Think Tank Thursday

It's All In Your Head
"We wince when we are seeing someone in pain and become anxious when looking at a picture depicting a scene of horror, but we are responding to our own mental representations, not to the pain or the scene."
For our purposes the "we" is the audience.
When the audience is watching a piece of violence (or any part of a play for that matter) their minds are scouring memory banks for ways to relate and better understand what they are seeing.
The audience will never fully understand what the character is experiencing because, simply put, they are not the character. They can only understand how they have felt in a situation similar or an emotion similar.
If it sounds like brain melting double speak think about this: when a friend is in pain can you feel the pain they are feeling?
You may feel a similar pain in empathy but you can't feel their pain, only they can feel it. The action that caused the pain in the first place may not even affect you. Your empathy comes from an event you had similar that evokes the appropriate emotion to support your friend.
With that in mind, think about the time (because we have all had it) where you are trying to console or calm someone who is upset for a reason you don't understand. How much harder is this than the first situation?
This is what the audience experiences in a play. Audiences react more to things they understand. While this Is a common sense statement, the reason why lay with how they process that understanding.
This is the knowledge that makes reaching an audience more effective. It is yet another reason in the long list of reasons why specifics in theater are so vital.
For violence the intention has to be specific. Not everyone can relate to driving a knife into someone's heart. They can relate to having the desire to do so.
And that is the point of what we do. We want them to react to the story more than to the movement (although oohs and ahhs can be gratifying).
To get them  to react make the story clear. The audience has to understand to relate, relate to react, react to enjoy/learn, enjoy  and learn to come back and tell friends and make you that money!
Greg