The presence in the Hall
by Cameryn Moore
Behind the curtain at my venue, the crowd noise is diffused and muffled, so I didn’t know he was out there until the show started. But then I knew he was there.
He laughed loudest and longest and first at all the laugh lines. He laughed at the lines that were poignant and uncomfortable. He laughed at most of the lines that contained either the word “cock” or “asshole”, and then groaned out loud at the lines that described what was being done with “cock” or “asshole”. At the end of my first “call”, after I’ve hung up and then say my first line to the audience—“I bet you wish I’d put those calls on speakerphone”—he yelled out “Fuck yeah!” And judging from the sounds that I could hear, he knocked over his beer at least twice.
He wasn’t quite over the line into aggressive, and certainly he wasn’t heckling, but good LORD, he was present and affecting the feel of the house the way a shot put distorts a rubber sheet in that physical metaphor for black holes in time and space.
So I don’t think you can really blame me for thinking that he was going to ruin it. As I continued through the show, the sweat beaded up on my forehead, and not just from the lights. I thought that I was going to lose control of the show. A fearful conviction threatened to drown my actorly soul, that the quiet, dark moments at the end of tonight’s presentation of Phone Whore were going to be trampled by a drunken dude who didn’t understand half of it and thought the other half was a fuckin’ laugh riot.
This is the part that freaks me out so much about audience participation in shows: some audience members are naturally going to interact all over the fucking place with little or no encouragement necessary to get ‘em going. This is scary, this is live theatre, this is a wild animal that I have to get on and ride and I have no way of knowing what that beast is going to do.
It’s kind of awesome.
Because so much of normal theatre-going experience is contained right there in our seats, right? We watch from the seats, and mull it around in our brains, but few shows allow us to respond externally in any way, except at the generally accepted applause points in a show. I don’t know if it’s our upbringing or cultural norms that keeps that experience the way it is, but I imagine that performance artists who actively go after audience participation probably have a really fucking hard time with it, over and over.
I never went after audience participation, not until my third show, power | play. Before that I never sought it out. I wanted them to be engaged, certainly, I wanted them to feel like I was talking to them in Phone Whore, but there wasn’t an actual conversation.
my audience members were out there, nodding their heads, gasping, lifting their eyebrows
Except there was. There is. There is always that conversation. I was just too scared, myself, during the first few cities, to see it. But my audience members were out there, nodding their heads, gasping, lifting their eyebrows, sitting back with arms crossed or leaning forward on the edge of their seat. It was definitely an active conversation. I was just doing most of the verbalizing in it.
I remember the first time an audience member spoke out loud in that conversation. It was in Winnipeg, 2010. The show wasn’t sold out, but it was pretty damn close, so the air was hot and stuffy and I was already sweating bullets. And I got to the part of the show where I ask them, directly, “That freaked you out, didn’t it?” Normally I wait a beat, and then I nod as if they said yes, because I know they want to, and maybe they’re nodding their heads, so it works. But this time, someone stage left, in the middle of the crowd, spoke clearly and loudly, “YES.”
I turned my head and looked in their direction, and for a split second I didn’t know how to go on. It was like when you call someone expecting to talk to their voice mail, and they actually pick up, and you are talking to them directly and you’re just not ready for that. But then I blinked, and I imagined for a second that I was looking at the right person, and smiled and picked back up my lines, “Me, too. At first.” And when I said it to that person, that person who had actually answered me, I felt more empathy responding than I had ever experienced in those lines up until that point, because they weren’t lines anymore. I understood them as the actual humanely necessary response in the conversation that the audience and I were sharing.
Since then, I’ve learned to enjoy the moments where the audience talks out loud. I take it as a point of pride, a compliment, that sometimes the audience forgets so much that they’re sitting in a theater that they go ahead and open their mouths and say it, or that they’re so new to theatre that they don’t have to shake off the conventions, they’re just experiencing our connection as its own thing, of course they can talk to me, because I’m talking to them, right?
“That was fuckin’ awesome! You rock so fuckin’ hard!”
In the Q&A session after that night’s show, I finally saw my loud, excitable talker. The lights came up for my bow, and the audience started applauding, and this guy three rows back was just about jumping out of his seat, pointing at me with rock-n-roll hands. “That was fuckin’ awesome! You rock so fuckin’ hard!” He was obviously drunk, had a mostly shaved head and some neck and arm tattoos, jeans and a Cannibal Corpse t-shirt (“that’s the most extreme death-metal band that I know,” said my tech, when we were talking about this later). His girlfriend looked a little embarrassed by his enthusiasm, but they stayed for the whole Q&A session, and afterward he shook my hand and said it again. “That was fuckin’ awesome!”
I teased him about it a little bit during the Q&A, how he made me feel like I was performing in an arena, and later I talked with my tech about how I couldn’t figure out where he had found out about Phone Whore in the first place?
But driving home, I thought about how enthusiasm is not to be scorned and beer can be mopped up and no matter how hard he laughed at “cock”, when the quiet moment came, he knew to be quiet, he knew that we were having a conversation and he was holding his breath like everyone else, waiting for what I was going to say.
Cameryn Moore will be at the Winnipeg Fringe July 19-29
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