Tear Down This Wall

Theater people love to say that the audience is the secret ingredient to our art form, that a play isn't really a play until, at long last, the audience shows up. It's a lovely sentiment, and like most lovely sentiments in life, it's only sorta kinda true, but is mostly based on vibes.

What theater makers actually mean when they say this is that they need an audience to complete the feedback loop necessary to achieve the inherent, unavoidable artifice of the art form. As practitioners, we've all suffered through gauntlets of 10-out-of-12s to know that a production can, and does, function more or less perfectly without anyone watching who is actually engrossed in the story and lives presented onstage. Traditional theater, as an operation, doesn't need an audience for anything more than their money. And traditional audiences don't need to do anything other than pay up and show up for the circuit to be sufficiently complete.

So here's my question: If an engrossed, engaged audience is ideal for all involved, why the hell are we still physically separating audience and story? Why do we insist on making things harder? The proscenium is a seventeenth-century construct. What year is it now?

This is why space has always been the chief medium of my approach to theatrical story-building. At a Steve Wargo show, theater-going is never an observational exercise. You have to "be there" to witness the events of the play in real time. If you weren't there, it didn't happen - unless you were to hear about it from someone else after the fact, which would potentially affect your understanding of the show/plot, but not your experience.

I've always gravitated toward plays that have a very specific sense of place to them. This facilitates the act of transporting the audience to the here and now of the story. All of this adds up to a palpable sense of presence for the audience, a sense of shared time and space. This is the core of live theater. And that core is enhanced, expanded, and perfected when we no longer operate with merely a sense of shared time and space, but when we actually construct and perform a communal lived experience. This is what we mean by immersion.

The secret sauce to crafting immersion is audience agency, which is itself also, paradoxically, an effect of immersion. You can't make decisions about where you are, where you go, or where to direct your attention without achieving a unified sense of space, place, and time that is one and the same with the theatrical reality created all around you. Audience agency is at once a prerequisite and a necessary effect of immersive theater. It's all still circular, yes, but it's a virtuous circle.

When you give audiences the freedom to move, to choose, to direct their own attention, you're not just adding activity and interactivity to a passive form. You're fundamentally changing the relationship between spectator and spectacle. You're eliminating the separation that traditional theater insists upon, even as it claims the audience is essential.

Traditional theater's relationship with its audience is pretty transactional: we make art, you watch it, everyone goes home. The audience completes the artistic circuit simply by existing in the room. But immersive theater demands a different contract, one where presence isn't passive, where attendance implicitly means participation, where "being there" is both literal and metaphorical.

This is not a gimmick and it is not a trend. This is theater returning to its roots as a communal experience, before someone (the nobility) decided to build a wall between the watchers and the watched. For me, the biggest change in English drama that came with the Restoration isn’t the introduction of female actors to the stage; it’s the elimination of the Groundlings. Am I suggesting that the proscenium = gentrification? You bet I am. When we share actual space, when audiences have actual agency, when presence becomes participation, that's when the claim that "the audience completes the play" becomes genuinely, actually true.

The proscenium served its purpose. It created a frame, established perspective, and organized the chaos of early modern performance. But we are not in the 17th century anymore. Hell, we’re not in the 20th century anymore! And I, for one, am not in the business of scholarly preservation. We have the tools, the vision, and the artists to create something better: theater that doesn't just ask audiences to just show up, but invites them to attend: fully, bodily, mindfully, and willfully.

The audience has always been the secret ingredient. It's time we tried treating them like it.