projections on the back wall of rioting, almost certainly the rising against Ceauşescu. As I said the producer was not Romanian, and again I suspect this was in dubious taste. Many present would have lived though those events, for whom they may well have been of virtually cosmic significance.
I agree, the ice here is perilously thin. I can see where the idea is coming from, of course. The whole principle of the "Stanislavsky" School of acting (which is properly called "The School Of Suffering", although this correct translation is rarely used outside Russia - I suspect because of potential misunderstandings that it's about misery or pain?) is that you "relive" some moment of anguish in your own life (even if it was about an unimportant matter - "the day you fell off the slide in the playground", etc) and project the
physical manifestation of that moment ("thinking about it" won't do, that's not acting - it must be visible) into your portrayal. (I've mentioned before, some singers would say that you can't do this fully... if you really found utmost grief from somewhere in your past, it would probably stop you singing correctly... it certainly ought to have that effect!)
ANYHOW, the idea of keying into an audience's own emotions and recent past is reaching for the same idea, but you have to be super-confident about these things to make them work to the result you intend. Too often they are either laughably awful, or produce an unpleasant maudlin sentimentality which usually results in anger directed towards, errr, the producer
It also assumes that people have "dealt" with these issues - but many people haven't, and they've put them in a box in their heads and tried to forget about them... interfering with that box usually provokes a highly negative reaction akin to rifling through someone's stuff in their house without their permission.
Achim Freyer tried this stunt in his MAGIC FLUTE in Moscow... he tried to turn the antagonism between the Queen Of The Night and Sarastro into a Communism/Capitalism allegory, and scenery decorated with Hammers & Sickles. This was, of course, a phenomenal mistake - there are still many, many Communists of deep moral convication in Russia, and the offence served up to them was intense. Freyer's contract to stage TRAVIATA in the Bolshoi was immediately cancelled as a result - not because he'd offended the Communists, but because his production was ill-conceived dross.
You also risk "triggering" things in the minds of people which you have no business or right to mess with. I saw a very nasty incident during a production of AIDA which tried to make clodhopping parallels with the Chechen War. A woman who had clearly lost her own son in the conflict attacked the theatre staff and the show had to be halted
I've fallen into this trap once myself, but during rehearsals rather than performance... we were doing an emotionally difficult work (Ullmann's THE EMPEROR OF ATLANTIS - written in KZL Theresienstadt where the composer was a prisoner, and dealing with mass extermination), and I forgot to allow for one of my cast having been in the cast of NORD-OST, the show which was hijacked... he was there until the end of the siege. I won't make that mistake again.
On the other hand, it can work. Dmitry Bertmann moved the ending of Prokofiev's STORY OF A REAL MAN into the present day, with the WW2 legless "Air Ace" Morozov dying forgotten in a State Nursing Home. For the opening three performances (done on the 60th Anniversary of the end of WW2) they gave tickets free to anyone who'd served during the war, so there were lots of vets in the audience. I really thought there was going to be trouble at the end, and as the final curtain came down one of the vets stood up and walked to the front of the auditorium to make a speech - his hands were shaking with rage, he was clearly furious. "This opera is about OUR LIVES... this is the way the country we fought for treats us now. THANK YOU for showing it - I hope politicians see this!". So it can work - but it is very edgy stuff.
