In fourth-wall theatre, we can't help knowing the audience is out there: We hear them, sense them, sometimes fear them. We want to please them, maybe even too much. But what if you're in a play -- most likely a comedy or circus-type production -- that requires you to interact with them?
I thought about this recently while watching a performance of the three-actor comedy The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged, written by the Reduced Shakespeare Company. At one point, actor Darren Bridgett plopped down beside me, cheerfully took a swig of my drink, then moved on to cozy up to other audience members. I wondered what special skills he used to make that work -- which it did, beautifully.
Several familiar acting techniques contribute to successful interaction with the audience: improvisation, listening, creating true relationships, dealing with the reality of what you're given, and pursuing an objective. But Bridgett has no improv background; he's a traditionally trained actor. "You don't have to be a brilliant improviser," he says. "Some actors maybe try too hard to be funny. It doesn't take very much. You have to be good at listening." Like the others I talked to, Bridgett sees his character in The Complete Works as benign when he's relating to individual audience members, not a caustic Don Rickles or David Shiner type. "The idea is making them seem funny," he says of the audience, "and not trying too hard to seem funny yourself."
Similarly, Steven Banks -- better known as Billy the Mime -- tries to be as charming as possible to put audience volunteers at ease. He learned his interactive skills as a street performer years ago. "There's nothing quite like it," Banks says. "You train on the job." In one of the bits in his edgy show America LoveSexDeath (which recently ran in New York at the Flea Theater), he brings a woman on stage, romances her, dances with her, pretends to marry her, and clearly intends to consummate the marriage. But he has to find a way to get her off the stage before that last step so he can proceed with the skit's downbeat ending, in which he drinks, pops pills, shoots heroin, and dies. Sometimes he gestures for her to take off her clothes (that usually sends her scurrying away); he has even brandished a 12-inch dildo. It's all about paying close attention to the audience member, he says, being sensitive to what she's doing.
Purveyors of Partnership
Bridgett says the audience interaction in The Complete Works feels quite safe to him. "I think that's because my approach to acting is I'm flying by the seat of my pants, creating a moment that's never happened before, seeing what's happening, and not trying too hard," he explains. "I don't feel like every moment has to work. You want to get the right balance: Don't play with the audience too much so that the well goes dry. And it's got to have build." He perfected his technique over nine summers in The Complete Works at California's Marin Shakespeare Festival.
For a broader perspective, here's a paradigm for acting, courtesy of actor-clown Jeff Raz, director of San Francisco's Clown Conservatory and currently playing the lead character in Cirque du Soleil's Corteo in Los Angeles. Raz says there are four types of acting partnership: 1) with the other performers; 2) with inanimate objects (props, but also sets, lights, music); 3) with the audience; and 4) with yourself -- heart, mind, body. He accurately points out that actors study partnerships 1 and 4 a lot, while 2 is a focus of Anne Bogart's Viewpoints and other esoteric approaches. "If all four partnerships are rich and detailed and genuine," Raz says, "good things will happen." But if you're particularly adept at one of the four, use that as your template for creating the other three, he says. For example, if you're good at relating to other performers, can you use that skill to establish a strong relationship with the audience? Would you treat your partner the way you're treating an audience member? If the answer is no, he says, can you shape the partnership so it works? "With all partnerships, it's a dialogue," Raz notes, "but not an equal dialogue. Sometimes the dialogue with the audience is very one-sided." The idea is to think of the audience as partners, and then they're not so scary.
Raz came up as a juggler at the Renaissance Faire in San Francisco, where interacting with the audience is a requirement. In Corteo, as the Dead Clown, he acts more than he clowns, but in one scene he and his partner go into the audience, where Raz has to coerce an audience member into requesting music by Mozart. When he's clowning, Raz -- like Bridgett and Banks -- is not coercive with the audience. "I listen carefully, like an improviser, and the moment a volunteer makes an offer, I honor that offer," he says. But in the meticulously scripted Corteo, honoring an offer (in improv parlance) is not an option, though the show does provide some leeway for improv. "What would you like to hear?" Raz asks the volunteer. "Mozart? Puccini? Mozart? Ravel? Mozart?" On a recent night the volunteer's reply was "Streisand." Raz said, "Excuse me?" and his partner hissed "Mozart!" to her more emphatically. The volunteer took the hint. Raz whispered to her, "Isn't that better than Streisand?" "I always want to finish the moment with them," he explains.
"The goal is to have them look better than they thought they could look," Raz adds. A basic clown thing -- and certainly this applies to fourth-wall acting too -- is that what's really going on trumps what you think is going on. "Just like in acting, you play tonight's show, not last night's," he says. And just as in acting, you respond truthfully to what the other person gives you.
Gravity and Gravity
Bridgett links his audience-hopping to his character's objective. He sees his character as someone trying to do well but who's easily amused and distracted, not very capable. "If you don't tie it to real people trying to do something, it gets tedious," he says. Banks allows himself to get distracted and play with the audience while always trying, as the character, to do his best. He comes from that trying-to-do-well viewpoint throughout the show, whether on stage or in the audience. "Let your obstacles be big," he recommends.
Actors who have to pull volunteers from the audience learn quickly how to pick them. You don't want someone too aggressive, who might take over your bit. You definitely don't want an actor, who will be compelled to act. You want someone who's just slightly embarrassed but game. Banks knows a hypnotist who whispers to his volunteers, "Don't fuck up my act." "If they're performing too much, you try to control them," Banks says. "If they're too shy, you try to bring them out a bit. You're in a position of power." Recently he unknowingly picked from the audience Deborah Yates, the Girl in the Yellow Dress from the Broadway musical Contact. "It was like dancing with a feather," he says.
In one of Raz's bits in Corteo, he works with Valentyna Paylevanyan, a circus artist under 3 feet tall. At one point he tosses her into the audience; she's rigged out in a twisting belt attached to six huge helium balloons. "Valentyna is a fabulous performer and improviser," says Raz. His job is to make sure she's safe while he's saying his lines and keeping up the pace of the bit. Dangling from the balloons, she floats into the crowd. The audience is entranced. Raz tells them to push her, and they reach up and touch the bottoms of her feet. He describes this as the greatest bit of audience participation in the show. Maybe it's the greatest in any show. "It's about gravity," Raz says -- the earth's gravity, and the gravity of life itself. And, conjuring one more pun, he adds, "They get to touch her feet, her soles -- her soul." It's a nice image to illustrate the special joy that comes from interacting with the audience.
Jean Schiffman can be reached at jeanschiff (at) earthlink.net.