Characters stepping out of their plays to address an audience is hardly a new phenomenon. Playwrights have been breaking the fourth wall ever since that invisible barrier separating the actors from the audience was raised.
Sophocles, of course, didn’t need Oedipus to chat directly with the audience. He had a chorus to provide running commentary. Shakespeare, whose theatrical sensibility was informed as much by Renaissance and Classical poetry as by those pageant wagons boisterously bringing miracle plays directly into the lives of townsfolk, had no compunction about a character slipping out of the frame to help audience members arrange their imagination. He even enlists Rosalind in ”As You Like It” and Prospero in “The Tempest” to bid their audiences farewell.
The fourth wall, encoded in the architecture of the proscenium stage, fosters the illusion that audiences are eavesdropping on a cordoned off reality. As the modern theater embraced realism, plays were carefully designed not to wrench their auditors from their waking dream. Maintaining a semblance of truth, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge pointed out in the context of poetry, was necessary to procure “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”
“Willing” is a key word. Art invites complicity, and in the theater, audiences are in on the game. As Samuel Johnson sagely points out in his “Preface to Shakespeare,” “The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses, and know from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players.”
How could it be otherwise? As Johnson reminds us, “If we thought murders and treasons real, they would please no more.”
In the Neoclassical era, playwrights were exhorted to observe the unities (of time and place, in particular) to facilitate an audience’s belief. But modern playwrights, particularly those who see their roles as storytellers, have resisted such superficial strictures.
The memory play, perfected by Tennessee Williams in “The Glass Menagerie,” asks the protagonist to serve also as narrator, setting the scene, reflecting on the action and fast-forwarding the story at will. Irish dramatist Brian Friel, a born raconteur, was a master of this use of direct address, writing monologues for his main characters that not only launched his tale but engulfed his audience in the right lyrical mood.
These writers create an environment in which characters can enter or exit the main storyline as if from a magic door. Audiences are cognizant of this portal, but they are encouraged to forget its existence when the drama ramps up, thereby allowing them to have their cake and eat it too.
A friend of mine hates when a character goes rogue and starts chatting up the audience. “Why are you talking to me?” she mumbles in faux outrage. “I paid to watch you talk to each other.”
Perhaps she considers it a dramatic cheat, as though the writer were copping out of the hard work of dramatization. But I have the opposite reaction. I find that playwrights are often at their liveliest when writing in a presentational mood. What they sacrifice in illusionist power, they gain in freedom.
In “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” Terrence McNally, a master of direct address, intensifies the emotional climax of his play by having his characters step forward and explain how and when they will die. This poignant comedy, about a group of gay male friends spending summer holidays together during the height of the AIDS epidemic, gathered the audience in a communal huddle of collective grief while urging survivors — everyone in attendance — to keep the faith.
In times of emergency, it’s natural to want to draw the public’s attention to the shared moment. The theater affords a space — one of the few left in our digitalized world — for this kind of reflective gathering.
Breaking the fourth wall is a tried-and-true method of calling an audience to attention. But a new breed of dramatist, writing in an age of overlapping calamities — environmental, political, economic, technological and moral — is retooling an old playwriting device to do more than inject urgency and immediacy in the theatrical experience.
Characters are not just stepping out of the dramatic frame — they are blurring the line between art and life. Performers are dropping their masks, or at the very least shuffling them, to force us to think harder about what we’re all doing in the theater as the world around us burns.
Bess Wohl’s “Liberation,” one of the best plays of the year, is having its Broadway premiere this season at the James Earl Jones Theatre under the direction of Whitney White (who matches her fine ensemble job with “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”). The play, an imaginative account of a group of women banding together in a gymnasium during the early days of the women’s rights movement, begins with a performer checking in on us.
“Hi. Is everyone — is everyone good? Comfortable? Snacks unwrapped? Hello. Hi. Welcome.”
Lizzie, the author’s surrogate (luminously played by Susannah Flood), greets us with the skittish confidence that will turn out to be one of the character’s most charming qualities. She apologizes that theatergoers have had to lock their phones in Yondr pouches. (Cameras are off-limits in a production that has some nudity.) But she immediately confronts the question on everybody’s mind: How long is the play?
Honestly, it’s not even your fault, it’s like, this is the modern condition — not to sound grandiose, ‘this is the modern condition,’ but honestly — it’s like, you decide to come, you get dressed up — Well all right, you didn’t get dressed up — but you put on clothes, thank you for that. You put on clothes. You make your way through whatever you went through — the subway, the traffic, the hellscape that is Times Square — you finally get here, and then you hope that the entire experience will be as short as humanly possible.
Theatergoers seem thrilled that after all the effort they made to be there, they’re not being ignored as usual. But Wohl isn’t pandering to them. She’s connecting to them in the present before ushering them into the past.
Her project, as Lizzie explains in her introduction, is memory — memories belonging to her mother (who recently died) and to her mother’s friends, who set out to change the world. Blazing a trail for women’s equality, they help transform society, even if incompletely. A momentous accomplishment, but then why Lizzie asks, “Why does it feel somehow like it’s all slipping away? And how do we get it back?”
The play rewinds to the 1970s, to a local rec center in Ohio, where a few pioneering women with little in common, beyond the everyday sexism that has hemmed in their lives, form a consciousness-raising group. Lizzie’s mother, also named Lizzie (and also played by Flood) is the ringleader, but a tentative one — as apologetically undeterred as her daughter.
Wohl is writing a personal history that is not her own. She sets up her play to make clear that this theatrical re-creation is her attempt to understand what happened in those meetings of unlikely revolutionaries. She provides space for the women to object to her version of events and to challenge her interpretation of motives.
In one scene, in which Lizzie is about to meet the man who will become her husband, Lizzie the daughter and de facto author interrupts the play to enlist another actor (Kayla Davion, superb) to play her mother. Young Lizzie is understandably squeamish to enact a love scene with the man who will turn out to be her father.
The playfulness of Wohl’s style, while at times informal to the point of desultory, treats the past as an autonomous reality. The playwright can only engage her mother’s history from her position in the present. She can imagine, she can theorize, she can try to do justice. But she isn’t permitted to subjugate her characters to advance her own agenda, no matter how well-intentioned. The personal is political, as the feminist rallying cry has it, and Wohl has taken pains never to lose sight of this insight when imagining the complexities of the lives of others.
“Prince Faggot,” by Jordan Tannahill, is built on the reaction to an effete photo of Prince George of Cambridge at the age of 4 that went viral. The play, originally produced by Playwrights Horizons and Soho Rep, is at off-Broadway’s Studio Seaview through Dec. 13. It imagines a queer life for William and Kate’s pride and joy as this young royal defiantly and decadently comes of age.
It’s a daring premise, full of presumption and not really defensible from the standpoint of a real-life boy who doesn’t deserve to be made the object of a sexual fantasia. But Tannahill doesn’t evade these tricky moral questions.
Performer 1 (Keshav Moodliar on the night I attended), who plays both the playwright’s surrogate and George’s future lover, debates the issues with the company. One by one, the queer and trans cast members share fictionalized personal stories, harking back to childhood moments before any declaration of identity was possible.
A thought experiment is under way in this seductively febrile production directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury (whose play “Public Obscenities” was a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist). How might the lives of the characters (and by extension all our lives) be different if heterosexuality weren’t the default assumption?
Intellectual license granted, the company is allowed to run riot in a performance work that maintains a Brechtian distance between actor and role. A playwright’s note in the script clarifies that “with the exception of Performer 4’s final monologue” (which was “inspired by a rehearsal hall interview with actress N’yomi Allure Stewart”), the rest of the play, “including the direct address monologues, is fictional, written by the playwright, and any resemblance to real events is purely coincidental.”
The audience can’t help but be conscious of the daredevil performers impersonating these royal celebrities, intimate friends and overzealous handlers, exposing their bodies, if not their own biographies, in a work that realizes in performance Picasso’s assertion of art being “the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”
“Table 17,” Doug Lyons’ meta-theatrical rom-com, which ended its run at the Geffen Playhouse on Sunday, has its character routinely check in with the audience as Jada (Gail Bean) and Dallas (Biko Eisen-Martin) review what led to their breakup. The location for this amorous autopsy is a fashionable restaurant in which the host/pinch-hit server (gamely incarnated by Michael Rishawn) functions as the show’s bitchy chorus.
Lyons has the characters directly engage the audience in a production directed by Zhailon Levingston that incorporated the energy of British pantomime. Theatergoers were encouraged to express their feelings in a comedy that pays homage, as the playwright notes in his script, to such popular Black films as “Love & Basketball,” “Poetic Justice” and “Love Jones.”
The direct address monologues, Lyons stresses, should have “a stand-up comedy feel to them. In these moments the audience is no longer a spectator, but an active participant in the story.”
“Table 17” is more modest in its ambition than either “Liberation” or “Prince Faggot.” It mostly wants to divert. But there was something bracing about the circuitry it created with an audience. Theater wasn’t being imposed onto a paying public. It was instead a shared endeavor, mutually manufactured in yet another instance of a play letting down its guard to reach new levels of aliveness.
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