THE AUDIENCE COMPLETES THE STEPS OF CREATION ENSEMBLE IN THE SYRACUSE STAGE/ DEPARTMENT OF DRAMA COPRODUCTION OF HAIRSPRAY.
In the interest of full disclosure, some details in the following may be inaccurate. I am relying on memory, and suspect in the best times, it surely should not be trusted now. Nonetheless, here goes. In June of 2000, Jack Kroll, the longtime art, film, and theatre critic for Newsweek magazine, passed away. An awardwinning journalist, Kroll was lauded as an intellectual and enthusiast whose broad tastes embraced Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Fred Astaire and Sam Shepard. He loved Jazz, dance, and film as well, and wrote well about each.
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“Though largely anonymous and usually cloaked in the invisibility of darkness, the audience is a living, breathing force at any performance. An audience is neither blank slate nor passive witness.” Here’s the dodgy part. Among the tributes and reflections published about Kroll at the time of his passing, I recall an account that reported he had known he wanted to be a critic from his very first visit to the theatre. During that experience, he recognized he didn’t want to be a performer, didn’t want to be on stage; he wanted to be in the audience. That was where he felt he wanted to spend his life. Today, I can find no trace of this account. Google turns up three short obituaries and a Wikipedia entry. So for now, I must rely on my memory and note that the surprise I felt upon reading of young Jack Kroll’s epiphany is why I think it stuck with me. I mean, there are any number of actors or drama students or drama faculty who will attest that they knew they wanted
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“Spelled out and slightly oversimplified, Brook’s formula reads: Theatre = Repetition, representation, assistance. Repetition stands for rehearsal. Representation means performance. Assistance, borrowing from French, means to watch a play, as in—j’assiste à une pièce.” to be on stage from their very first encounters with live performance. But a critic? A member of the audience? I’d say that’s rare, however enjoyable that first taste of theatre may have been. There’s something more here as well. Granted, this may be wild speculation, but young Jack Kroll must have intrinsically understood the deep importance of the audience to the theatrical event. Though largely anonymous and usually cloaked in the invisibility of darkness, the audience is a living, breathing force at any performance. An audience is neither blank slate nor passive witness. An audience, as the great Peter Brook would have it, “completes the steps of creation.” What a thought. It occurs to me that perhaps the average member of the Syracuse Stage audience may never consider this. There’s no need to really. We come to the theatre for enjoyment, for laughter, for a good story, or for any of a plethora of personal reasons. That is enough. Yet, every actor, director, and stage manager knows well that every audience is part of the performance and every performance is impacted by the audience. Brook has even devised a kind of mathematical formula that in determining the requirements for success in the theatre assigns one third of the whole experience to the audience: Theatre = R r a. This bears some explaining. Spelled out and slightly oversimplified, Brook’s formula reads: Theatre = Repetition, representation, assistance. Repetition stands for rehearsal. Representation means performance. Assistance, borrowing from French, means to watch a play, as in— j’assiste à une pièce. Part of what Brook is getting at is that what turns a rehearsal (repetition of practiced material) into a real performance (a true re-presentation, as if new) is the assistance (active interest) of the audience. The active interest, the collective engagement of the audience is the final magical ingredient that 3
breathes fresh life into a theatrical performance. It completes all the other steps of creation. Astonishing and undeniably true. What is also undeniably true is that no theatre can be successful without an audience. Bernard Gersten, who passed away last month at 97 and who was a major force in the success of the Public Theatre and the revival of Lincoln Center, once noted his four indispensable elements of theatre: a building, artists, money, and an audience. “How you mix them, how you adjust them, how you administer them is the secret of success or failure,” he said. And success matters. As we endure this forced hiatus, it behooves us all, artists, administrators, and audience alike, to remember that what we do in the theatre, in art, has value, perhaps especially at times like these. Let’s give Jack Kroll the last word. “Art’s natural enemy – and [humanity’s] – is chaos. Today art is our most advanced attempt to map out our chaos so we can avoid disappearing into it.” – Joseph Whelan 4
PETER BROOK. PHOTO: LIONEL BONAVENTURE/ AFP/GETTY IMAGES.