BOOKS
135
KRAZY KAT AND BRICK BAT
PUSS IN BOOTS.
by Ludwig Tieck. University of Texas Press. $3.45
"Next
to
dodging bricks, I like reading Tieck most."
- Krazy Kat
The old, finely developed art of disrupting plays with a cat-call
or a volley of oranges is rarely practiced any more by theater audiences.
Unseemly snoring can be heard occasionally in the balcony, but nothing
survives comparable to the behavior of theater audiences in classical Athens,
Restoration London, or Hugo's Paris, where, through their orange–
throwing, hissing, footstamping, and applause for serious ideas as well as
jests , spectators criticized live performances while watching them. Play–
wrights needed no printed criticism to know whether their plays were
popular. Audiences came to be heard as well as to hear; to be seen, as well as
to see. Electric lighting and fourth wall realism had not yet relegated
spectators to the darkness and silence of voyeurism. That came later, after
Antoine advised nineteenth-century French actors to imagine a wall be–
tween themselves and the audience-to act as if no one was watching-and
after electric lights could be turned off in the house to further encourage the
illusion that no audience was present.
Not all post-Antoine theater encouraged voyeurism, of course. Mod–
ern playwrights such as Brecht, Wilder, and Peter Handke have acknow–
ledged the presence of their audience by having actors directly address the
house. Handke turns the audience into the central character of
Offending
The Audience;
his actors tell the audience "You are the subject ... you are the
event," and then call the spectators all sorts of names which acknowledge
the audience's collective presence while ridiculing it. To insure vocal
audience response as well as audience presence for his play ,
Each in His Own
Way ,
Pirandello wrote two intervals during which actors impersonate
spectators and comment on the production.
These audience provocations by Handke and Pirandello are not merely
counteractions to modern audience quietude, but also continuations of a
theatrical tradition that has its beginnings in the audience-directed insults
of Aristophanic satire, and recurs throughout theater history in the form of
prologues, induction scenes, and plays-within-plays that comment on
audience presence and prejudices. One of the most humorous plays in this
