Richard Schechner's Notes Towards An Imaginary Production

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The lights dim, as you cross your legs with anticipation of the show. You've had this ticket pre-ordered for two months! As the actors troop onstage to deliver the famed prologue to Henry V each passes your seat and you can see each miniscule detail. You notice the ruffle of cuff on the prince of France, you inhale the soft fragrance of the princess, you notice the gentle glint of reflected light bouncing of the false jewel embedded on Henry's crown. And when they stop in a loose semicircle, if you hadn't been taught better, you could have reached out and touched the hem of the actors cloak standing not four feet in front of you. As the show progresses the physical intimacy of the actors drags you deeper into the world of the play, so much …show more content…

Schechner claims that “If Woyzeck is done in a theater it is important that Woyzeck gets very close to the audience. Close enough so that the audience can smell his sweat. His fear.” (Schechner 15) I tend to agree, that if the audience can get closer to the action, the more involved they will feel. There are dozens of examples of how theater has tried to interact with the audience in a more interactive way, from vaudeville bringing audience members up on stage to sing and dance or have practical jokes played on them. All the way through theater in the modern era which would actively try to make the audience feel unpleasant in both physical and sensory methods such as screaming in your face, using hand held instruments obnoxiously, or wafting disgusting or alluring smells like baked bread or garbage during the show. Another way that audiences have been brought closer to the action is to remove them from the standard proscenium theater and put them within the environment through site specific …show more content…

The most insignificant face makes a deeper impression that the mere sensation of beauty, and one can let the figures come to life without copying anything into them from the outside, Where no life, no pulse, no muscles` swell and beat.” (Schmitd 96) This concept also agrees Strongly with how Büchner felt about classicism, and the relative politics of his day, he confides in a friend that “Aristocracy is the most despicable contempt of the holy spirit of man; against this contempt I turn its own weapons: arrogance against arrogance, ridicule against ridicule. (Schmidt 109) What both of these quotes together explain is that to understand one another, and to understand the essence of Woyzeck, we each must be brought low. Each of us must be placed in a place where we feel sick with ourselves, feel inferior, lose the sense of our own empowerment. For many people, the idea of losing control of oneself and being “just a statistic” is the ideal way to remove any sense of entitlement within an audience. Placing them in a prison changes the dynamic of a show, instead of viewing the show from the comfort of an exterior presence, when the prison door slides shut and you are withing a prison cell you are encapsulated within the world of the play, bringing a whole new level of empathy to the characters in your same

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