The trouble with trigger warnings: True drama is an emotional ambush

I opened a production of King Lear last night. Everybody in the audience knew how the play ends. They wept anyway.

The play's eye-gouging scene is very famous; I include a spoiler warning in the marketing for those who don't. Everybody last night knew it was coming -- and some people still looked away.

The last time I did this play, audience members sometimes vomited at the scene, even though they all knew it wasn't real. I deliberately dialed it back a bit, because I don't want to distract from the real horror of that moment.

This play is 400 years old. Nobody was ambushed. It is still incredibly effective drama.

Nor is that restricted to 400 year old plays. We watch remakes all the time. Nobody needed to be "ambushed" by the live-action Lion King to experience drama.

Surprise is one way to bring about drama, but it is by no means required. If the trigger warning really costs you all of the drama of your production, then you chose a single, shallow way to tell your story.

As Roger Ebert said, a movie is not about what it is about, but how it is about it. The audiences comes with the story -- if they're thinking about your trigger warnings while watching it, it's because you're not engaging them. The trigger warnings are there so that some people can say "Nope, not for me", and I am glad that they can find other entertainment for the evening. That frees me up to tell the story the way I want to tell it.