Yes, audience members talking during a performance is maddening. But during intermission, the chatter can be something else entirely. The collective sound of my fellow theatregoers—as experienced recently during the 15-minute break at Musical Theatre West’s opening-night performance of Monty Python’s Spamalot—was a thing of immersive beauty.  

The Carpenter Performing Arts Center is a fantastic venue, not only for its grand stage and amphitheater-style seating, but even for its inviting curve of a lobby. And at one special point you can ascend a stairway and get a bird’s-eye view of the whole thing. So, as an inveterate people-watcher, I nested myself up there for duration of the entr’acte.

But within a couple of minutes, it was not what I saw that overtook me, but what I heard. The aural phenomenon typically referred to as “the din of conversation” is familiar to all of us—that acoustical soup of human origin that feels almost tangible (as it should, considering that sound is the physical vibration of air).

Get yourself a proper distance from the individual contributors of such din, and you can become truly immersed, not distracted from the totality by individual patches of conversation that emerge when you’re too close. Let yourself float on that din, and it may do some strange and wonderful things to your head. For me, Saturday’s intermission was the nicest one I’ve ever experienced.

Why, I wondered, did this particular chatter strike me as so pleasant? Then I realized: the sound was of a group of fellow humans in uniformly good spirits—collective pleasure transmitted by the air itself.

There may, of course, have been pockets of conversation of some gravity, but the vast majority of verbal expression I heard was light and airy—its depth constrained by the awareness of its 15-minute time limit and its content influenced by being conducted within the perfect temperature and inviting décor of the Carpenter Center. This all occuring in the middle of a night out at the theater—events rarely attended by persons in foul moods—led to featured material that was nothing if not feel-good stuff.

I have never before been caught up in mass panic or suffering (a fire in a crowded nightclub or a battlefield of dying soldiers), but I can only imagine that even were I safe from the suffering, the sound of those souls would be gut-wrenching, heart-rending, perhaps capable of inducing physical illness. Beneath our conscious connections to each other lies an animal linkage where we—as social a species as our planet has seen—are influenced by the herd, our sophisticated linguistic tricks and semiotic conceptualizations allowing us to function in ways seemingly so removed from our feral instincts that at times we lose touch with them entirely.

So, next time you find yourself in the midst of a jovial crowd, remove yourself from the immediate vicinity of individuals, then float above it, still your mind and let the contentedly vibrating air wash over you and permeate your physical being. It’s a show in itself.