Theater Talkback: Stepping Into the Spotlight

Hendrik†Schmidt/European Pressphoto Agency Critics tend to shun the spotlight.

Limelight is to theater critics as sunlight is to vampires. We reviewers feel safest crouched in the shadows while we feast on the lifeblood and talent (or lack thereof) of the performers on the bright stage before us. Legend has it that if you drag a critic into the glare of the other side of the proscenium, he will hiss, shrivel and disintegrate like Dracula at dawn.

As a member of this tribe of darkness, I have often watched with pity and terror as other innocent audience members have been recruited to become the playthings of actors. Like those unsuspecting guys who were assigned the task of carrying trunk a bearing the not inconsidrable weight of James Corden in “One Man Two Guvnors” on Broadway last year. Or just last month, the ashen fellow who was asked to kneel down and tie Tim Crouch’s shoelaces in “I, Malvolio” at the New Victory Theater.

New York critics are usually exempt from such participation. We attend late previews on designated press nights, and our seats are mostly (and deliberately) beyond range of any possible selection process for cameo roles.(Otherwise, a critic might be put in the unseemly position of reviewing his own performance.) But that has never stopped me from thinking with a shiver, when some poor civilian sap becomes the focus of an actor’s jibes and sallies, “There but for the grace of God…”

And then the grace of God was s! uspended..

This occurred a few weeks ago at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where a sad, lovely fable of a play called “The Suit,” from the Theatre des Bouffes du Nord, was in residence. I had seen the show - a creation of the august director Peter Brook with Marie-Helene Estienne and Frank Krawczyk - in London the previous summer, and I vaguely remembered that, toward the end, three audience members were brought on stage for a climactic party sequence.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times From left, Rikki Henry, Nonhlanhla Kheswa and William Nadylam in “The Suit”

Let me provide a little context: At this point in “The Suit,” which portrays a South African husband’s whimsical and cruel revenge on his adulterous wife, that couple has invited friends to their home for food and song. The wife, who has a heavenly voice, performs, and a mood of celebration reigns. Then the husband performs a simple, startling act that turns joy into chilling embarrassment, and the party is over.

In other words, anyone who enters into this this scene must become a visible witness to an act of public humiliation. And if you’re one of the audience members who have been brought into the story, the responses you’ve been having throughout to a deeply emotional tale are no longer private.

Perhaps I should say at this point that I am not a stoical theatergoer, though I try to be a quiet one. If a production is at all effective, I become as involved in its plot as a child listening to a suspenseful bedtime story. And when the big party moment came aro! und in “! The Suit,” I still had tear tracks on my face from earlier scenes. I was hardly ready for any kind of close-up.

Imagine my dismay, then, when I was confronted with the beckoning hand and smile of one of the actors - a hand and a smile that brooked no refusal. What could I do Say “I’m a theater critic, I don’t do theater”

Robotically, I put down my pen and notepad and followed the actor down the aisle and onto the back rim of the stage. Curtains suspended from a clothes rack - signifying the entrance to the couple’s house - were drawn for me, and I stepped through them onto center-stage and into a hot circumference of light, as my cheeks burned. I was the first of the chosen few at this performance, and my entrance was greeted with laughter.

It had been a long time since I had appeared on a stage, except as a speaker, which is not the same as being an actor. Throughout grade school and college, I had done a fair amount of theater (not well, mind you), but I had put away this avoation with other childish things once I entered the working world.

So I had forgotten how very different the view is from the other side of the stage. It’s so strangely isolating. You feel cocooned, and believe it or not, protected by the haze of lights that separate you from the people in the dark. I felt self-conscious, yes, but more because I was a stranger at a party (being asked what I wanted to eat and drink), than because I was appearing before an audience.

And something quite wonderful happened. You might assume that once a theatergoer crosses the divide between his seat and the stage that the illusion so carefully fostered by the actors would dissolve. On the contrary, I felt like Mia Farrow in Woody Allen’s “Purple Rose of Cairo,” as if I had believed strongly enough in a fictional world for it to become a physical reality.

Details I hadn’t noticed from the audience - like the sweat beading the performers’! faces an! d the rhythms of their breathing - only seemed to enhance their existence as fragile, truly human characters. And the sense of complicity that every audience member feels in reacting to a play, if it’s any good, was only strengthened. When the party scene turned sorrowful, I had to forcibly keep myself from crying or crying out. I felt implicated, which I usually do by any powerful work of art, but even more intensely than usual.

So that was my baptism into audience participation. (I don’t count environmental theater, where boundaries are in flux from the beginning.) And it turned out to be mercifully benign. Of course I didn’t have to trade jokes or be insulted or perform stunts. My hosts were gracious, and I left the realm of stage lights feeling, in a word, illuminated.

For those of you have made similarly unexpected stage appearances, what were your experiences like Be they traumatic, exhilarating or enlightenin - I’m eager to hear about them.