Introduction

Abstract

Our daughters and sons have burst from the marionette show leaving a tangle of strings and gone into the unlit audience. (Maxine Kumin, “The Absent Ones”) One of the earliest lessons I picked up from the performance and theatre training I received as a young man was the maxim: “Always assume that your audience is as smart as you are.” I don’t remember when or where or from whom I received this instruction. Like so much of what I know about performance, it probably came to me from our oral tradition. But it has remained something like a categorical imperative for me as a performer and director and teacher. I remind myself of it now, at the beginning of my editorial tenure at TPQ, because it has served me so well in the past, and I hope that it will continue to do so over the next few years as I take up this new role. Of course, the illusion that many editors and performers work with—the necessary fiction that sustains our work—is the fantasy that we “know our audience.” One of the more humbling lessons we have received from performance theory over the last two or three decades is that we aren’t as smart as we thought we were when it comes to understanding audiences. In literary and media studies, audience-oriented research has become an important and widely accepted practice. That nothing comparable has emerged in theatre and performance studies, at least in terms of quantity of research, is puzzling, if not embarrassing. In one way or another, all the articles in this issue of TPQ are concerned with audiences—how to speak to or with them, how to speak about them. Phaedra C. Pezzullo begins close to home—close to my home, anyway, which lies at the northern edge of “Cancer Alley”—contributing to a growing body of research that shows us how some of the theatrical techniques of modern tourism, which are designed largely to reinforce a spectatorial, ocularcentric encounter with otherness, can be rearticulated in the interests of dialogue, a communitarian ethos, and forging environmental actor-activists out of a tourist audience. Community-building also figures largely in both Frederick C. Corey’s essay about Tim Miller’s body of work and John Gentile’s interview with Tim about his work and his way of working. And Linda M. Park-Fuller reviews some of the difficulties of audience-oriented theory, research, and practice in theatre and performance studies, proposing a method of documenting and engaging the experience of audiencing within the context of Playback Theatre. Taken together, these articles do not answer all our questions about audiences. But in an age when the entertainment and showbiz apparatus treats its audience as a twelve-year-old child-and is, as I write this, announcing plans to prosecute twelve-year-old children for downloading music from the internet—it is humbling and heartening to have evidence of performers who are willing to approach the “unlit audience” as a reservoir of social hope.