After speaking with Lisa Dillon Thursday morning, I was surprised to hear how closely connected she feels with the audience each night. Because she is a professional actress, I felt like she would feel more isolated in her performances and produce a consistent rendition onstage each night. Instead, she spoke about how each crowd radiates a different sort of energy. Unsurprisingly, this energy greatly impacts each performance, especially due to the nature of the theater. The swan features a huge thrust stage around which audiences sit. If a more intimate theater design exists, I cannot image. Before the beginning of the play, Jane excitedly mentioned that the actors might spit on us. I felt like her statement captured both how our class has become so happily immersed in these plays and the extent of the intimacy we feel with the characters. Each of us has formed opinions about the character through reading and discussing the plays before we even watch the performance. It is interesting to see how our feelings about the characters change after watching performances and to also see if we wish the plays were performed in a different manner which would be more consistent with how we imagined.
After speaking with Lisa, I realized how important it is to be an active audience. Despite our support or disapproval of a certain performance, it enhances everyone’s experience if the audience remains engaged. Because our class has already read the plays, it is nice to walk into a play with opinions about the characters and plots before the performance even begins. This helps to actively engage with a show whether we like it or not. I found it interesting that she preferred an audience which actively disliked the show than one which contributed nothing at all. After speaking with this actress, I realized that we need to engage ourselves in each performance in this trip. Speaking with Lisa I realized that our approach to each performance far exceeds that of an observer, and we need to actively immerse ourselves in each play.