For a brief trip in 2011, Theatre for One was situated in New York City's Times Square, just a few steps from Broadway's mainstream theaters. This four-by-eight-foot black booth, trimmed in steel and lined in red velvet, it served as the locale for five plays. Each play had a single actor and a single audience member. (33) And intriguingly, each demanded the spectator's involvement.
In making the audience a part of the play, Theatre for One epitomizes "intimate theater, " a movement that has seen a recent rise in popularity. Meanwhile, intimate theater collapses the "wall" separating the audience from the actors. It creates an immersive experience in which the audience participates in creating the play.
Audience involvement can be physical or verbal. In a London production of Edgar Allan Poe's Masque of the Red Death, audiences silently wandered the halls of the 1893 Battersea Arts Centre while scenes from the story played out in various rooms. People could walk in on a scene already in progress or leave before a scene finished. Actors drew the spectators in by making eye contact, touching someone's arm, or beckoning someone to follow them to a new location. A person's show, specifically, quite literally depended on your own particular movements.
Some productions rely almost completely on actor-audience dialogue. An Edinburgh festival featuredLive Art Speed Dating, for which each theatergoer met with each of the twelve actors individually for a series of "mini-dates. " For Internal, audience members first paired off with actors to talk for twenty-five minutes and then sat in a circle for something seemingly more akin to group therapy than theater. Such experiences could be both exhilarating and unsettling.
Intimate theater breaks in the rules of traditional theater. Relying on the audience's personal involvement in the creation of the performance, it sometimes blurs the line among illusion and reality. Whether it's in Times Square or Edinburgh, intimate theater is definitely not Broadway.