Toronto theatre audiences: I owe you an apology, for I underestimated your intelligence.
Let me explain.
When Coal Mine Theatre co-founder Diana Bentley announced last fall that she was launching a sister company focused on workshopping new plays in front of paying audiences (and soliciting their feedback afterwards), I was more than skeptical.
I didn’t think it would work. And on paper, at least, it shouldn’t.
There’s a reason why new play development is so often done behind closed doors, with a select group of collaborators. When you introduce too many voices, you receive too many (sometimes misguided or just plain vague) opinions. As the saying goes: ask 100 people for their thoughts on a piece of art and you’ll get 100 different responses.
For a new work still in gestation, these opinions might offer little help to creators. At worst, they could mislead them and harm the art itself.
It’s not that I think audiences are stupid. I firmly believe that theatremakers should also avoid looking at critics’ reviews for advice. (Critics, anyway, should write first and foremost for audiences, not creators.) In short: it’s generally better for artists to select with careful consideration whose advice they seek, rather than casting a wide net.
But I was wrong about Bentley’s new company, the Vault Creation Lab. Most of all, I was wrong about Toronto theatregoers.
The Vault’s inaugural workshop presentation was a seven-show run of “A Little Closer,” by the celebrated Toronto playwright Michael Ross Albert. The quirky tragicomedy follows Cale (David Reale), a professional cuddler who helps to comfort strangers — but is unable to help himself as he deals with his unravelling marriage.
I sat in on a rehearsal about a week before performances began, then caught the final show of this short run on Sunday.
Directed by Bentley, the production was lightly staged with no more than several dozen audience members sitting in-the-round.
Each performance, Bentley explained at the top of each show, was a work-in-progress. At the end, audiences were invited to stay behind for a talkback with her and Albert. The pair then incorporated the feedback they received into the next show.
By the time I caught the final performance of “A Little Closer” on Sunday, it was already far different from the version of the play I saw in rehearsal just a few days before. Many scenes, excised of extraneous dialogue, felt tighter. Gone was a choreographed sequence at the top of the show. Emotional beats landed with greater force.
What surprised me the most, however, came at the end of the evening.
The vast majority of the audience stayed behind for the post-show talkback. Their feedback was insightful, detailed and deeply considered. It seemed they were eager to completely engage with the work — beyond thumbs-up or thumbs-down reactions.
Part of the reason why the talkback was so successful, I suspect, was because of how Bentley and Albert structured it. The questions they asked audiences to consider weren’t too broad (like what they liked or disliked about the play). That would have only resulted in scattered — perhaps even contradicting — responses that offered little help to the creative team.
Instead, the three questions that Bentley and Albert posed (different at each show) seemed to look specifically at whether the play’s message and themes were effectively communicated to the audience. At Sunday’s performance, they asked these questions:
What is something that surprised, delighted or saddened you?
If you had to describe the play in one phrase, what would that be?
What’s the mood of the play?
Three other questions in an online form that audiences could also complete were even more specific, looking at character development and the play’s structure:
How would you describe the main character’s journey?
What, if anything, was unclear about the story?
How does the character’s job as a professional cuddler make you feel about him?
What the Vault Creation Lab is doing — letting the public in on workshops of new plays — is unheard of in Toronto theatre. And time will tell whether this large-scale experiment is successful at forging new partnerships between Canadian playwrights and local audiences.
But, so far, it seems to be working. Sunday’s performance was an enriching experience on many levels: for audiences and theatremakers alike. And that can only be good for the art form.
