Why content advisories matter for live performance

Arts Spotlight

Editor’s note: In this occasional feature, our arts and culture writers take a deeper look at the local arts scene, shining a spotlight on issues and trends, both local and national, and the art makers in our community.

Do you know anyone who has no opinion about trigger warnings? 

For whatever reason, these little phrases cause big emotions, both positive and negative. 

Content advisories, also known as content warnings (and yes, the more volatile “trigger warning”) have become fairly common in live performance — that little info box in a program or sign in a lobby telling audiences what potentially difficult subject matter may be ahead of them: 

“Content Advisories: Strong profanity, sexual references, and prop firearm on stage.”

“Content Advisories: Substance abuse, self-harm, suicidal ideation, death.”

Even as some criticize advisories as being overly sensitive or simply unnecessary, some theater artists and mental health experts say they make a difference for audience members with mental health needs — akin to production warnings for things like strobe lights, which can trigger seizures for some, or stage fog, which can affect those with asthma. Love them or loathe them, these content advisories are likely here to stay, in some form. Given that, here’s how some local theaters are thinking about integrating these advisories without coddling audiences or inhibiting artistic interpretation.

Content warnings have existed, in some form, for decades. After the 1968 dissolution of the restrictive Hays Code, which dictated what content could appear in American films, the Motion Picture Association replaced it with the (admittedly opaque) ratings system still in use today. 

Advisories created specifically to address issues of trauma, rather than potentially objectionable content, came much later. “Trigger warnings,” which are widely believed to have begun in online spaces for survivors of sexual assault in the 1990s, grew in usage until they made national news in the 2010s as conflict brewed over their use on college campuses.

Slowly, over the last 10 years or so, these warnings have made their way to live performance, joining alerts about stage fog and strobe lights. In many theaters now, advisories about onstage violence, sexual content, gunshots and more are de rigueur. 

When created thoughtfully, said Daryn Nelsen-Soza, a licensed social worker and senior manager at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, content advisories can really help those who need them while still allowing adults to grapple with the difficult ideas theater can present.

Now that we, as a culture, better understand trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, said Nelsen-Soza, we can better understand the physical and emotional responses to trauma that content advisories help prevent. 

If someone unexpectedly encounters a depiction of a traumatic event, “it may send them right back to the response they had at that moment they got hurt,” Nelsen-Soza said. She thinks particularly of veterans, who may have a trauma response to explosive noises, and of survivors of sexual assault seeing sexual acts depicted onstage. That kind of emotional dysregulation, she said, can come with physical responses like tears or a fight, flight or freeze response, flooding the body with hormones like adrenaline. “If we don’t know that’s the potential, we can’t do anything to protect ourselves before it happens.” 

“I don’t want to coddle people,” she said. “But at the same time it’s only fair that we empower people to be able to make decisions around what they watch, what they hear and what they see.”

For Teresa Thuman, co-artistic director of Sound Theatre Company, content advisories are inextricably linked with broader issues of disability justice, anti-racism and consent in the theater. 

“It’s really about recognizing that people are experiencing things that are not your lived experience,” she said. “You can’t judge whether someone’s having a valid experience or not, and you have to stay humble to people who may be experiencing things that are not what you’re experiencing. You can’t just say ‘What’s wrong with them?’ because nothing’s wrong with them — they’re just being human.”

One common complaint about advisories is that they can ruin a show’s surprise, or even dictate interpretation of an onstage event. No spoilers, and all that. 

To avoid the risk of overexplaining a piece of art before it’s been experienced, some theaters are now moving toward a more “opt-in” model for advisories in hopes of reaching the people who need the information without providing spoilers to the general audience. 

Sound, Thuman said, has had three levels of advisory: the first is a very general warning, and those who want more information can click through to a more detailed description of what happens onstage, and then there’s an option to see the script. “You decide how much spoiler you want,” Thuman said. 

Come on, you may say, isn’t good theater supposed to make people uncomfortable?  

Sure — sometimes. Theater is too diverse an art form to have any universal requirements, other than telling a good story and telling it well. 

But advisories are, at their core, not about comfort; they’re about compassion, and ensuring people can actually engage with a show’s material rather than be overwhelmed by it.

For its 2024 musical “Spring Awakening,” the storyline of which includes abortion and suicide, The 5th Avenue Theatre included in the program a primer on somatic breathing, a stress-reduction technique that can help regulate emotions. 

The 5th patrons, said Amberlee Joers, the theater’s director of education and engagement, expressed gratitude for the information and for elements like the grounding exercises. “Providing audience members resources they may need serves an end goal of creating as rich a cultural experience as possible,” she said. 

Spoilers aside, relying on shock and awe to be provocative doesn’t always fly anymore. “In some ways it was kind of an easy choice as an artist,” Thuman said. “If you want to shock people, do something shocking. But now you have to better know why you’re doing that; it can’t be just a random choice.” 

As our cultural understanding of trauma evolves, theaters are also evolving and, in some cases, scaling back as they better learn what audiences really need to feel supported.

Seattle Rep, for example, has created detailed advisories and lists of audience resources in past seasons, but now uses a more streamlined approach.

“We realized that it was beyond the scope of our expertise to attempt to anticipate the full range of potential audience responses and curate recommended resources for supporting each one,” Dámaso Rodríguez, Rep artistic director, said in an email. “Theatergoers are the ones best positioned to know and respond to their own needs.” For the company’s most recent show, “Mother Russia,” it created a factual, chronological sensory guide to the play, available to prospective audience members on the company website. 

Even Disney announced last month that it would dramatically pare down the content warnings shown before classic films like “Dumbo” and “Peter Pan,” leaving alerts about dated, racist content to those who click through to a film’s description. 

Simplifying things can have the added benefit of feeling more sincere, less showy. Don’t want a warning? Don’t read it, and allow those who do to carry on in peace. Reducing the stigma of seeking help can further one goal we can likely all agree is a good thing: getting more people into the theater. 

And simplicity isn’t the only way to achieve that, as long as the sincerity remains. Dacha Theatre made its first detailed scene-by-scene sensory impact guide for “The Master and Margarita,” in April 2024. For its improvised, immersive show “The Pomegranate Tree,” which didn’t align with a chronological guide, it created a broader guide of “things that can happen during the show,” because it couldn’t know precisely what its fellow actors would do or say or when, said Orianna O’Neill, Dacha’s director of audience services. 

These advisories are a lot of work, she said, but it’s important to remember that the people who need accessibility accommodations are not the problem to be overcome — it’s the show’s job to be accessible. 

“Honestly, many of our audience members ignore or walk right past the detailed guides, which doesn’t bother me at all,” said O’Neill. “I’d so much rather do this extra work to bring the show closer to a small but important group of people.”