Playing the Audience
When the story goes somewhere other than your place, and your character doesn’t appear in the current scene, you still have a role to play, as the audience. Even when you play your place or character, you’ll still have a little bit of this role to play, though you should put the others ahead of it. The audience shares the same agenda and principles, but they have different tools for pursuing them, because they have no one in the story at the moment who can say or do things directly. Instead, they can ask questions and invoke ritual phrases. When you play the audience, remember your agenda and principles and use those tools to advance them.
As the audience, you really have an opportunity to focus on asking questions and building on the answers, and those questions can establish new elements in the story. If you ask, “How did you lose your footing?” you’ve already established that the character lost hens footing, and hen gets to tell us how it happened, and then what hen does about it.
While those playing the place or the characters focus on those roles, you as the audience should try to support them by paying attention to which ritual phrases should follow from what happens. Ask questions and introduce difficulty and danger in keeping with your agenda and principles.