Theatre can serve many ends. It can be designed to entertain, instruct, motivate, persuade, and even shock. But whatever the intentions of the director, performers, and crew, the result depends on the interaction with an audience. The audience for theatre differs from the reader of a novel or the viewer of a painting in that it assembles as a group at a given time and place to share in the performance with the actors and all the surrounding elements of light, sound, music, costumes, and scenery. The audience affects the performance by providing the performers with immediate feedback, such as laughter, tears, applause, or silence. Each night there is continuous interaction between the auditorium and the stage.
Ultimately, audiences make their opinions known through their attendance or nonattendance. They support what appeals to them and generally fail to support what they find distasteful, offensive, or incomprehensible.
The actor is the creative artist most identified by audiences with their experience of theatre. Actors portray their characters’ wants and needs through believable personal behavior that mirrors the characters’ psychological and emotional lives within the world of the play. British actor Sir Laurence Olivier once said that acting 'is an everlasting search for truth.' Acting begins with an individual's talent, imagination, discipline, the need to express, and the process of observation through the sensory organs—eyes, ears, skin, tongue, nose. Reduced to its simplest terms, the actor's goal is to tell the character's circumstances within the story of the play.