What is an audience? And what is the moral responsibility of actors/company to an audience? I had these questions jabbed between my ribs when I attended Classic Theatre of Harlem's recent production of Jean Genet's The Blacks. Not long ago, they did a slam-bang adaptation of Richard Wright's Native Son, the excellence of which drew me back to see how they would handle Genet's play.
Production values -- superb, right from the moment one entered the theatre. Cast energy, presence, articulation -- again, superb.
But halfway or so through a two-hour production (without intermission) came the issue of the knitting needles. In an improv clearly carpentered into the production (but not called for in Genet's script), one of the characters, Village, steps out of the circus atmosphere of the show, breaks the fourth and all the walls, to ask an audience member to hold the knitting needles.
To continue, I am going to excerpt the letter I sent to them and all of their identified funding sources, a letter written in a rage that still boils in me, even if at a lower temperature now than then.
* * *
February 18, 2003
Christopher McElroen, Co-Founder and Executive Director
The Classical Theatre of Harlem
c/o Harlem School of the Arts
645 St. Nicholas Avenue
New York, NY 10030
Dear Mr. McElroen:
On Saturday, February 15, I attended a performance of The Clowns and as part of the performance witnessed the deliberate humiliation of two audience members by one of your actors (a humiliation, according to several reviews, which is apparently a deliberate part of the show). I write this letter to you out of anger and dismay (and no small measure of shame for my not having spoken up during the incident). And before you congratulate yourself that my visceral response rises out of the artistry of the performance, let me tell that it comes in reaction to the failure of your company’s artistry and to a mean-spiritedness that, to me, has no place in the theatre.
As I saw it on Saturday, the character of Village (J. Kyle Manzay) first deliberately cajoled an audience member (a woman) to come up on the stage to get the knitting needles from him. She did not want to participate and said so several times, but Mr. Manzay continued to press her, saying, in several variations, that if she did not participate, he would “clown on her” for the rest of the evening. Finally, she agreed to come on the stage.
The cajoling seemed good-natured enough at first (in line with how the actors greeted the audience as it entered) until he accused the woman of reaching for the knitting needles like (I paraphrase) “reaching for a brownstone in Harlem.” Said with a smile, to be sure, but no one in the audience missed the comparison’s acid edge. It went downhill from there into Mr. Manzay’s high-handed harangue of her as a racist until he released her back to her seat.
Later, when Mr. Manzay asked for the knitting needles back, he enlisted her companion to come up onstage to make the hand-off, and proceeded, in an even more vulgar fashion, to denigrate the man, making him get on his knees to simulate the “three-fifths” slave ratio of the Constitution and generally tarring this person whom he did not know with a vicious stereotypical racism.
What angered me so much about what happened? Every time I walk into a theatre I expect that I walk into a safe place, a place where the company putting on their performance will honor my presence and respect my integrity as a co-participant in what they want to do. “Safe,” to me, means an implicit contract between performers and audience that within these walls we will take a journey together. That journey may disturb, provoke, anger, wrench, offend -- but I will endure whatever riles the waters if I can trust that underlying everything that happens in front of me and to me is a based upon a shared humanity and a sense of mutual human frailty. In short, I will make the journey if I can assume that while I am there, I will not be treated like an ignorant beast that needs correction.
You and your company broke that contract on Saturday night. You singled out two strangers, about whom you knew nothing, and trashed their characters by associating them with outmoded stereotypes and accusing them, without evidence, of racist beliefs. You also exploited the audience by relying upon their good manners not to interfere, just as you later abused their trust by isolating people of color in the audience from everyone else, assuming, again without evidence, that every person of color brought up on that stage, simply because of pigment, stood in solidarity with what you were trying to do and say. In short, by descending to insult and false assumptions about racial identity and unity, you failed as humanists and artists.
Should my anger stand as a sign that your performance succeeded because it generated controversy and passionate response? No. As I said, I will admit that I felt ashamed afterwards for not denouncing what had happened on the stage, and I will not deny that that shame, in no small part, prompts this letter. But this anger also comes from your demonstration of what appears to me as unearned arrogance and poisonous closed-mindedness. It comes from your exploitation of people’s good faith and trust. And it comes from an intense sadness that you used theatre, an art to which I have dedicated whatever talents I own, for such retrograde and reactionary purposes.
I have enjoyed CTH performances in the past. No longer. And no longer will I recommend to friends and associates that they support the theatre. What you have done is unforgivable, and it will not be forgiven.
* * *
So, back to my original questions: What is an audience? And what is the moral responsibility of actors/company to an audience? And, given my own failure to act on that night, what, as a fellow member of the audience, is my custodial and collective responsibility to other members of the audience?
Here are my answers, rough-hewn as they may be. What an audience "is" depends upon when they pay for their entertainment. Livingston Taylor, James Taylor's brother, once said in an interview that what a performer does to and for an audience depends upon whether they pay going in or going out. If they pay going in, then the performer has no right to harass and harangue them unless they know ahead of time that that is the meal being served (think of Gallagher, smithereened watermelons, and raincoats for patrons in the first three rows). If they pay going out (think church-goers and the collection basket), then the performer can try anything, and if the audience likes, they'll pay; if not, they won't.
The method of payment, then, sets up a kind of moral contract, and the contract should be honored by the performer. We all paid money "going in" to see The Blacks; we were a "going in" audience. Thus, we did not pay money to see people humiliated or be ambushed by stupidity. To me, then, CTH broke a trust with the audience, treating them as if they were a "going out" audience when, in fact, they had our money in their pocket and our unsuspecting butts in the seats.
And my own failure to act? The letter-writing is just the intellectual's way of absolving cowardice. The right thing to do would have been to rise, yell, break the spell of audience courtesy, "ride to the rescue," and brave appearing as the idiot spoilsport.
(Actually, my nephew designed a much better counter-attack, less individualistic, more theatrical and collaborative. With friends, devise a kind of Boal "invisible theatre" piece, buy tickets, and when the moment comes, hijack the show. Use theatre to combat theatre, use the artifice to expose the artificial. Unfortunately, given the lack of funds and too-busy schedules, I could not get this together, but it has a rough justice that appeals to me.)
I haven't received a response yet from the theatre (and I won't be surprised if I don't), but I still wrestle with what I should have done that night. Yet in that wrestling and my sense of failure, I find embedded, ironically, a re-affirming of why I have joined my life to live theatre. The lesson the Classic Theatre of Harlem wanted me to learn about racism and white guilt rolled off my back. But the roiling in my stomach, the churning outrage in my brain, made me feel alive, whole-body engaged. When we can create theatre that does this in an honorable way, then we do something no other art form can do. In fact, it is important enough to devote a lifetime to learning how to do it -- and hoping at least once that you can pull it off.
©2003 Michael Bettencourt
For more commentary and articles by Michael Bettencourt, check the Archives.
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produced in New York, Chicago,
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April 2003
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