Avant-garde theatre forced audiences to accept complicity in violence to continue

Evidence

The Manson murders surfaced for the first time, followed by a jam session featuring the late eighteenth-century hymn “Bound for the Promised Land.” The Statue of Liberty (Joan MacIntosh) appeared reciting Emma Lazarus’s poem in a thick Brooklyn accent and then turned into a cheerleader who inspired the rest of the cast to run a slow-motion Rat Race and frolic in a wading pool. … Some nights the audience was invited to participate, an echo of Schechner’s 1967 guerrilla theater piece, and the play stopped until they agreed to become culpable. Finally, the Tate murders were recounted in gory detail to end with a Polanski surrogate being asked about the role of the artist today. Long pause followed by, “Yes, yes of course.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1671

Categorization

• FICTION: The forced-culpability staging — the show physically stops until the audience consents to being complicit — is a working mechanism for a story about how institutions manufacture consent or guilt.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how material/scenic conditions (a theatre that stops mid-show) force audience participation — the same structural coercion that Cheap Thrills-era improv theatre used.