Only a live performance can utilize the audience’s immediate responses to shape the explicit text of the show. 

It’s common in stand-up, and moments of crowd work, and improv built around invited participation. But how can scripted theater take advantage of residing in the same room as living-and-breathing humans? If art reflects us, how can we become a direct part of the art?

Marie Antoinette at this year’s Under the Radar Festival, As You Like It at last year’s Under the Radar Festival, and Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists at BAM’s Next Wave Festival share a similar approach to corralling spontaneity within precisely constructed productions: they stage what will deliberately provoke, and then plant actors in the house to get the vocal outrage started. Crack open that door for New Yorkers, and we’ll burst it wide with our loudmouth opinions.

This unwieldy shattering of the fourth wall can make it impossible to differentiate the controlled vegetation from the triggered spectators, a dangerous prospect that transforms all of it into interpretable material.