I’m a big fan of the fourth wall. That invisible barrier that keeps the audience separate from the stage ““ I love it.
Recently though, I have been confronted by some interactive theater and art that have required my participation. Now, I don’t mind this if it will enhance the show, but if the sole purpose of drawing me in is to hold up a critical mirror so I can feel guilty or self-conscious, then please, leave me out of it.
On Sunday night, I saw “Avenue Q,” the musical comedy featuring Sesame Street-like puppets at the Ahmanson Theater downtown. Most of the other theater patrons were well-to-do middle aged couples, just stepping out for a tame, early evening on the town. The main character in the play, however, was in my demographic: a 22-year-old recent college graduate who moves into his first apartment on “Avenue Q,” because he couldn’t afford anything on the more posh Avenues A through P.
So all throughout the play, the jokes about finding your purpose were striking me as far more serious in nature than they were to those audience members who have long since chosen a path and were lightly chuckling at the young’ns. So perhaps I was atypically on edge when the time came for the audience to get drawn into the action.
In one scene, the cast members run into the audience to raise money to fulfill a poor character’s dream. The gimmick was cute, and I was chuckling at first, but then to my surprise, other audience members were actually putting money into the hats. Sure, donating to a puppet could be a cute way to show your date that you are fun and generous, but be serious. If you want to help the cause, pass that five to your left, not up to the stage. And the more people that started opening their wallets, the guiltier I felt that I wasn’t sympathetic and the less enjoyable the scene became.
The show was an enjoyable one overall, but I left the theater thinking dismally about the looming future rather than happily chatting about clever lyrics. I would have preferred to have been left out of that show and let the troubles of the characters remain onstage and not become my problem too.
Another show that recently made me part of the art was the Getty Center’s new exhibit, “Please Be Seated,” which allows visitors to sit on replicas of famous French furniture pieces, then look up at a video screen and see their own images on that screen. You see yourself sitting on a chair in a room at Versailles, or in a pretty gazebo.
But while surrounded by all this art and technology working harmoniously together, the thing that struck me the most while I was watching myself on the screen was that I was only really looking at myself on screen. I was not really paying attention to my virtual surroundings at all. When I saw my image projected onto the screen, I smoothed out a wrinkle on my shirt, lamented my short hair, and stood up so I could try to get close enough to the camera to check on a black smudge on my nose. Call me self-centered, but if I’m going to be put on public display, I want to look good.
When I saw myself, I became self-conscious and critical of the wrong things. Rather than appreciating the work that went into the show and safely admiring it from a distance, the object of concentration became my own image. All the technology and artistic energy that went into making me a part of the art felt wasted because a mirror would have done the same thing.
Perhaps including the patrons in the art makes the goal of putting a mirror up to society more easily attainable, but doing so feels a little too easy when the critique becomes of the individual, not of a greater societal theme. There’s a difference between art and reality, and sometimes I like to keep that distinction.
If you would have donated to the puppet cause, e-mail Crocker at acrocker@media.ucla.edu.