breaking the fourth wall: brecht, bathrooms, and brains

Sitting on the stage at Love at Park Ave. Armory does not give audience members the right to use the (nonfunctioning) bathroom at the left (photo ©Stephanie Berger)

“The one tribute we can pay the audience is to treat it as thoroughly intelligent,” Bertolt Brecht explained.

Judging from what I’ve seen at numerous plays, the German poet, playwright, and director, who believed in the breaking of the fourth wall, was being rather generous.

“Never underestimate the power of human stupidity,” science-fiction novelist Robert A. Heinlein writes in Time Enough for Love.

At a May 2015 performance of Robert Askins’s Tony-nominated Hand to God at the Booth, right before the show started, as the lights began to dim, I watched in abject horror as a nineteen-year-old Seaford community college student crawled onto the stage to plug his phone charger into an outlet on Beowulf Boritt’s set, a church basement. The young man, who later admitted to having had a bit of booze in him, did not at first understand when theater employees told him that not only shouldn’t he be on the stage, but the outlet was a prop anyway; there was no electricity coming out of it.

“I saw the outlet and ran for it,” he later told Playbill without a hint of regret or apology. “That was the only outlet I saw, so I thought, ‘Why not?’ I was thinking that they were probably going to plug something in there on the set, and I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal if my phone was up there too.”

Brecht, who wrote such works as The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage and Her Children, and The Mother — a “learning play” meant to bring the actors and the audience together while taking a social stand — also posited, “It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theater. Our theater must stimulate a desire for understanding, a delight in changing reality. Our audience must experience not only the ways to free Prometheus, but be schooled in the very desire to free him. Theater must teach all the pleasures and joys of discovery, all the feelings of triumph associated with liberation.”

In January I wrote about a bizarre bathroom experience I had involving the Amoralists’ production of HotelMotel in an actual hotel room, in which I was seated in the center of the action and saw a character make use of a functional bathroom on the set. As he liberated himself, I got an unexpected dose of reality.

Although it turns some of my colleagues’ stomachs, I love immersive theater, from participatory shows to sitting on the stage. When I noticed an empty stage seat at the Public’s 2019 revival of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, I practically begged the stage manager to let me sit there. You just never know what’s going to happen when you’re in the middle of it all.

One of my regular theatergoing partners loves sharing a story about when she was at the Lyceum in 2007 seeing Christopher Plummer and Brian Dennehy in Inherit the Wind. She was among the audience members sitting on the stage, as if the jury at the court proceedings. After making an impassioned speech, Dennehy, as prosecuting attorney Matthew Brady, turned to the “jury” and, with his back to the rest of the audience, put his thumbs in his ears, waved his fingers, and stuck out his tongue at them.

Thus, the breaking of the fourth wall is up to the production itself, not the audience. In July 2015, I was watching Douglas Carter Beane’s Shows for Days when stage diva Patti LuPone, playing a stage diva, walked offstage in a triumphant moment and appeared to low-five a woman in the audience. The next day it was revealed that LuPone had actually snatched the lady’s cellphone, which the audience member had been actively using, contrary to all instructions. If there’s one thing you don’t want to do in a theater, it’s anger Ms. LuPone, who has also chastised audience members for talking, taking pictures, and not wearing masks.

In Alex Edelman’s one-man Just for Us at SoHo Playhouse, early on a man got up and started walking out. “Bathroom or political issue?” Edelman asked, straying from the narrative flow. “Bathroom,” the man answered. When the man came back, Edelman inquired how things went. Once the man started giving too many details, Edelman humorously told him to sit down and shut up, that it was not his show.

At a December 2022 performance of Death of a Salesman, an unruly woman in a fur coat started screaming and approached the stage; Wendell Pierce, who portrays Willy Loman, stopped the show and tried to defuse the situation. The cops had to come to take her away before the play resumed.

In “Breaking the Fourth Wall,” Dr. Elizabeth Quinlan and professor Wendy Duggleby discuss how participatory theater relates to caregiving. At one point they refer to Brazilian dramatist and activist Augusto Boal, writing, “Boal was inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s political use of theatre, in which the fourth wall is broken to awaken critical consciousness. As such the research method of participatory theatre is an intervention as well as it seeks to awaken the critical consciousness. The fourth wall is the imaginary wall at the front that divides the audience from the stage. Brecht’s epic theatre broke the fourth wall by disrupting the narrative flow, often by song, to make political comments and draw attention to the theatre-making process itself. With the fourth wall broken, audiences can take a critical, analytical stance towards the action on the stage rather than being entertained as an unseen spectator of the fiction of the performance. Boal’s innovation was to break the fourth wall more directly by insisting that the spectator become active. As ‘spect-actors,’ audience members engage in the activities of scriptwriting, directing, and acting. Participation does not require theatrical training or experience, but rather ‘insider’ knowledge of the everyday actualities of the particular social problem under investigation.”

Which brings me back to sitting onstage and using bathrooms. At Alexander Zeldin’s powerful and moving Love at Park Avenue Armory, there are dozens of audience chairs scattered across Natasha Jenkins’s set, an all-too-realistic dingy shelter for unhoused people. The design and bright lighting imply that anyone can end up in such a domicile, at any time and for any reason.

The set features several small apartments, a kitchen, and, at stage right, a bathroom. A few minutes before the show began, I watched as a young man got up out of his $99 stage seat and went into the bathroom, closing the door behind him.

It took a moment, but two staff members eventually walked over and knocked on the door. There initially was no answer, but the man finally came out, and the staffers told him that this was part of the set; if he needed to use the facilities, they were downstairs, but there probably wasn’t enough time for him to go. Unashamedly, he returned to his seat.

“I don’t need somebody to hold my hand while I go pee-pee!” a character says at the beginning of Time Enough for Love. Apparently some theatergoers do.

After the play, a must-see, harrowing drama, I made my way to the onstage bathroom to look inside. It was a horror show, filthy and disgusting, strewn with garbage and slime. Throughout Love, the characters battle over access to it, the only place they have to relieve themselves and wash up.

One of the staffers who had told the audience member to evacuate came over to me, ostensibly to make sure I wasn’t going to try to use it.

“This is not a functional bathroom, right?” I asked. “No running water?”

“Nope,” he said.

“Then what was that guy doing in it before the show?”

“I have no idea,” he replied. “But it happens in every city the play travels to.”

So, what was it that Brecht said about intelligent audiences?