Characters are breaking the fourth wall to confront and galvanize audiences

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Characters stepping out of their plays to address an audience is hardly a new phenomenon.Playwrights have been breaking the fourth wall ever since that invisible barrier separating the actors from the audience was raised.Sophocles, of course, didn’t need Oedipus to chat directly with the audience.

He had a chorus to provide running commentary.Shakespeare, whose theatrical sensibility was informed as much by Renaissance and Classical poetry as by those pageant wagons boisterously bringing miracle plays directly into the lives of townsfolk, had no compunction about a character slipping out of the frame to help audience members arrange their imagination.

He even enlists Rosalind in ”As You Like It” and Prospero in “The Tempest” to bid their audiences farewell.The fourth wall, encoded in the architecture of the proscenium stage, fosters the illusion that audiences are eavesdropping on a cordoned off reality.As the modern theater embraced realism, plays were carefully designed not to wrench their auditors from their waking dream.

Maintaining a semblance of truth, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge pointed out in the context of poetry, was necessary to procure “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”“Willing” is a key word.Art invites complicity, and in the theater, audiences are in on the game.

As Samuel Johnson sagely points out in his “Preface to Shakespeare,” “The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses, and know from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players.”How could it be otherwise? As Johnson reminds us, “If we thought murders and treasons real, they would please no more.”In the Neoclassical era, playwrights were exhorted to observe the unities (of time and place, in particular) to facilitate an audience’s belief.But modern playwrigh...