Theater Talkback: Up Close, Feeling Very Personal Since the subject under discussion today is a particularly sensitive and frightening one for some of you, I would like to make a few things clear right away. In none of the incidents described below was I ever clutched, stroked, groped or otherwise physically assaulted. Nor was I dragged onto a stage and forced to engage in unseemly activities with professional exhibitionists. Yes, I am talking about (cue ominous organ chord, please) audience participation at the theater. But not in the way you have come to expect and quite possibly loathe. The productions I have in mind, both of which opened recently, do not single out theatergoers and place them under a spotlight. Yet watching them, I found it impossible to avoid the feeling that I - and everyone seated around me - was directly implicated in and possibly even responsible for what was happening onstage. The shows are Athol Fugard's three-character drama "My Children! My Africa!," at the Signature Center, and Mike Bartlett's four-person comedy with an unprintable four-letter title, at the Duke Theater. At first glance, these plays don't seem to have much in common, aside from their small casts of characters. "My Children" is about South Africa in the last years of apartheid; Mr. Bartlett's work, hitherto to be referred to as "Cockfight Play," is about an internecine romantic triangle. In other words, one is political and the other personal. Still, as most of us learn when we move toward that shifting and elusive state called adulthood, the political and the personal can never be unequivocally separated. Human beings don't conduct their lives in separate sealed compartments, try though they might. And what better art than the theater, by its nature a collective experience, to consider the overlap between what is individual and what is communal? In both "My Children," directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and "Cockfight Play," directed by James Macdonald, our awareness of that intersection is achieved subtly. Both productions are testaments to the theory that in seducing an audience by stealth, size definitely matters. So does shape. The Duke and the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theater are small spaces to begin with, and the ways in which their seats have been reconfigured make them feel even more intimate. For "Cockfight Play," which is designed by Miriam Buether, the Duke has been turned into a stark forum that brings to mind a luxury-free miniature of a Roman coliseum. Wooden benches rise in a circle around the naked stage, which itself brings to mind an arena for one-on-one combat. The association turns out to be most appropriate, since "Cockfight" portrays a battle for the body and soul of one indecisive young man, John (Cory Michael Smith). The combatants, as it happens, are of different sexes: the man is called simply M (Jason Butler Harner), John's existing romantic partner, and W (Amanda Quaid), with whom John has begun affair. The fourth character, F (Cotter Smith), is M's father, enlisted for moral support in a fraught dinner party scene. While sex plays a large part in "Cockfight," which also features the occasional minor act of violence, there is almost no physical contact among the actors. Sexual encounters are described as they're happening, quite vividly, but the cast members all keep their clothes on. This has the unexpected effect of drawing us more completely into the onstage encounters. Simulated sex, with nudity, is likely to create a self-contained reality from which we keep our distance (unless we're talking about an experimental troupe like the Living Theater, in the anything-goes 1960s). With "Cockfight," the eroticism is at once abstract and immediate, and we don't feel obligated to look away, or embarrassed if we don't. We remain part of the, uh, conversation. Did I mention that while this is happening the lights have never entirely gone down on the audience? So you can't really look at the actors without seeing the observers seated behind them. And their (and, oh yes, your) responses inevitably filter into the onstage discussion of the nature and fluidity of sexual identity. You're more aware than usual of when certain lines strike home with the audience, and you may find yourself wondering about the personal history of everyone watching the play. I couldn't help noticing that a man directly across from me in the third row was in tears at the end of "Cockfight." And I didn't look away from him any more than I had from the sex scenes. His response seemed to feed and layer the implicit debate in the script. The debate that begins "My Children! My Africa!" is explicit. Two high school students, a black boy and a white girl, are facing off in a formal, adjudicated argument about the role of women in South African society. The audience is seated in tiers around three-quarters of the stage. And the two students - Isabel (Allie Gallerani) and Thami (Stephen Tyrone Williams) - address their statements directly and successively to each part of the audience. A teacher known as Mr. M (James A. Williams) presides behind a desk, and reminds us, as if we were his students, to listen closely and to behave. Isabel, it emerges, is a visitor from a private school to the township institution where Thami is a star student and Mr. M a strict but beloved instructor. And though you'd think a mixed-race debate in a country under apartheid would be angry, this one is characterized by high spirits that feel only friendly. We understand when Mr. M later tells us how much hope this encounter has given him; we've been infected by the same optimistic energy. When that hopeful glow starts to fade, eclipsed by a murky confusion and rancor, we feel almost as betrayed by the change as Mr. M does. Mr. Fugard rings variations on the debate structure with which he begins the play, by letting each character talk to us in monologues. But these people aren't preaching with the conviction they brought to that classroom exercise. The reality they share is too complicated for unconditional beliefs. As we listen to them, we become aware, by degrees, of how confining the space we're in is. Neil Patel's set includes metal fencing and barbed wire that extends into and frames the seated area. South Africa is a prison for Mr. Fugard's characters, and we grow to share that sense of confinement. I should add that the actors in "Cockfight" and "My Children" are all excellent. If they weren't, the experience of the productions would be far less involving. But when performances are as on target as these, a small space allows us to enter more completely into a dramatist's reality, and to feel as if we're truly part of the play. Of course in a sense, we always are whenever we visit the theater. Like it or not, to be part of an audience is automatically to be a participant; it's in the unwritten but inescapable contract between us and any play. Intimate and intense productions like these remind us, in ways both exciting and discomfiting, of that beautiful cardinal truth of theatergoing. What are your experiences of intimacy in theatergoing? When you have most felt a part of the action onstage?