Willing Suspension of Disbelief

I went to see a play the other night. It was for an assignment so I went alone so that wouldn't have someone distracting me or influencing my reaction to the play. The play was "The Elephant Man", and incredible play. Definitely not a "feel-good" show though. It's very jarring and causes you to take a look at yourself and the world you're living in.

I discovered in seeing this play that it is possible to like something without enjoying it. Enjoying something implies that it was pleasurable or left you happier than you were before. That's not what this play did, but it did intrigue me and it's a brilliant play. My friend compared it to scary movies, no one "enjoys" them per se, but many people do like them. I am not one of those people but the comparison still stands.

Half way through the play the fire alarm went off. Everyone sat there for awhile. The actors, still trying to maintain "the illusion" and stay in character kept going through with their lines for a bit. No one knew what to do. We're trained to get sucked into the plays we see. We were all waiting for someone to tell us, "yes the illusion is dead, go back to the real world where the building you are currently in might be on fire" Just then someone came on the over head speakers and basically said just that. We still didn't believe that. We just sat there looking at each other, "are we supposed to leave" " I don't know" Until an usher came in and started herding us out.

Theater and film require something from their audience called "willing suspension of disbelief" meaning: of course you know there's no such thing as magic and no, people never randomly start singing about their feelings in real life but you don't need to think about reality anymore. You're in the theater where everything is possible and things don't need to be a perfectly crafted deception for you to believe in them momentarily.

Perhaps in having that willing suspension of disbelief in the theater we inversely had willing suspension of belief in reality. I wonder what contributes more to the enjoyment of theater, entering into an unbelievable and new world, or leaving behind reality. Do we love dreams or do we just hate reality? I like to believe the former because I'd rather be an optimist and reality has been pretty good to me lately.