If I had been watching the movie at home, I definitely would not have teared up. But sitting in a theater with about 3,000 other people, watching the Beast turn around and see Belle at the top of the stairs near the end of Beauty and the Beast, I couldn’t help it: I was verklempt.
That was not the only surprise of my theater season that wrapped up yesterday when I saw the national tour of The Notebook. My theater menu this year included a subscription to the Broadway series at Durham Performing Arts Center (DPAC), where I saw five Broadway musicals and two plays (well, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was more like a theme park show to be honest) on their national tours. Musical theater isn’t my favorite genre, but I respect it greatly and want to deepen my appreciation of the form, so subscribing to DPAC is part of my personal cultural curriculum.
My preferred theater taste would be more downtown/experimental (at least that’s what the Boomers and X-ers call it; “indie theater” if you’re Gen Z). In that genre, I saw Lost Lear, a production by Irish director Dan Colley and The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy, created by Joshua William Gelb, brought to North Carolina by university presenters, Carolina Performing Arts and NC State Live.
I expected to spend the season thinking about acting, directing, design, and production and relishing the craft and ingenuity of top professional artists. But as always, I found myself watching the audiences just as much as the shows. These are my field notes from one season spent sitting among very different theater audiences.
Theater asks audiences to participate in different ways
Broadway musicals are infectious creatures for big emotion, and even this theater pro is not immune. I welled up with tears at the end of The Outsiders and The Notebook, along with just about everyone else in the house. The songs, performances, design, pacing, and scale in Broadway musicals are all working to generate a shared emotional response.
When working well, the effect is hard to resist. (Hell’s Kitchen didn’t work on me – I was taken out of it as my inner dramaturg awoke and I spent the show mentally fixing the holes in the back story.) There is something powerful about thousands of audience members laughing, cheering, gasping, and crying together at the same time. No wonder musicals are the most popular genre in the U.S.
Lost Lear asked something very different of its audience. The piece was subtle, poignant, and beautifully crafted, using the story of King Lear to explore dementia and the bittersweet experience of familial love. The audience was sparse in a large theater, and at times it felt as though I could have been alone with the performance. Rather than sweeping the audience along, the production asked us to concentrate, sit with uncertainty, and lean into its rhythms and allow it to take us along switches between styles of naturalism, puppetry and video.
Two college students sitting next to me squirmed throughout the first act and left at intermission. I don’t say that to criticize them or the production. Their reaction was part of what made the contrast so striking. Lost Lear and The Notebook both dealt with dementia, memory, love, and loss, but they approached those subjects through completely different artistic languages. The Notebook wore its emotions openly and delivered them at scale. Lost Lear was quieter, stranger, and more demanding. Both were moving, but they required different kinds of attention from the audience.
More than a show to the audience
I eavesdrop all the time when I go to the theater. (How could I call myself an audience researcher if I didn’t?) What I hear most often is not commentary about the acting or the design. It is people catching up and sharing the mundane and exceptional parts of their lives with the people they came with. “Oh, let me tell you about…” may have been the phrase I heard most often all season.
On Sunday at The Notebook, I saw people passing phones back and forth to share wedding pictures and photos of a new house. A gentleman sitting next to me at Stereophonic gave his friend a detailed play-by-play of his open-heart surgery (TMI!).
All this reinforces that the show is not really why most audience members are there. The performance creates an occasion for people to spend meaningful time with friends and family. The show is part of a larger evening shaped by relationships, memories, and conversation.
In addition to eavesdropping, I just chat people up that sit next to me. At The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy, I sat next to a couple who had no idea what they were going to watch. Egon Tichy is a one-man show based on a science fiction story. The actor is in a closet-sized box, with a double of him on a video screen. It’s an incredibly well-crafted show by Joshua William Gelb who has been honing this style since he created Theater in Quarantine during COVID.
But the couple had no idea about all that background. They told me they had been meaning to get out to the theater again after not having gone for a while, so they simply bought tickets to what was playing and were game for seeing something interesting. They were not experts on the piece, and they were not relying on a familiar title. They just wanted to return to the theater and were willing to take a chance.
Arts organizations spend a great deal of time worrying that audiences will not try unfamiliar work. Sometimes that concern is justified, but this couple represented another kind of audience member: someone motivated less by the title than by the desire to have a theater experience. Their willingness to buy a ticket unseen just filled me with happiness. I was so excited for them – I knew that it was going to be a fun evening, and definitely something they wouldn’t get anywhere else around here. It was rare, it was a treat. They trusted that going to the theater would be worthwhile even when they did not know exactly what they were going to see.
There are plenty of people looking for something fun to do, and would be open to theater or performing arts or a museum – we just need to break through in their awareness, give them enough of a preview that they’ll take a bit of a risk, and then give them a great experience.
There cannot be a wrong way to begin loving theater
Theater organizations talk constantly about making audiences feel welcome. Welcome is about more than ticket prices, dress codes, parking, or friendly ushers. It also means allowing people to have the experience they actually came to have without signaling that they are appreciating the art incorrectly.
Those of us who work in the arts can be remarkably snobbish about what counts as a legitimate response. I’ve had to unlearn this snobbishness myself. We tend to admire the audience member who approaches a performance with concentration, analytical distance, and an appreciation for subtle artistic choices. We are less generous toward the person who wants spectacle, a familiar story, a good cry, or an enjoyable evening with friends and family. One response gets treated as serious engagement. The other gets dismissed as mere entertainment.
But entertainment is not the opposite of engagement, and emotional immediacy is not the opposite of artistic value. The Notebook and Lost Lear both explored dementia, memory, love, and loss. They did so through radically different artistic languages, and they asked different things of their audiences. One created emotion openly and at scale. The other worked through subtlety, ambiguity, and sustained attention. I was moved by both.
If we want audiences to grow again, we need to celebrate that range of experience rather than arranging it into a hierarchy. People do not generally enter an art form through its most unfamiliar or intellectually demanding work. They begin with something that captures them. They enjoy themselves. They feel moved. They learn how to be in the room. They have fun. They return to something familiar. Over time, they may become curious about what else the form can do.
The couple sitting beside me at The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy offered another version of that story. They were willing to encounter unfamiliar work because the idea of going to the theater already felt inviting enough, interesting enough, and safe enough to trust.
That is what audience development should ultimately build: not a march from supposedly inferior art toward supposedly superior art, but a growing confidence that the theater contains many kinds of experiences and that you are entitled to explore them. You can cry at a musical, puzzle over a contemporary performance, bring your children in costume, catch up with a friend at intermission, or decide that a particular show is not for you. None of those experiences disqualifies you from belonging.
If theater is going to become a place where more people develop lasting curiosity and affection for the form, we have to make room for the full range of reasons they walk through the door. We cannot invite people in and then quietly judge them for loving the wrong thing, feeling too much, knowing too little, or having too much fun.
The audience does not need to prove that it deserves the theater. The theater needs to give people enough ways to discover that it belongs to them too.
