Ideations of Violence

PART 5/6

But here's another thing my experience as a performer has taught me, if not my formal training: audiences differ.

Different constituencies within one's audience differ from one another in ways that marketing professionals used to slice and dice a theatre community, and we all choose our audience or so the theory goes.

One's audience may be understood as either informed or naive and it's just too bad if you think of the word naive as a personal affront get over it deal with it the word just means 'innocent'.

Why do all the sub-literates take so much umbrage at being called innocent?

To oversimplify the matter, as a dramatist, you either reach out to an audience of critically-minded, literary-inclined, culture-appreciating people, or you're reaching out to the audience of know-nothings.

In the former case, they may not be the easiest audience, but at least they accept the premise that theatre companies should exist in the United States of America.

In the latter case, you can feel in their genuine appreciation of the form itself how really unfamiliar they are with live performance in practice.

Meaning, for many American citizens, they may have only seen a handful of dramatic performances in their entire lives.

For them, the power of live performance can seem visibly transformative, as opposed to the effect it often has on the jaundiced attendees that comprise legacy patronage at the nation's larger institutions.

Meanwhile, liberal-minded or left-leaning audiences don't flock together under a banner of mythological demagoguery as easily as people tend to congregate for it on the right.

It just doesn't work that way for us because, if I'm encouraging my audience to think critically, the last thing I want them to do is behave with a herd mentality.  

Conformity and uniformity appeals to certain humans with certain synapses and to certain other humans with synapses arranged differently, such notions inspire detestation.

I don't even like formatting my plays to the arbitrary specifications of my own chosen field; I damn sure don't accept the formatting of my personal view of God.

Lest it need to put with absolute explicitness for the absolutest among you:  I will NEVER pray like you want me to pray.  I will NEVER believe like you want me to believe.  I will NEVER claim to be part of your mythological cult.