Audience Beware

Let this be a warning that should be posted in the North Coast Rep lobby during the run of Henry IV, Part 1: Audience members are warned to keep their seats during the show, and those sitting in aisle seats are cautioned not to lean too far into the aisles. For at numerous and unpredictable times, actors will be running at full speed in the aisles, from behind the audience towards the stage, some of them armed with spears. Failure to heed these warnings could result in serious injury.

Theatre is supposed to be dangerous, but short of being physically dangerous to the audience. There was an epidemic of open flames on local stages a few years back, at least once in close company with highly inflammable material that I uncomfortably witnessed. Audience complaints, producer sanity or more active fire safety people--or some combination of these--put that practice out.

Some people complained of noxious fumes, particularly cigarette smoke, coming from the stage, so non-tobacco smoke with posted warnings is now the norm. The latest fashion that probably needs to be addressed is the increasing use of the audience's part of the theatre by actors during the performance. The stage is no longer enough. Actors declaim from the seats and the aisles, and particularly, make their entrances onto the stage from the "house."

There are certain dramatic advantages, or there were before this became commonplace: the element of surprise, the novelty of wrapping the show around the audience rather than limiting the perspective to audience facing the stage.

However, there is a problem: the audience. The "house" is their space. If the audience stays off the stage, they have a reasonable expectation that the actors will not invade their space, preventing them from movement within it. This is more than etiquette: it is a matter of health and safety, particularly when--as in the current North Coast Rep production--the house aisles are regularly used by actors running onto the stage. Sometimes they do so shouting, which merely threatens temporary deafness to the unwary. But they are moving at such heedless speed that the next patron who feels the call of nature at the wrong moment, may wind up a casualty of the long-ago English wars being depicted.

I hope it does not take such an injury, and the resulting lawsuit, to suggest that this practice be abandoned.