The Great "Unknown": The Audience

Subject: The Great ‘Unknown’: The Audience

We all know what an audience is, but the important thing is, “What does the audience see?” As we spoke about in class a few weeks ago, many things in theatrical performances are for only one type of audience. Much like in the movie Shakespeare In Love, some people would understand the satirical jokes that were placed inside the movie and others wouldn’t. One of those jokes was when one character told Will that, “We don’t have time, speak prose.” Another was the design on the mug that talked of Stratford on Avon. The first of these is important because it shows that the movie is making fun of the fact that most people that read Shakespeare today, think that the language that he uses is really the way that the English spoke in Elizabethan time. Where, in all reality, this is just not the case. No one in there right mind would have spoken in rhyme on a daily basis. The second example shows that the directors wanted to poke fun at the fact that Shakespeare is now a very large part of our everyday culture, whether we realize it or not. We now could just as easily have a mug from Stratford on Avon as we could have one from Disney World.

Now, not everyone will understand either of those ‘jokes’ but some people will. This is what I mean when I talk about playing to different audiences. This can also be seen in the play, Trouble In Mind. In my opinion this play was written for two or more audiences. Obviously it was written for the blacks and the whites, but it was also written to show the feelings about the male gender and the female gender.
The audience gets undertones from not only the language and the dialogue, but also the stage directions. Wiletta is supposed to be a weak type of a character this symbolizes the race itself being weak compared to the whites that are around them. For another audience, however, this also symbolizes the weakness of the woman compared to the man. Manners, represents just the opposite, the strong, white, man.
The big thing also about this play is the fact that it was performed for the first time in the 1950’s, right in the big middle of the Civil Rights Movement. The fact that it was written and performed in this era, and that it was very blunt about how the white race perceived the way that that African Americans were treated, is the main reason that I and many others view this as a very two sided piece of work. Each audience ‘sector’, if you will, saw different things that they wanted to see. The whites saw the blacks in their place, weak and powerless, and the blacks saw reality for them. However, for all we, as white people know, they may have seen something entirely different.

This shows the great thing about theatre. Each member of an audience sees something completely different from what the person sitting next to them sees. Theatre is truly a frontier in a way. You can go anywhere and see anything that your mind will allow you to see and do. It is up to your imagination and you. This is why the Great ’Unknown’ is the Audience. No one really knows what anyone else understands or perceives, and there is no real way for someone to ‘take you by the hand’ and lead you to some ultimate meaning of any piece of work.

--Michael