Audience as Its Own Society

SITI Company's "Radio Macbeth" alighted over the weekend at Columbia University's Miller Theatre, where Anne Bogart and Darron L. West's program note segued from discussing the production to issuing something of a challenge to the audience -- or, perhaps, explaining the bargain the audience had already entered into:

The theater is ultimately also about community. In the heat of the shared theatrical experience, an audience becomes its own society. You are here with a roomful of other people. Can you handle that? We are a community of people dealing with one another and challenging each other. The theater is about social systems and how individuals in communities function in concert. Can the planet be shared or does it just belong to me?