Understanding That Fickle Creature: Your Audience

After months and months of rehearsals, they’re finally here. Coming straight from work or from a day of relative leisure, they get their programs, find their seats, and begin the ritual of checking their phone or engaging in small talk. They occasionally glance at the closed curtain with various levels of expectation as to what awaits them when it opens.

All the while, you and your fellow actors are behind that curtain, anticipating the moment when it’s pulled back, the veil drops, and you let the people in the seats meet your characters and the world that you’ve created. While you wait, you might stand quietly with butterflies fluttering all over your stomach, maybe doing a little last-minute character work, some mindless chatter, or perhaps even engaging in some ritualistic phone-checking of your own. But all the while, you think about them. As they’re sitting out there. Waiting. For you.

Your audience. 

They might be silent – but you know they’re out there.

Projecting their emotional needs onto you:

“Entertain me!”  “Make me laugh!”  “Make me cry!”

At times, supportive:

“I could never do that.”  “So talented.”  “I feel like I’m in another world.”

And at times, critical:

“That looks nothing like a real ship. It looks like painted cardboard.”

“Wow. Was that 40-second pause supposed to be in there?”

“Wait, I thought she was supposed to be dead? You can clearly see her breathing.”

What kind of audience will you get? You never know, but today I’ll share some tips that will allow you to focus on your character, your fellow actors, and the world of your play without worrying about that fickle creature known as “the audience.”

Without further ado, curtain up!

1. You are not performing for the audience. Yes, they are there watching you and your fellow actors bring a play to life, but you’re not doing it for them. Your only true objective is to create a believable character that lives, listens, and interacts with the world of the play.

2. But do care about your audience. You need them. All performers do. You invited them to share in this world you’ve created, and the way to show them you care is by simply being aware of them. The good news is that being aware of the audience is easy if you keep a few key things in mind: Am I projecting? Can the person with hearing issues in the back hear me? Am I avoiding the infamous “butt-shot?” (Or, “can the audience see my face?”) Am I holding long enough (but not too long) for laughter? There are other questions you could ask yourself, but those are the main ones that show you are aware of your audience.

3. Don’t judge the quality of your performance based on the audience’s response (or lack thereof). They might be loud. They might be quiet. They might respond to everything, some things, or nothing at all. So you must not gauge how well the show is going by the audience’s reaction, because no two audiences are the same. Play your objectives and attack every moment. If you do that, then you’ve done all you can. Besides, sometimes the quietest audiences will come up to you afterwards raving about how good the show was.

4. Play through. Your audience won’t hear or see the “mistakes” that happen unless you let them. Long pauses full of actors staring at each other with looks that say “Oh crap! What do we do now?” are one way of telling your audience “Something is wrong!” So is apologizing. So is a two-hour silence. Don’t do any of those. Play through the issue, and stay in character. Keep the show moving no matter what, as if everything that happened was supposed to happen. You will be surprised at how few of your mistakes were actually noticed by the audience.

5. You can’t make your audience respond. You can set everything up for a response, but in the end, each member of the audience responds or doesn’t respond based on variables over which you have no control. This also applies to making someone laugh. One audience might laugh a ridiculous amount and the next night, when the same joke is delivered in the same amazing way: crickets. Or silence, if there are no crickets. Once again, your focus shouldn’t be on getting a response; it should be on playing your objectives and attacking each and every moment. And if you do that, the responses will come. Or they won’t.

6. Remember: your audience wants you to succeed. This is because if you do succeed, there’s a huge chance that they are being entertained. (Also, a bunch of them are probably related to you.) So there is no reason to fear them. Unless they brought tomatoes. Then you can fear them.

Now, there are actually 245 more facts about audiences that you should know, but I’m not sharing them. If I did, this post would be really long. So instead of that, I encourage you to come up with your own facts about audiences based on your experiences. The more you know about these . . . “audiences” . . . the less scary they’ll become.

Play on!