Over the last twenty years, museums, zoos and aquaria have been developing live theatre programs to present performances to their visitors. In general, these performances are presented by professional actors, the scripts are written by playwrights, and the staging is done with a director. The content of these performances is generated from the institutional mission of the home museum, zoo or aquarium, and is usually educational. This genre of performance is called museum theatre. While the practice of museum theatre has proliferated, fewer attempts have been made to research its effects. Positive response has been documented from visitors who have seen such performances, but only a few studies have gone beyond this to understand the underlying nature of that response.
This study explored the nature of spectator response to museum theatre performances. Several different museum theatre performances were used in two museum sites in order to gather responses from museum visitors of all ages who became spectators. Through pre- and post-show surveys, observations, focus group interviews, and follow-up interviews 3-5 months later, spectator responses were analyzed using transactional theory as a lens to reveal what participants selected for attention and how they constructed meaning from their museum theatre experience.
The sample of visitors who participated in this study represented a wide range of ages. This was evident in the variety of experiences they brought to their meaning-making of the performances, which inspired a plethora of different interpretations of the performances. Participants in this study were typically able to recall details of the performances they saw three to five months later.
A primary idea that emerged in the data that showed aesthetic response to museum theatre was the centrality of empathy. The human dimension, the interaction between spectator and actor, was found to be of central importance in engaging spectators to museum theatre.
One of the strengths of this study was in the variety of instruments used, which allowed participants to construct and clarify their responses in varying ways and at different intervals. The data consistently painted a detailed picture of the museum theatre event as a site of activation for participants' affective and cognitive processing, which led to strong recall, comprehension and learning.