志异 Draft by Drama box July 2014 (english) | Page 12

government is not the only problem. The people themselves are also problematic. Being anti-establishment is
too easy. Such works get easy applause and endorsement.  
In the bourgeois theatre, everyone’s sitting in the dark
and they think everyone is thinking like them. Shallow
theatre reviewers commit such a flaw when they claim
that at a particular point in the play, the audience was
not engaged.  Did the reviewer interview every single
person in the audience to make such an assumption? 
The audience is plural, they all have different ideologies and perspectives. Some of our plays reveal that
plurality of the audience to the audience themselves. 
Forum Theatre pieces and plays such as  Completely
With/Out Character, where a Q&A segment is inserted
midway in the play engendering opportunities for audience feedback and responses to reveal a diversity of views
to all present before the play continues to the end. So I
would say it’s not so much about dividing the audience
up, because the audience is already plural.
Can you tell us more about this plurality? Plurality is actually the
human condition, and it is only in the postmodern era
did the consciousness of plurality and multiple positions
become embraced by the mainstream. I think the modernists had a lot of difficulties with it, that’s why realism then was very problematic as it was limiting – there
was the unity of time, unity of character, unity of space
to deal with. With such a worldview, when one is not
in alignment, one is easily dismissed as a hypocrite or
a character under duress or that the playwright is not

*plurality & postmodern sensibilities—