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I’ve Been Watching You Watching Us

The Source

I’m not sure what I know, but I know what I’ve seen. One subject that’s fascinated me over the years is audience behavior. I still don’t have it figured out, but there are a few things I’ve learned after watching people behave in hundreds of performances. Surely someone more intelligent has studied this, but I’ve not met him and perhaps he isn’t reading the Source this week. So…Audience Behavior 101 . . . You laugh more easily if you know the people sitting around you. When seated with strangers we become quieter. Last weekend we did a dinner theatre performance in Arenzville, and the show was preceded by an hour of our audience dining together. These folks weren’t family. They didn’t all know each other. But there’s something about the simple acting of supping together, asking someone to pass the salt, perhaps dropping your hot roll onto their shoe that loosens you up. If you’ve just spent an hour watching each other struggle with long strands of spaghetti in public then it takes little effort to guffaw out loud once the show begins. Compare that to walking into a darkened theatre and having a seat among strangers. If you want a lively audience, let them get to know each other. I’d suggest pre-show volleyball. Years ago I did a play at Triopia during a near-tornado. The lights flickered on and off all night and we had to stop the show so many times some folks thought it was a ten-act play. Our ushers saw the winds coming and passed a flashlight to every tenth audience member, sort of like the old days when they’d give out free boxes of Tide at the movies. I learned two things that night: 1) after you’ve suffered various power outages and stumbled around a crowded gym long enough, you become a very friendly audience, and 2) there are many folks who don’t know how to work a flashlight. Observation #2 of Audience Behavior: The temperature in the theatre is key. A cold audience will get numb. A hot audience will get angry. People assume that the director can cause heat on any given night but only God creates cold. (Observation 2.2: the most cold-blooded person in the room will sit directly in front of the air conditioner vent.) #3: This can’t always be accomplished since it involves reconfiguring your theatre, but if you’re doing a comedy, try to do it in the round. Audience members who can see each other laugh more. I suppose they might also cry more freely, but I can’t ever notice that…I usually have tears in my eyes. #4: I’ve never employed this one, but my friends in professional theatre tell me that a nearby saloon increases the audience response in comedies. #5: The old adage about matinee crowds being dead is dead wrong. I’m not sure what’s happened in recent years, but the audience for afternoon shows has grown a great deal younger and more responsive. Perhaps more folks are bringing their kids to the theatre. Perhaps hearing aids are improving. #6: Friday night crowds are almost always the most lively. Perhaps it’s the fact that fewer folks are thinking about going to work the next day. #7: Many theatres have adopted a practice that can kill your enjoyment of about any play. For some reason known only to their egos and God, they find it necessary to begin each performance with a prolonged curtain speech that tells you everything that’s already listed in the program. Perhaps they’ve noticed a drastic dip in American literacy and they’re simply catering to the non-readers in the audience. I come to the theatre all ready to enjoy a comedy then someone starts off my evening with a litany of upcoming shows, cell phone warnings, weather reports, stock market estimates, and the average yearly rainfall in that county. Okay, I’ve occasionally given a curtain speech myself, but I try to hold it really needed information like, “The theatre is on fire,” or, “The world has just ended. Please hold onto your ticket stubs.” #8: People laugh more readily when they sit closer together. They don’t like it, but they laugh more. Perhaps they can sense the vibration of the strange buttock pressed tightly up against their own and feel obligated to jiggle back in return. #9: Okay, I’ll come clean and admit there’s only one type of audience whom I really dread . . . the ones who don’t come.