Word: stated
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...when we are in an "audience" state, we can't really say that we exist. Everyone knows Descartes' famous axiom "I think, therefore I am," but Sartre came closer to the mark when he argued that to exist is to be perceived. To be invisible is to be dead. Thus, being part of an audience is a state entirely different than any other state during our lives...
...remedy this problem? Keeping the house lights up throughout a production is not necessarily the answer. Doing so might prevent the audience from entering that sublime state of non-existence where compassion becomes easier than judgment. On the other hand, keeping the house lights down the entire time can create a troubling dichotomy between the world of theater and the external world. It's easy enough to check our judgments at the theater door along with our coats if we know we can pick them up again on the way outside...
...around this problem is to catch the audience off-guard, to confront them with their own existence while they're in that state of nonjudgment. To have the actors in a production approach individual members of the audience during the production--to surprise the audience with the fact that they can be observed--might just work. This is exactly the technique used by the Institute for Advanced Theater Training in their production of Bertolt Brecht's St. Joan of the Stockyards three weeks ago in the Loeb Ex, and it works wonders. To feel sympathy for a beggar...
...manner during a production is, in a sense, to kill that audience. But the audience itself is a deadening mechanism. The darkness of a theater allows us to think compassionate thoughts but deadens us to the full implications of those thoughts. And it allows us to enter a temporary state of non-existence. To kill the audience, then, is to give birth to a new type of person, a person who is suddenly aware of his or her own temporary non-existence and the thoughts that characterize that world. The death of the audience may just fulfill the moral mission...
...between men and women. The program notes even include a section devoted to why the X chromosome is thousands of times more useful, bigger, and better than the Y chromosome: "Gentlemen, I'm afraid it's true, size does make a difference". If Ensler's goal was to simply state that women are better than men are, these statements might have been relevant, but this seems contrary to Ensler's stated intent and to portions of the text itself...