Forum Theater Performances Get Audience Out of Their Seats

Article by Kathleen Pequeño

“It was beautiful. It was awful. It was… heavy”
--Audience member evaluation from “What Would You Do?”

Scores of community members got to jump on stage and join the action at three performances of “What Would You Do?” in Northeast Portland this fall. “What Would You Do?” is a 15-minute play about a family experiencing domestic violence and racial profiling. By the end of the play, the audience is noticeably upset and frustrated. On a second run-through of the play, audience members have the option of shouting, “Stop!” and inserting themselves into any scene as one of the existing characters. Then they try to prevent the violence in the scenes from escalating. People’s actions and the results of their interventions were surprising.

“We were overwhelmed at times with the intensity and creativity of people’s interventions,” said Terrie Quinteros, program director of Crime Survivors for Community Safety and the author of the play. “Some people would start talking about what should happen onstage before they even got out of their chair.” The three performances drew over 125 people from across Portland, including high school and college students, community activists, seniors, Christians, Muslims, Jews, people in recovery, survivors of domestic violence, men, women, people of different races and ethnicities, and many other people with one thing in common: an interest in ending violence in their communities through non-violent intervention.

This style of theater, Forum Theater, is often called a “rehearsal for life” because it gives audience members the chance to try interventions in situations where there’s not a lot of room for error in real life. Audience members take the place of an existing character who they think can change the outcome of the scene, and the remaining actors stay “in character” and respond. After a few minutes, the cast and audience members stop and talk about the intervention, and how it changed the situation before moving onto the next scene or next intervention.

In the opening scene, Maria and Paul are a married couple who get into an argument that erupts into extreme violence directed at Maria and their teenage daughter, Gabriela. Neighbors in the next apartment overhear the fight and disagree about whether or not they should do something, then opt to do nothing. In one intervention, an audience member took the place of a neighbor, and went over to Maria and Paul’s apartment to borrow a cup of sugar, to interrupt the argument before it could escalate. Paul answered the door and let the neighbor in, and after saying hi to Maria, she left. It stopped the violence in the moment, but afterwards, the actor playing Paul revealed that the intervention had left him even angrier at Maria, and as soon as the neighbor left, he was prepared to blame her for making so much noise that it brought the neighbors over. For him, it became a reason to escalate the violence.

“You really see how different it is to try something and get realistic feedback about whether it will work,” related Jeannie LaFrance, the director of the play and director of Act for Action, an organization that produces Forum Theater on a regular basis. “One audience member came up to take the place of a neighbor, and he was saying to Maria, ‘why are you putting up with this?’ Maria and her daughter were really pulling back, so he changed what he was doing. Afterwards as we talked with the audience, he said ‘I thought I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t. As soon as things came out of my mouth, I knew they were the wrong thing to say.’ Now he’ll be able to do a better job as an advocate in real life.” This was one of the goals of the play: to help people identify ways that they and other people in their community could become better at responding to violence and crime.

Some of the most emotional interventions were done by women who sat down with Maria and talked about their personal experiences of domestic violence—how they kept hoping the violence would decrease or stop, but it didn’t. Maria would then open up, talking about the barriers she was facing with trying to end the violence in her life, and they would start making plans together, with the audience members offering more assistance to Maria. One audience member wrote in a post-performance evaluation, “Powerful, brought tears to my eyes. Audience participation was magnificent.”

Between 50 and 60 people attempted interventions in every scene of the play, including scenes among family members who suspect the abuse, conversations at a church where the family’s pastor ignores obvious clues about the abuse, and a scene at a mall where Gabriela is harassed while shopping. The play was based on stories that we heard at community forums for crime survivors this spring. At the close of the performances, audience members continued their conversations with the actors and with each other about how to respond to violence. Some accessed the “safe people” who were available to audience members who wanted to talk about past or current domestic violence situations.

Many audience members filled out comment forms about what they had learned from the performance, and how they would respond to a similar situation in the future, and many of those echoed a similar theme to this evaluation: “If you are in a position where you even think it is possible, do something.”

Thanks to “What Would You Do?” we know better what that “something” can be.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2006/Winter 2007 Issue of Justice Matters.