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What We Get Away With Onstage



It’s always amazing to me what we can get away with onstage.

The things we do to take a story and make it presentable for an audience are sometimes so out of the realm of the possible that it seems like it should make alarms go off in the head of anybody with a penchant for realism.

Turning out is the thing that drives me the craziest.

I get that we have to turn out in order to blah blah blah the audience, but every time I see an actor consciously turn out, all I can think about are soap operas where a teary-eyed young girl confesses something to her boyfriend by stepping three feet away from and turning to look off into the distance as if she’s smelling smoke from a distant fire.

Surely it has to look better to have people onstage actually talk to each other so that the audience feels like they’re eavesdropping rather than watching alien people from another planet who communicate by avoiding eye contact at all costs.

I mean, one would think, right?

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