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This pacification was accomplished by the complete fourth wall separation of actors and audiences engendered through new drama forms, electric stage lighting, and the cinematic model of placing the audience (literally and figuratively) in the dark. Other historical audience studies of interest that posit the same phenomenon—the pacification and alienation of contemporary mainstream theatre audiences in comparison to those of the past—are Blackadder’s (2003) book Performing Opposition: Modern Theater and the Scandalized Audience, and Fisher’s (2003) essay “Audience Participation in the Eighteenth-Century London Theatre.”
Blackadder (2003) creates a compelling study of the negative reception of a number of significant modern dramas by their audiences. He is fascinated by plays that so provoked their audiences that they responded in ways that had been largely left behind in the historical past. Blackadder calls the negative response of audiences to such plays as Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry, J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, and a number of plays by Brecht, “counter-performances” (p. xi), where the audience, or part of it, performs its opposition to the play as it is performed. The timeframe of his study is from the 1880s to the 1930s, “a key transitional phase in the evolution of normative audience response in the theater” (p. xiii). Blackadder goes on,
Like Blackadder, Butsch (2000) also states that this change was facilitated by the rise of naturalism in playwriting and acting styles, electric stage lighting and, later, the cinema. It is the exceptions to this new code of passive audience behavior that interest Blackadder, in the wake of the “fundamental transformation of the norms of audience behavior in the western theater [that] took place between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries” (Blackadder, 2003, p. xv). As Blackadder comments,