Were You Listening?

“A play presents a self-enclosed little world for the audience to examine.  It’s an opportunity to look objectively at a group of people, to assess them, to react to them, and to measure oneself against them, to ask “Am I like that?”  Every playwright tries to present on stage–in the world he creates–something like an aspect of his own view of the real world, the world outside the play, and I find the real world to be disturbingly complicated and hard to figure out.”   –Wallace Shawn

So.  Perhaps you have been mulling over “Aunt Dan & Lemon” on your commute home from the Chopin.  Perhaps you are angry.  Perhaps you are exhilarated.  Perhaps you are confused.  Perhaps you are ambivalent.  All of these responses have deep merit.  In fact, any response at all, whether positive or negative that you may have had to this deceptive, unnerving little play speaks to what this play is ultimately about.

You.

I find Aunt Dan and Lemon to be a fascinating, infuriating play which at various times appears to be about the subversive power of influence and ideology, about the devastating impact of politics on a family, of our country’s voyeuristic fascination with violence and sex and force.  But ultimately Aunt Dan and Lemon is a play about its audience.  It is about what happens inside the imaginations, the hearts, the emotional cores and the political consciousness of the audience.  The play asks its audience to listen carefully and deeply and to make sense of the play’s lingering questions for themselves.

To me, this is a unique and increasingly latent power of the theatre.  To intimately engage the audience with mystery and nuance; to take them by surprise; to treat them as intelligent, discerning individuals; to present an audience with big questions and send them back into the world with something to consider.  Something to work on.

Some audience members may have a hard time believing that a playwright could create a character such as Lemon, and ask her to say the things she says for as long as she says them and with as much intellectual clarity as she does, without in turn believing that the playwright is espousing his own political viewpoints, and attempting to foist them upon us.  But this particular play is less an examination of a specific political stance, and more an examination of the ways that dangerous ideas are communicated through families, communities and through the mass media.  By continuously asking “are you listening?” this play asks its audience to do an enormous amount of work, and truthfully, contemporary American audiences are no longer acquainted to that kind of experience.  The proliferation of instant mass media, including 24 hour cable channels and radio talk shows and internet blogs have led to our society becoming accustomed to others doing our listening for us, and telling us how to feel before we’ve had a chance to sort it out for ourselves.  Everything is filtered through something or someone else.  The great brilliance in this strange play is that there is no filter.  Lemon addresses us, the audience, directly.  There is no summarizing headline, no excerpt, no analysis, no counter-commentary, no rebuttal.  Lemon seduces us, she charms us and then she talks to us.  For a very, very long time.  And there is nothing, no one to instruct us how to feel about the things she says.  We must work that out for ourselves.

So, a play that challenges its audience to listen, to experience and to evaluate needs a followup discussion.  We at BackStage Theatre Company would love to engage you in a conversation about your experience of this particular story.  Please use the comment section below to begin the conversation.  We eagerly look forward to talking to you.

After you have shared your own personal thoughts about Lemon & her story, I recommend heading over to this page, where playwright Wallace Shawn shares what he calls “A Justification On Putting The Audience Through a Difficult Evening.”  Like this play and his new book of Essays, this is fascinating reading.

We’re glad you came.  Let’s talk.