Lyn Gardener over at the Guardian praises performances that involve real blood, real sweat, and real tears.

She quotes Tim Etchells (of Forced Entertainment, which brought their Bloody Mess to On the Boards a few years ago): "performers 'put their bodies on the line' so that we in the audience can be 'transformed, not audiences to a spectacle but witnesses to an event.'"

Gardener goes on:

More interesting in this context are genuine durational performances of six hours or more. As exhaustion takes over, performers can no longer rely on technique or the tricks that they have learned, but simply start "being". The audience, meanwhile, becomes fogged with tiredness, and begins to experience the piece through drooping eyelids and cramped legs. In these circumstances, exhaustion may not be the enemy of interesting performance, but its best ally for both the watched and their watchers.

Which put me in mind of the hornets' nest that blew up over my very, very infrequent habit of leaving a painful production during intermission. Some commenters suggested I leave because I got bored or have a short attention span. Not so. Boredom isn't the problem. Active awfulness is.

Like Gardener, I salute performers brave enough to use boredom—it's a very, very sharp instrument and can turn on you quickly and mercilessly. If used carefully and skilfully, boredom can tenderize the audience for greater shocks to come; it is dangerous only when it is the unintended by-product of weak imagination and weak performances.

Smart performers can be a little sadistic with their audiences—he world is full of cloying bullshit. If you can get an audience to trust you, to believe that you're in control, you can do anything you want to it.

Recent examples in Seattle (some more successful than others, but all experimenting with boredom and discomfort—and shows I wouldn't have left if they were eight hours long): Forced Entertainment, Dorky Park, GATZ, Implied Violence, and High Kindergarten Performance Group.

It's the desperate, I'll-entertain-you-or-die-trying schtick that drives audiences away. The worst actors aren't the boring ones—they're the overeager, manic, obnoxious ones.