21 talkbacks

In Blackjack, players try to get as close as they can to 21 without going over. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.  Given that we performed “Doubt” 21 times and held 21 talkbacks, I think there’s a connection to be made. And — for the record — I’m a pretty terrible Blackjack player.

We have closed our run of “Doubt“, whose strategy of holding talkbacks after every performance was created in order to balance the theatre’s desire for bar sales with the playwright’s desire for no intermission.  For the uninformed, a “talkback” is a moderated discussion held in the theatre after a performance, where interested members of the audience can stick around and discuss the play they’ve seen with members of the cast.  In my circles, it is common for a theatre to hold one or two talkbacks over the run of a show; sometimes for the general public, but almost universally in the case of student matinees.

Four weeks ago, I would have said that talkbacks are awesome and I would do them after every performance, for all time.  Four weeks ago, I think I was unaware of how much energy nightly talkbacks actually require.  21 talkbacks for “Doubt” have left me with mixed feelings on their success.

Here’s why.

1. Magicians don’t like giving out secrets. A talkback can be a great opportunity to talk about the themes of a piece, but very often audience members want to know ‘how it was all done’ — what the set is made of, how rehearsals went, and — gawd forbid — how actors memorize all those lines.  At one of the “Doubt” talkbacks we cast members were prodded for information on how we made choices about characters. We hemmed and hawwed and stared at each other hoping someone else would respond.  Thankfully, one actor jumped in and suggested that these choices are personal, and that’s why we were reluctant to share them.  We’re glad that you can’t see the structure underneath the facade… but sometimes it’s best to leave that structure hidden (sprezzatura).  As Travis Bedard stated eloquently the other day on his theatre company’s blog, our hope is that these choices aren’t visible to an audience… on purpose.  Perhaps more fundamentally for me, the desire for audience members to know such things is akin to having them watch a magic show and then having the magician reveal all the tricks afterwards.

Some people don’t mind knowing all the details and can continue to revel in the artistry. Other people, after having the curtain raised and the illusion revealed, look at every magic trick thereafter with a view to figuring it out… losing the art altogether.

2. I believe talkbacks are about the audience.  So is theatre in general, really. But in the world of the talkback I like to imagine that the play was 90 minutes of my character’s chance to speak; the post-show chat is the audience’s chance to speak. On most occasions this plays out very well, with audience members engaging one another in discussion. Occasionally, I feel as though I am being prodded to pontificate on the themes of the play. It’s natural for some (if not all) audience members to be left with questions, but I don’t think the people on stage really have many more answers to offer than other audience members do.

I feel the same way about teaching Shakespeare to kids: students will ask me what a line of text means, but even if I “know” (based on my own interpretation and work), I will reflect the question back to the class. Nine times out of ten the response from the student’s peers is as valid as anything I can offer.  The empowering effect this has on a class is palpable: they soon realize that they own the work.  In theatre, audiences own the work; I believe in empowering them, too.  It’s art, after all; not science.  There are only interpretations; not answers.

The presence of a good moderator at a talkback can keep the ball bouncing healthily in the auditorium, and I think that the choice of talkback moderator should not be made lightly.

3. I’m an actor, not a philosopher.  This is the hardest point for me to articulate. As an actor working on a scripted play, my attention is focused on my character: his intentions, his life, his story, and how that lines up with the intent of the author, as guided by a director.  While preparing a role, I rapidly lose sight of the Big Picture. This is somewhat purposeful — there is too much other work to do.  As an audience member, what this ultimately means is that you have a more complete experience of the play than I ever do.  I would do you a disservice by tearing focus away from my job in order to share my partially-obscured opinions on what you’ve seen.

Some time ago I stumbled across a cool CBC Digital Archives site on the first 50 Years of the Stratford Festival.  In one of the clips on the site, a young-ish Alec Guinness (in 1953) is asked to comment on his roles in that year’s productions of Richard III and All’s Well That Ends Well. He responds as follows: “I think an actor’s the last person who should make any comment about the roles he’s playing, because [...] if we could speak intelligently about what we are playing, we wouldn’t want to act. You know, one acts because we can’t express ourselves in any other way… except by acting.”

Ultimately, I think the “Doubt” experiment was successful, and a far better option than adding an intermission to a play that was written without one.  But perhaps a “universal talkback” policy is a little extreme. I think audiences truly enjoy having a forum after a play, but in cases where talkbacks are a regular occurrence, I would advocate that cast members take turns participating in them, to avoid being burned out by them.