Perfect, Passive Audience Behavior (and Who it Excludes)

Everyone has a story about a distracting audience member. Maybe someone yelled out a response, laughed at an inappropriate moment, kept leaning in your way, started snapping pictures with the flash on. But it seems that recently, the question of audience behavior has risen from these anecdotes, moving further and further into the spotlight.

A lot of focus has centered around cell phone use in the theatre, sparked by Rihanna texting Slave Play playwright Jeremy O. Harris while in the audience of the show and his defense of her actions. Shortly after, Freestyle Love Supreme started using Yondr, a service that locks away audience's phones in pouches kept in the lobby. Phones, with their bright lights, buzzing, ringing, and endless notifications, have been labelled a distracting villain by the general theatre community. But in reality, cell phone usage (or the lack thereof) is one small piece of a much larger discussion about what constitutes proper audience behavior.

What is appropriate audience behavior? A passive, attentive, and well-mannered audience is what usually gets presented as the ideal - come in, sit quietly and still in your seat, only make noise to applaud. But this is actually quite a recent invention. It stems from the 19th century, a period where the ideals of Romanticism prevailed in regard to art. If anything, the 19th century is where capital-A Art was invented, with artists presented as priests to achieving the sublime, and audience members meant to follow them completely.

Look back before the 19th century, though, and you see a history of loud, noisy, and inattentive audiences. For instance, Shakespeare's audience back in the late 16th and early 17th centuries was well-known for its groundlings standing and watching in the pit of the theater. They made plenty of noise, never stopped moving, and were often distracted by off-stage events. It's also important to note that these were the poorest audience members.

So what happened? How did we get from a bunch of people milling about and barely paying attention to the stage to the quiet, passive ideal of today? In short, the audience changed. As the ideals of Art rose, so did the cost of admission. The audiences of the 19th century became rich white people. The ideals of audience behavior were thus the behaviors of rich white people. And, despite some progress, theatre audiences today are still predominantly rich, white, and notably older. Audience behavior - what is considered appropriate, how deviations are enforced - is a distinctly race- and class-based phenomenon.

Many instances of audience members calling out and shutting down the behaviors of others is tied to race. Jeremy O. Harris, a Black man, came under much scrutiny for his defense of Rihanna's texting. Latino critic Jose Solís shares some of his own experiences in his piece "What people of color experience at the theater":

"For as long as I’ve been attending theater in the city, my name and brown skin have made me the target of bullies and racists. I’ve been asked if I’m with the catering staff...been chastised by angry ushers to turn my cell phone off, even if I have never taken my device out of my pocket during a performance, and often been asked if I’m sure I belong in the orchestra, as ushers point me to the mezzanine. My skin has become so thickened by the mistreatment and rudeness of theater employees that I might as well be a walking callus."

Black playwright Dominique Morriseau discusses similar experiences in "Why I Almost Slapped a Fellow Theatre Patron, and What That Says About Our Theatres":

"...theatre has a white privilege and elitism problem. There is an environment that is fostering this kind of behavior. Our collective institutions...are placating the older white audiences, and are afraid to challenge them, or even educate them. We take their donor money and put them on boards, and we brush their microaggressions off as our old grandma or grandpa who might be a little racist and elitist but are otherwise harmless.

To that I ask: harmless to whom? I am telling you it is not harmless. It is harmful. It further marginalizes audiences of color and tells them they are not fully welcome in the theatre, except by permission of the white audience. It tells the upper-middle-class white audience that theatre is their home first and the rest of us are just guests."

I am a young white woman. I'm certain I have broken many rules of proper audience behavior at one time or another, whether checking my phone or whispering to a friend. I have also never been called out on my behavior.

We live in a new age where technology has changed the way we pay attention and react to media. We live in a new age where theatre proclaims itself as inclusive and radical, challenging the thoughts and ideas of its audience. We live in a new age where audiences are growing and becoming more diverse. But our ideas of what an audience is and should do has barely changed since the 19th century, and it is disproportionately blocking out audiences of color.

It follows that much of the work that asks for more direct audience engagement is work by artists of color, and specifically Black artists. Works such as Slave Play by Jeremy O. Harris, Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury, and N****, Digress by Ty Greenwood all directly address race and their audiences alike.

It seems that there cannot be any one set of rules for audience behavior if theatre truly wants to grow and be inclusive of all people. I hesitate to make any sweeping statements about whether or not cell phones should be used, whether or not audience members should react loudly to events, whether or not singing along is appropriate, and so on. Shows vary, and so do their audiences.

Here's what I can say for certain: before establishing any rules for how audiences should behave, consider where those rules are coming from and how they will be enforced. Consider the history of excluding people of color through the notion of audience behavior. Consider the past, consider the realities of today, and consider what we want the theatre to be in the future. The audience is the first massive step to realizing those dreams of diversity and inclusion.

Photo by davide ragusa on Unsplash.