Share on X Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Written by Samantha Sasaki May 18, 2024 Samantha Sasaki attended the play CHOICE at McCarter on May 18th, 2024. She is a PhD candidate in musicology at Princeton. Her research interests include Hong Kong protest music, Scottish folk song, and contemporary musical theater. This essay is part of The Scholar's Take Series. When is a theater performance over? Is it when the final line is spoken? Or when the actors take their final bow? Or when the audience stops talking about and thinking about the show? Winnie Holzman’s Choice makes a convincing case for the latter.Holzman’s play centers on journalist Zipporah (Zippy) Zunder as she writes an article on a high-profile member of a cultish group, Children Lost and Found (CLAF), an organization which believes that aborted fetuses have been reincarnated, meaning that would-be mothers could find their “lost” children. Zippy is forced to reckon with the choices she made that shaped her current life, bringing her into conflict with those closest to her, including her lifelong friend Erica. It’s a provocative piece, and I wasn’t the only one compelled by the complex politics and emotions of the play. As a regular theatergoer, I’ve got a good sense of when the audience doesn’t fully embrace the show; the laughs come a beat too late, and the silences are full of rustling from restless spectators. The audience at Choice were the complete opposite. In fact, this may have been one of the most engaged audiences I’ve been a part of, with people speculating on what a “play of possibilities” could mean as they entered and eagerly dissecting the performance as they left.The role of the theatre audience is one that has long been contested. Theatrical conventions in the United States have traditionally discouraged the audience from speaking during the performance so as not to disrupt the performers or disturb their fellow audience members. Reactions like laughing, clapping, or gasping are permitted, but only when the performance dictates it; laughing during a somber scene might draw a glare or two. But this does not mean that the audience passively watches the show. Jacques Rancière argues that spectators are active participants even though they are not the ones performing. He calls for theatre to embrace a new understanding of “spectators who are active interpreters, who render their own translation, who appropriate the story for themselves, and who ultimately make their own story out of it.” (Rancière, Jacques. “The Emancipated Spectator.” Artforum, March 2007, pp. 275-287.) Theatre is not a simple transmission of ideas from a playwright to a director to actors to audience. The audience plays a crucial role in telling the story, as their interpretations, connections, and questions about the play directly impact how its themes are understood and how its ideas live on.Choice’s understanding of the personal and active nature of the audience clearly resonates with this vision of spectatorship. Not only does the show respect this active nature of the audience but it also encourages us to become creatively and personally engaged with the show we are watching. As I made my way to my seat, I was greeted by a large poster in the front orchestra lobby asking patrons to “Tell us about a choice that made your current life possible.” The purple poster was already covered with yellow sticky notes, and I saw people carefully writing out their answers both before and after the show. While the significance of the phrase was only made clear after watching the show, the production clearly aimed to engage the audience in conversation from the minute they entered the theater – and it worked! By bringing together the audience’s personal experiences into a public exploration of choice, the production encouraged us to view the show not as a nameless mass, but as us.This engagement only grows as the play begins. While Choice originally premiered in 2015 at Huntington Theatre Company, Holzman has updated the play to place her characters and the audience in the midst of upheavals ushered in by four years of Trump’s presidency, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the overturning of Roe v Wade. With less than four years between the beginning of the play and the day I saw the performance, the play seems to invite the audience to draw comparisons between life today and in 2020, when the play is set. It is not unusual for a show set in a specific time period to hint at parallels to the present day; the recently opened Suffs on Broadway is one such example. However, Choice’s idiosyncratic and detailed depiction of life during this incredibly turbulent time makes the comparisons almost instinctual. Even though many of the specific references to the pandemic (such as the hours-long wait for a drive-through testing site that Erica bemoans) are largely things of the past, their casual inclusion instantly reminds us that COVID-19 has shaped, and will continue to shape, our lives. Furthermore, when Zippy reads on her phone that Ruth Bader Ginsberg has died, I realized I still remember exactly where I was and how I felt when I saw the news. By anchoring Choice in the very near past, the audience is not only encouraged to engage with the prescient material but to connect their personal experiences during this time to what the characters are going through.Perhaps the most important moment of active spectatorship occurs near the end of the play. The climax of Choice centers on a fierce debate between Zippy and Erica, two lifelong friends hurtling towards a breakup, over the article Zippy is writing on CLAF. At the heart of the issue is the potential political ramifications of Zippy engaging with the ideology of the group instead of outright debunking it. Zippy maintains that she never regretted her abortion and that it was “the birth of my life as I know it” – and at the same time, she feels she needs to acknowledge that something happened to her. Erica pushes back, arguing that the stakes are too high and that if she continues to “perpetuate” CLAF’s ideology, legal access to abortion “can go away. In a heartbeat.” No one wins the debate; the magazine pulls the article and Erica and Zippy reconcile while acknowledging their friendship is irrevocably changed. But in refusing to give us an easy answer to the political question at the heart of the show, Holzman opens space for us to continue wondering about the relationship between politics, art, and intent. I’ve certainly been thinking over and talking about these implications since I’ve seen the show and I imagine others have too.In the play’s program, Winnie Holzman talks about the process of creating Choice, revealing that her initial inspiration was not the abortion debate, but instead her own reaction to watching John Patrick Stanley’s 2004 play Doubt. She tells Julie Felise Dubliner, Director of Artistic Initiatives at McCarter, that “Walking back to my hotel, I realized that I wanted to write a play that leaves people wanting to have a conversation.” I didn’t get a chance to fully read through the program until I had already returned home, and I was struck by the fact that the audience’s experience had been an integral part of production since the very beginning. Choice is a show that encourages us to reject the passivity often attributed to audiences and engage intellectually and emotionally with the complex politics and ideas in the piece. When the spectators are treated as active participants, the show does not end at the final curtain. AsChoice illustrates, the performance lives on in the audience.The Scholar’s Take is a series of essays by Princeton students in response to experiences at McCarter. It is part of Arts & Ideas which connects University scholarship and campus life to the work on our stage. 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