While planning for this years’ play we stumbled upon a big roadblock, deciding the game. Usually the school pays don’t include much of a game, but rely more on conventions, like last years’ play  Miyuki, which relied heavily on the set Kabuki conventions of not only physical movement but voice as well.

We had to devise a game for the audience (as was the splitting of the audience for the one-act play “Split”) and we didn’t get very far. Eventually with the aid of the IB year one students a game was set. Each scene would occur through the point of view of a specific character (which changes from scene to scene) and this character would be the audience, thus breaking the fourth wall, making the audience become an active participant in the play.

Now, even though this sounds like a great idea, it has problems too. The fact that the audience gets involved is a good thing, but the degree of this involvement is what could make it a success or a failure. For example, in order for it to be clear that the audience is a specific character in the scene, the characters on-stage will have to address such character at some point, leading to the issue. When this interaction occurs, (audience/character is addressed) there will be no response, because the audience wont intervene, so there will be a short pause of silence in which the character is supposed to be speaking, and then the character on-stage would have to react to the invisible answer. I am unsure of how that is going to be effective, because pauses don’t work very well on these types of performances. The only alternative to these pauses is that the audience/character be referred to, but not directly addressed to, this way it wouldn’t have to participate in the dialogue. But if this happens, then whats the difference between the audience being a character or just a passive spectator, after all, it would not participate in any way. For all they know, the character that is being addressed could just be an unseen character, which just happens not to be onstage, but there is no way of relating that unseen character with the audience. And the fact that this character is supposed to change from scene to scene makes this interaction ever more difficult.

And the only way of physical intervention from the character which the audience is representing would be to actually place an actor on stage to perform the actions, which would make no sense, because then it would become just like any other character, and the audience would become passive spectators once again.

Ruling out dialogue and physical interaction, the audience will never understand the game, or at least will understand it but wouldnt work for them in any interesting way. So unless we find a creative way of interaction between the audience/character and the characters on stage then this system will not work. The decision we take on this will influence how the script works aswell, so until we make a clear decision, the script cant be finished yet.

Can the audience ever participate physically on-stage as a character without any kind of surrogate? Has this ever happened?