Midway through the Red Bull Theater and Fiasco’s recent coproduction of Francis Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle, Nell, the grocer’s wife (who, along with her husband, has been sitting onstage watching and sometimes interfering with the performance), takes out a sandwich and begins to eat it. Because the sandwich is wrapped in not one but two paper bags, the seemingly endless rustling causes the players to stop and stare. Nell apologizes, putting the sandwich down, and the action resumes. The night I saw the production, my friend told me at intermission that this moment reminded her of the time someone seated near her at a play took out and began to peel and eat a hard-boiled egg.
Anyone who has been to the theater knows that the audience is part of the show. But the question of how to think and talk about audiences’ involvement is not always...
