one time i went to see a performance of much ado about nothin by a small indie company somewhere in rural france. as we waited in line at the door, the fire alarm rang out.
(it was about the third false alarm i'd personally had that month - i was still in high school and they happened a lot, and you also regularly heard them walking around any city, with a bunch of disgruntled people muttering on the sidewalk waiting to go back to their job. PLUS on the previous play i'd gone to see, they'd had an electrical problem and the lights had gone out. the actors had bravely kept on playing, but eventually the stage manager had appeared on stage and said "i'm sorry... we can't bring the lights back on, we have to stop the play".)
so anyway. the fire alarm went off right as we were about to go into the theater. the entire crowd went 'uggghhh' and stood hoping it'd stop, but no such luck: one of the actors appeared, smiling in that obviously stressed out way when you hope everything will be fine, and said that by law we had to evacuate the building and they hoped the problem would be fixed asap so we could start the play.
so we poured out. it was a beautiful, warm night in the south of france, and there were like benches and low walls and stuff so that at least anybody who needed to sit down could sit down. and we waited. the fire alarm stopped. general relief! and then it started again. general groan.
people in the crowd were starting to get mad. one lady, who looked very right-wing, started loudly saying stuff like 'this is what we get these days with local government funding, no need to ask whose fault THAT is' (we had a left-wing president at the time). people side-eyed her, said nothing, but as she kept making those comments one man went 'listen, ma'am, can you please stop' and they started debating at the top of their voices.
then a homeless guy arrived and, seeing us all gathered here, whipped out his guitar and started busking for money. some people groaned, others appreciated the distraction from the political debate. until he started asking us what we were all doing here and, hearing the debate, directly addressed the two people fighting, putting in his two cents.
at this point some of us were starting to realize what was actually going on, but most of the crowd still had no idea.
but no one was getting too nervous because the various arguments stayed pretty mild- just exciting enough to be super engaging. eventually the actor from before reappeared, told the debating people to calm down, nervously confirmed we still couldn't go back inside, and offered to do a monologue from romeo & juliet while we waited. the homeless guy loudly approved, the two debating people looked awkward. he launched into his monologue, with one fellow actress as juliet, but they kinda botched it and a third actor arrived, berating them for not learning their lines AND not understanding the true meaning of the text. then, since it looked like we wouldn't get to go back into the theater (by then it had been over an hour anyway) they started awkwardly telling us what their version of much ado would have been like, and it sounded hilariously terrible (a wwi version with bombs raining on the characters the whole time...?)
the right-wing lady from earlier eventually loudly scoffed and said this was a disaster and SHE could do better, SHE had studied shakespeare in school, thank you very much. she did a few lines from another play (lear, i think?) and it wasn't half bad, the actors clapped. everyone was kinda pleased she'd stopped her shit. then the homeless guy did it too, a much longer monologue, and that's when even people very slow on the uptake realized (the crowd had been murmuring between themselves for a while already) that this was the play.
the pointless debates, the awkward busking, the actors doing bits of other plays and then arguing about it, this was 'much ado about nothing', stripped of everything but its title.
now that the cat was out of the bag, the actors (including the right-wing lady, the left-wing guy and the homeless guy) did an actual scene from much ado, the end scene where they dance and sing. and then they bowed and it was over! but they were still like, standing in the middle of the audience, and over these two hours we had gotten really familiar with them all, since a lot of non-actor people had interjected and tried to get in the middle of the debate and either frowned at the busking guy or encouraged him, etc etc. the usual barrier between actors and audience had been obliterated! so everytone started asking questions, and they happily stuck around for the spontaneous round of interviewing, which we got to understood was how this 'play' usually concluded.
"what if the fake political debate got TOO heated?" was asked by many people. they said there were other hidden actors in the crowd who could divert into other directions if it got out of hand, not just the busking man. "what if it rained so that we couldn't all just stand around outside for two hours?" then the play would have been for real cancelled, and they would have explained to the crowd inside the theater what they were supposed to be doing. the right-wing lady got a lot of compliments for being particularly convincing, and also a lot of awed comments regarding what a stressful, even actually dangerous role it is- going into a crowd and starting shit on purpose. "what about the people who left, thinking the play was actually ruined?" yeah, they lost part of their audience every night, but usually the promise of a juicy debate just as the wait got a little long got most of the crowd to stick around until the rest of it started happening.
it was really good. the illusion obviously had to break sometime, but they kept it going for an impressively long while, and to this day i still remember it as the most ambitious spin on live theater i've ever had the pleasure to witness.
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