Making the Audience Cry: Witnessing Violence and the Ethics of Compelled Empathy
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Abstract
Yael Farber’s 2013 play Nirbhaya was devised in response to the incident in December 2012, when a young woman was gang-raped on a bus in Delhi. Emotionally draining for both the performers and the audience, the show inevitably elicits strong, often tearful reactions. Correspondingly, the Belarus Free Theatre’s play Trash Cuisine (2012), exploring state violence and genocide, culminates in a scene that attempts to force tears from the audience by means of the aggressive use of an external provocation. However, can a reaction to the atrocities represented in these works be anything more than visceral? In order to be genuine, it should be deliberate – yet in some cases, the only acceptable reaction may have to be a forced response. In the context of emotional manipulation, witnessing, grief and excessive public mourning, the focus of this chapter is the ultimately ethical question of what it means to make the audience cry.