The Naked Audience

Thirteen hundred and fifty one people entered the building to see the show.  A play it was.  A team of three had written the scenes and lines to be acted, another team had prepared the stage and wardrobe, and one with superior insight was directing the whole ensemble.  It really was a remarkable event to see.  And, yet it was a tragic demonstration of absentee living.

The audience had dressed in special clothes - as much costumed as the cast.  They had arrived amidst the safety of acceptable lines, socially acceptable conversations, as they moved on queue to their seats to take up their next role as characters who give attention in the larger scene.  The whole theater, and the streets surrounding it were now the stage and everyone who bought tickets were the true actors, hidden in their duplicity by both mask and feigning.  Safe within their world of fragile boundary, they watch and wonder because it is the role of their evening, the time of their queue. 

The paid actors on stage were the more honest.  "Here we are – acting!  Here we are made up to be someone else as surely you can see it is not the real us," they seem to be saying needlessly.  But, the husband who smiles demurely to his wife while thinking of his infidelity; the old woman who smiles and nods her approval while feeling all power slipping from her life with each withdrawal from the bank and each visit to the doctor’s office; and the young couple who hold hands in the midst of a months old dance of show and assumption while never really heading toward the same future; are all acting with such deftly delivered surrogacy that all who know them best know no truth of them at all. 

But, tonight is a different evolution of art, and as we watch from the chandelier, the myth and mirth of the stage actors becomes airborne and highly contagious.  The vein of truth - having been mined by the playwrights with words of skilled and earnest selection - erupts within the ears and minds of the ticket holders, causing the audience to gradually – and then rapidly – become infected with the idea of honest expression. 

While it seems to happen as a surge through the crowd, it is in truth happening one by one as each person wrestles and then acquiesces to the movement within themselves – completely unfounded upon any popular notion.  As each one sees and wants to express what it is they have to say, they find a deeper and more accurate form to convey it than the ineptness and inadequacy of language.  With flits of the hand as if on a musical instrument; with utterances from their throats as if sick, singing, or primal; with the seepage of tears from ducts, sweat from glands, and spit from urgent lips; these people are finding new voices to speak their pain, fear, and glee. 

Finally, at the end of the evening, one-by-one (though it seems as if in groups) they depart and disperse from the gathering, meandering back into the world that requires their masks, their costumes, and their given lines.  They take with them, soon to be tucked away from their countenance, the knowing of what it means to be free.  They have been bolstered of hope, becoming almost daring (if only in a fantasy dream of a Utopian tomorrow); bolstered and encouraged, subtly enthused and  now more wanting of a life where truth and honesty are allowed, nay… revered, and true freedom of self is the attire that dresses the masses – naked in their human joy. Yet, it is not to be. Sadly they button their overcoats and begin to forget with each step that which will be gone by morning.