Prior to actually getting the chance to see a play at an outdoor theater, I had never actually considered how it might be different than seeing a play indoors. I figured that they would be essentially the same, only with more sunburn involved for both the actors and spectators in the outdoor version. I had especially never considered the different challenges of the two spaces from a performer’s point of view.
While my two (thus far) experiences with seeing plays at the Globe Theatre (which is actually outdoors and completely ceiling-less) has shown me that indoor and outdoor plays are radically different beasts, I believe that the difference that has struck me the most has been the birds. During both of the shows I have seen in the Globe, pigeons have been mixed in with people to comprise the audience for the plays. The presence of the birds was more than just a (in hindsight, quite obvious) surprise, however; their presence gave me (another) reason to be quite impressed by both the actors and the staff of the theater.
At no point were the pigeons weren’t just sitting by and idling watching. It seemed that every five minutes, the pigeons were flying from one end of the theater to the other, flapping loudly and cooing, sometimes even coming to land on the stage and peck about for a few seconds before flying off noisily again.
Here’s the part that impressed me, though. The birds were distracting, and successfully diverted my attention away from the performance the first few times they started up their antics. The actors, however, weren’t even phased. Not only did they ignore the pigeons, which seemed to find it fun to fly in front of the actors’ faces and hang about underfoot, but the actors also succeeded in winning back my attention just as quickly as the birds could steal it away.
I also send props out to the ushers of the Globe, for persistently engaging in the futile task of chasing the pigeons away from the stage and the spectators for the entire performance.