by Ben Spatz
I keep going to plays and sitting in front of old white women who talk back to what's going on onstage. Sometimes they respond to individual things in the play, and sometimes they just talk about how bad the whole thing is. I've heard some pretty sharp comments, actually.
Anyway, the point is that I get very annoyed by these people, because I want to hear the play in silence. And one day, while I was annoyed at one of them, it occurred to me that there's a kind of interesting breaking of the fourth wall going on. I mean, it's still annoying, because it's out of context and no one else is doing it and the performers didn't ask her to speak... But even so, it speaks of a kind of irreverant engagement with the show that reminds me of call and response in concerts. I tend to think of theater as something to be watched in silence and passivity. And I definitely believe that the separation between performer and audience is the founding principle of theater. But there certainly is something spunky about talking back, even if nobody asked you what you thought.