Rethinking audience interaction in theater for the YouTube era

George Hunka had an excellent post up today on the staging of Beckett's television and fiction work to the stage at the Lincoln Center. Hunka rightly notes than in an era with as strong media saturation with distinctly non-theatrical media, integrating things like film and prose into theater is inevitable. This is especially true when that production happens to have a lot of money.

I commented that Beckett one-acts are perfectly suited for viral video. But that got me thinking about what happens to the theater and its audience if plays go to YouTube and the web. On the one hand, some of the core distinctions of the theatrical medium—an organic creation, live audience, using a theatrical space—get lost. At the same time, audience interaction in general does not get lost. It may actually even get bigger.

The web has created unprecedented possibilities for media access, whether or not the business side of the media world has caught up yet. YouTube has already been used as a promotional tool to get people to see shows. But what's stopping a taped, live, organic performance from streaming on the web? What if a free broadcast of a staged production gets orders of magnitude more viewers than a $50 per viewer live staging. What if a web broadcast gets audience comments that, in effect, serve the same purpose as audience feedback slips in the program?

These kind of innovations would no doubt be maddening to theater traditionalists, but they may be essential to moving theater into the Web 2.0 (soon to be 3.0) era. Audiences aren't going away, they're just going to nontradional places. Trying to redefine the theatrical audience is certainly a tricky proposition that could easily fail, but it's time someone at least had the guts to try.