*tim boucher effect

You know you’ve been working in theatre too long when your brain begins to automatically transpose which handle of the bathroom faucet is stage right and stage left. If I’m facing a faucet and I turn the cold water handle on my right, then that’s the stage left handle. Because that’s how stage left and stage right work. They’re opposite of you. They automatically assume a switch in perspective: you’re looking at yourself from the outside and flipping the viewpoint to the other person, to the audience.

And that is, ultimately, the essence of theatre. Realigning perspectives on one’s own actions and behaviours so that they might be viewed from the outsider perspective: you make space for the ‘other.’

The space you make for the supposed other, however, may be quite limited. You’re up there on stage singing and dancing or declaiming your lines or whatever and you leave the audience with what? The ability to respond. You hope for the right response. You hope for laughter – or weeping, depending on the script. These things, the response of the ‘other’ becomes like a formula. You can sit up in a booth in the back of the house and you can cue the lights and the lights come up. And likewise, if everybody’s doing their job and everything’s working harmoniously, you can pretty much cue audience laughter. You know where it’s going to happen. You know basically what to expect. You may not know precisely the intensity or the specific persons in the audience with their particular voices who will be joining in the ritual as laughers. But the rest is pretty much all mapped out.

The audience, I wonder, maybe their role is the same as what the ‘chorus’ once played in Greek drama. You have your lead actors, the persons doing most of the standing-up and saying-lines sort of thing, and the chorus (which continues still to Broadway musicals of today) acts as sort of the built-in responder unit within the formulaic structure of the performance. The chorus is like the huddled masses yearning to breathe free: they model emotional response for the audience. Is that right? I don’t know. My apprenticeship to the Great and Ridiculous Traditions of the Almighty Stage™ is still underway. But every day, I strive. I strive to separate my left and my right from stage left and stage right. I strive to see the effects of my actions, of my “performance” – however limited – upon the other players, whether they be staff or guest. It’s not always easy, it doesn’t always work. Sometimes you reach an impasse. Most commonly over small things. You keep striving, or you quit. One of those two. It’s that simple. Stage left and stage right. Downstage and upstage. Where are you?

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