Cabin Pressure (1999-2000)

Conceived and Directed by: Anne Bogart
Created and Performed by: SITI Company
Soundscape: Darron L. West
Scenic Design: Neil Patel
Lighting Design: Mimi Jordan Sherin
Costume Design: James Schuette
Properties Design: Jason Szalla
Company Stage Manager: Megan Wanlass

Directors Note

Cabin Pressure is a play I developed with the SITI Company in order to investigate the audience/actor relationship in the theater. The production opened to great enthusiasm at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Kentucky in March,1999.

As a director in the theater, I am acutely aware of the tension, the exquisite pressure, or the lack thereof, between audience members and actors on the stage. The quality of the dynamics between actor and audience constitute a relationship. Sometimes the relationship functions and at times, it does not. Cabin Pressure is an investigation of this potentially rich and creative relationship.

What is an audience? What is the creative role of the audience? What is the responsibility of the audience to the actor? What is an actor? What is the actor's responsibility to the audience? These are some of the questions that I posed to the SITI Company actors in rehearsal for Cabin Pressure . I wanted us to start with no preconceived notions or assumptions about the answers to these questions, but rather to experiment freely and play with possible variations on the theme. The result of these explorations is a production that speaks directly to the people in the room sharing it.

The spoken text and dialogue selected for Cabin Pressure is sampled from the writings of great dreamers of the theater such as Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Artaud, Brook, as well as selections from my interviews with fifty seven theater-goers and fragments from existing plays that suggest variations on the actor/audience theme.

I hope that Cabin Pressure will serve as a happy reminder about the potential humanity of the audience/actor relationship in the theater. In a time when computers, television, film and mega malls dominate and mediate our relationship with others, perhaps the theater is a place to strengthen and heighten our direct connection with each other.

-Anne Bogart