Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 17
their performance is affected by the way the audience
yields or withholds its responses through its laughter,
sighs, applause, gasps, and silences. Live theatrical performance
is always—even in naturalistic theatre—a two-way
communication between stage and house.
Live theatre also creates a relationship among the
audience members. Having arrived at the theatre as individuals
or in groups of two or three, they quickly find
themselves fused to a common experience with total
strangers: laughing at the same jokes, empathizing with
the same characters, experiencing the same revelations.
This broad communal response is never developed by
television drama, which is played chiefly to solitary or
clustered viewers who may engage online with other
viewers, but rarely in person; nor is it likely to happen
in movie houses, where audience members essentially
assume a one-on-one relationship with the screen and
rarely break out in a powerful collective reaction. In contrast,
live theatrical presentations generate social activity:
audience members arrive at the theatre at about the
same time, they mingle and chat during intermissions,
and they all depart together, often in spirited conversation
about the play. Moreover, they communicate during the
play: laughter and applause build upon themselves and
gain strength from the recognition that others are laughing
and applauding. The final ovation—unique to live
performance—inevitably involves the audience applauding
itself, as well as the performers, for understanding and
appreciating the experience they have all shared.
Plays can even generate collective political responses.
In a celebrated example, the Depression-era Waiting
for Lefty was staged as if the audience were a group of
union members; by the play’s end the audience was yelling
“Strike! Strike!” in response to the play’s issues.
Obviously, only a live performance could evoke such a
response. More recently, the 1998 revival of Cabaret,
restaged in 2015, converted the entire theatre space into a
1930s-era German nightclub. At the end of the show, the
once-frivolous activities on the stage have given way to
the early, horrific days of the Nazi regime. The audience
members were more than simply spectators—they were
part of the show, complicit in witnessing the horrors and
called upon to think and react.
Finally, live performance has the quality of immediacy.
The action of the play is taking place right now, as
it is being watched, and anything can happen. Although
in most professional productions the changes that occur
in performance from one night to the next are so subtle
only an expert would notice, the fact is that each night’s
presentation is unique and everyone present—in the
audience, in the cast, and behind the scenes—knows it.
This awareness lends an excitement that cannot be experienced
while watching films or video, which are wholly
“in the can” before they are viewed. One reason for the
excitement of live theatre, of course, is that mistakes can
happen in its performance; this possibility creates a certain
tension, perhaps even an edge of stage fright, which
some people say creates the ultimate thrill of the theatre.
But just as disaster can come without warning, so too
can splendor. On any given night, each actor is trying to
better her or his previous performance, and no one knows
when this collective effort will coalesce into something
sublime. In this way, the immediacy of live performance
creates a “presentness,” or “presence,” that embodies the
fundamental uncertainty of life itself. One prime function
of theatre is to address the uncertainties of human existence,
and the very format of live performance presents
moment-to-moment uncertainty right before our eyes.
Ultimately, this “immediate theatre” helps us define the
questions and confusions of our lives and lets us grapple,
in the present, with their implications.
Scripted and Rehearsed Performance While
theatre is always new and immediate, it is also scripted
and carefully prepared. The art of theatre lives in the tension
between these two opposing principles: it is always
spontaneous but also carefully and repeatedly rehearsed.
Theatre performances are largely prepared according to
written and well-rehearsed texts, or play scripts. In this
way they are often distinguished from other forms of
performance, such as improvisation and performance
installations. Although improvisation and ad-libbing
may play a role in the preparation process, and even in
certain actual performances, most play productions are
based on a script that was established before—and modified
during—the play’s rehearsal period, and most of the
action is permanently set during these rehearsals as well.
Mainstream professional play productions, therefore,
appear nearly the same night after night: for the most
part, the Broadway production of Wicked that you see on
Thursday will be almost identical to the show your friend
saw on Wednesday or your mother saw last fall. And if
you were to read the published text, you would see on
the page the same words you heard spoken or sung on
the stage.
But the text of a play is not, by any means, the play
itself. The play fully exists only in its performance—in
its “playing.” The script is merely the record the play
leaves behind after the audience has gone home. The
script, therefore, is to the play it represents only what
a shadow painting is to the face it silhouettes: it outlines
the principal features but conveys only the outer