When you're watching a play, why the actors are also watching you

Some restaurant kitchens feature drawings of each table, with staffers constantly updating tables' happiness levels on a 1-10 scale. There aren't drawings at theaters but rest assured that actors monitor happiness levels.

"We talk about the audience constantly backstage. Constantly," said Sun Mee Chomet, appearing now in the Guthrie Theater's "Sally & Tom" and from Nov. 20-Dec. 23 in Jungle Theater's "Georgiana & Kitty."

Sometimes, it's gossip. But it might also be about adjustments to make for an audience that's inclined to clap longer than usual.

"We'll say, 'Did you hear that guy with the big laugh?' We're always talking, between scenes and at intermission, about the audience as an entity and the energy we're getting back from them," Chomet said.

The pact formed by audiences and theaters is often spoken of as sacred because the exchange only works when both are fully engaged. That's why actor/director Joseph Papke, who's also the founder of Classical Actors Ensemble — which opens "Othello" Oct. 28 at Elision Playhouse — has developed a rule about audience responses. He believes the maxim that "the customer is always right" holds true for theater.

"When rehearsing comedies, we think whatever we've come up with is great," said Papke. "But if it doesn't get laughs, the rule I go by is if you do it in front of an audience two times and it still doesn't get a laugh, cut it or change it. It's a losing battle, otherwise."

There's no right or wrong amount of applause but actors learn to gauge it so they're not drowned out by laughter or clapping.

"Applause is like a wave, or an arc," said Adán Varela, who was in Theater Latté Da's "Twelve Angry Men" this summer and currently understudies several roles in "Carmela Full of Wishes" at Children's Theatre Company. "A laugh, too. It'll go up and up, usually, and when it starts to go down, it's time to come in."

"Carmela" has a manure joke that Varela is confident will kill. But audience reactions are not always predictable. Reports from Broadway's current "Funny Girl" revival indicate Lea Michele fans are so excited that the company must adjust to standing ovations in the middle of songs.

"I don't know about [that] but I've certainly been in shows where the applause went on a lot longer than we expected. You try to stay in character as long as humanly possible until you can keep going," Varela said.

Because of the songs, musicals generally have more applause moments for actors to keep track of than plays do, but there are exceptions. The creative team of "Angry Men" wanted the musical's momentum to rise from start to finish. So they built in underscoring, transitions and unresolved songs as subliminal clues not to clap until the end. But audiences didn't always play along.

"There were certain times, especially after T. Mychael Rambo's song, that the audience really wanted to applaud, so we'd hold," said Varela. "Audiences really help you figure out where there might be laughs or reactions that surprise you. And then you know you need extreme focus so you don't get derailed."

Extreme focus was crucial at an early performance of "Sally & Tom." In it, an actor and playwright debate about cutting a monologue in a play-within-the-play. The actor argues that the speech is beautifully written and should stay, but the playwright asks, "Does it fit?"

To which a woman in the audience hollered, "Yes, it does!"

"We loved that," said Chomet, adding that response to the speech had been especially emotional, even in the rehearsal room. "As a BIPOC woman, we want to know our people are out there and in many environments — if it's an Asian American play with Asian American audiences, for instance — they're going to be raucous."

She had a similar experience in Ten Thousand Things' "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the former Dorothy Day Center in St. Paul.

"[Music director] Peter Vitale was drumming and I was doing this big dance and this man near me started laughing hysterically and cheering me on. 'You go, girl!' Never mind that I was playing [male] Oberon but you have to stay in the moment," Chomet said.

Stage actors, of course, develop an instinct for how to respond to audiences within the discipline of their craft.

"You have to use it. I started yelling back and Peter was going along with it," said Chomet. "One of the best things I ever learned in school was an exercise with two actors. After they did it, the teacher would ask what we thought and we'd say, 'It was amazing. They were rock stars,' and he'd say, 'But did you feel included?' He always said it's important to make audiences feel included, not to be admired."

There are, however, limits to inclusion. Papke still dislikes thinking about the 2019 "Much Ado About Nothing" when patrons were so unruly that he had to veer from Shakespeare's language to kick them out, all while staying in character as Benedick.

In that case, the customer was not always right.

"You don't want a drunk person having a little episode in your audience. That's disrespectful to the other people in the audience. That's what bothered me most. These other people paid money and you are ruining their experience," Papke said.

All three actors agree that theater requires maintaining the back-and-forth energy between the stage and seats.

"If the audience laughs at a new place one night, of course you leave space for that so they know it's a conversation happening over the next two hours," said Chomet. "It's a living and breathing thing that happens between hundreds and hundreds of people."