A friend of mine who came to see Trickster was talking to Tony and I afterward about some of the sexual content and the violence that was seen and talked about. She works in education, in areas involving sexual assault, rape, and other very sensitive issues. While she thought we handled the matter well, she said that if we were doing a show like that again and we wanted her to come in and talk to our cast and crew about how to handle it, she'd love to do so. As we talked more, she said that the chances are very good that when someone does a show with sexual or other violence in it, there is someone in the audience who has experienced it, and it may trigger a reaction in them to see it played out or talked about.
I thought about that conversation again tonight after seeing a show that hit very close to home in about a buzzillion different ways.
The show was under an hour, and I literally spent most of it with tears streaming down my face and the feeling I was going to throw up. It was a very tight show, obviously. Some nit-picky notes aside, it had to be good to affect me in such a way. But if I could have, I would have left. Because it was too much. The thing is, I couldn’t leave. You know the Chicago Storefront M.O- I was in the front row in a house with 20 seats, and would have had to cross the stage to get out. After curtain call I booked it out, and it took me 20 minutes of walking in the rain (having left my umbrella in my haste) to be calm enough to drown the rest of my sorrows in the local CVS drugstore.
And tonight as I lay awake at 1:00 a.m., I wonder... do we as artists have an obligation to our audience to be aware of this kind of response? I don’t feel like most of us are... I certainly can’t think of a show I have directed where I have built in an escape route for an emotionally hit audience member. Can you?
As I think more about it, I think the general feeling about how our shows affect the audience is that we want to give them insight into a subject they might not know enough about, or to help/make them become more personally attached to a subject they might be avoiding or have a bias against. But what about those audience members who may already know, too closely, what we are talking about?
The more Halcyon engages and embraces its mission onstage, the more diverse we hope our audience will become as well. Does that mean we then broaden our chances that someone in our audience may already have experienced the things we are showing them. One of the big underlying themes in Trickster and overlying themes in Iphegenia, is the murder of thousands of women in Juarez. Also, in Trickster, the segments that talked about family members being murdered to still the voice of a rebel were taken from news stories that have happened IN THE LAST SIX MONTHS. In the past we have talked about villages in Nigeria being plagued by drought and burned to the ground, artists being killed for being homosexual, babies being killed by soldiers. Do we need to be thinking about the possibility of an audience member seeing the show whose family members HAVE been murdered; whose home HAS been destroyed; who HAS been assaulted.
But then, how far do you take it? I watched the movie Hope Floats after my college boyfriend cheated on me and I felt pretty bad afterwards... I may even have cried as I left the movie theater... I’m only being flippant and taking it to the other extreme as a way to seriously ask, “If we want to affect our audience with what we are giving them, to what extent are we responsible to our audience for what we give them?”
Or is our responsibility only to open the door, and to hope that a wet walk and a new red lipgloss will be enough to get them home?
