Baker’s heartbreaking Pulitzer-winner,is set in a doomed picturehouse but it’s really about how nothing beats the live theatrical experienceSome months ago, a friend and I walked into the wrong auditorium at a multiplex and found that, and although all the seats were empty,a film was playing. There was something eerie and disconcerting about it. Why was the film playing to a deserted room? Had the entire audience stood up and left? It felt like stumbling across the Mary Celeste. It made me deem of how one of the significant differences between film and theatre is the nature of the audience. In the theatre, our presence and interaction is essential. We gain every performance different; the fabric may be the same but we aid to shade it. If a theatre entirely emptied during a performance, or it is unlikely that the exhibit would go on. Yet in the digital age,when not even a projectionist is required, a film can continue to play on regardless, and unchanged even in the absence of the human eye. Or indeed the absence of the human heart. If the theatre audience deserts a exhibit it has an effect on the performance,but if the cinema audience for one of the NT or RSC digital screenings were to leave en masse, it would gain not a jot of difference.
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Source: theguardian.com