “Do you wanna finish that call?”, or “Do you mind?” — or something unprintable — he stayed in the game. I know it’s what you’re supposed to do, but that doesn’t mean everyone has the focus to do it. Anyway, I just thought it was worth mentioning.