OFFENDING THE AUDIENCE
Long before the Berlin Wall came down, the fourth wall–the one “separating” the performer from his audience, constructed on the principle of “aesthetic distance”–was being stormed. Alan Kaprow created the first happening 31 years ago, though the roots of these revolutionaries go much further back. Their motto: the words of Antonin Artaud, “Between Life and Theatre, there will be no distinct division, but instead a continuity.” Their purpose: breaking down individual isolation and complacency and replacing them with the perception that we are all involved with one another. Their technique: anything that would shock audiences out of their illusion of invulnerability and thus clear the way for an open, unprejudiced discussion of ideas.
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This “theater of attrition” (as one contemporary critic dubbed it) lent itself superbly to agitprop and guerrilla performances, and so became associated with social causes. When the riots and marches finally subsided, so did their collar-grabbing vehicle. By the mid-70s, this brand of theater had almost completely died out–except for the students who rediscover Artaud every spring to this day.
Having made it clear to us what this evening will not be, the actors go on to talk to us of time and reality. They propose that stage time and audience time are no different–that the 50 minutes taken up by a performance are no different than the 50 minutes taken up by any of our activities, no matter that a playwright may claim to cover decades. The same is true for reality, they tell us–words mean the same things onstage and off, there is no magic hidden meaning to the events onstage, and we are not escaping anywhere by going to the theater. “There is no demarcation line here. We and you do not constitute two halves of one world.” They accuse us of neglecting this fact, jeer at our sheeplike docility, our terminal inertia. By the time their attack is complete and the final invective–“You fellow humans, you!”–has been flung in our faces, we have been put in our places most thoroughly, but we have also been brought to a realization of our transgressions. This interrogation, far from being offensive, has been therapeutic, breaking through our denials and opening our eyes so that we can be healed.
