One person’s withheld approval can outweigh a standing ovation. An essay on narcissism, recognition, and what happens to success when it has to answer someone who isn’t listening.
By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator
Imagine a director named Colin on the opening night of the production that will make his reputation. The house is full, and when the lights come up on the final tableau, most of the audience rises. He has watched every preview from the back of the orchestra, and now he watches from there, letting the sound wash over him for a moment before his eyes go where they have been all evening: to the aisle seat in row K that he reserved for his former stage manager. Priya ran his first three productions, sat at his elbow through every rehearsal, and saw the night in tech week when he blamed a lighting failure on an actor who had nothing to do with it. Two years ago she left theatre for a scheduling job at a hospital. He sent her the ticket with a warm note. The seat is empty. The house applauds, and what Colin carries out of the theatre, into the party, the reviews, and the weeks that follow, is the shape of that one empty chair.
The two earlier essays in this series, Still Taking Bows and The Stage with No Wings, considered how victory can become an identity requiring continuous confirmation, and how the disappearance of any reliable offstage leaves the performer of winning unable to set the effort down. This essay turns to the audience itself, particularly to the one member whose response the performer most wants and cannot secure. Colin’s evening raises the question plainly. He has extensive public approval, and it’s genuine. Yet it fails to compensate for a recognition withheld, or merely not offered, by a single person who was elsewhere that night. Why one witness should outweigh a full house is the problem I want to examine. The figures in this essay are not offered as diagnoses. The research I draw on treats narcissism as a trait people possess in varying degrees, and the dynamics this essay describes grow stronger, and harder to set down, as those traits become more pronounced.
Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) treats performance as a cooperative accomplishment, something the audience helps to make rather than simply receives. Three of his concepts matter here. The first is what Goffman called a working consensus. Whenever people meet, they arrive, usually without discussing it, at a shared definition of what is going on: this is a job interview, this is a dinner among friends, this is an evening celebrating the director’s work. Each participant agrees, at least provisionally, to act within that definition. Audiences contribute significantly to the agreement. They exercise tact, overlook small failures, and help the performer through moments when the impression falters, because a collapsed performance embarrasses everyone in the room.
The second concept is audience segregation, the practice by which a performer ensures that the people who witness one version of him are not the same people who witnessed a contradictory one. The surgeon who is gentle with patients and imperious with nurses relies on the two audiences rarely comparing notes; if a patient overheard how he spoke in the corridor, the bedside manner would begin to look like an act. The third concerns people who know too much. Goffman observed that some people hold what he called destructive information, knowledge of backstage conduct that would discredit a performance if it reached the front-of-house audience. A waiter who has seen how the kitchen treats a dropped steak holds that kind of knowledge about the elegant service in the dining room.
Priya is the person in whom all three concepts meet. She belongs both to the audience of Colin’s work and to the backstage of his working life, which makes her the place where his audience segregation has failed, and she holds destructive information about the night in tech week. These concepts help explain why her response would weigh more with Colin than a stranger’s. They do not determine what her response would mean. The opening-night audience responds to the production: the staging, the acting, the evening they just spent. Their applause says something about the work and very little about the man who directed it, and nothing at all about how he treated an actor during tech week.
Priya’s applause, had she been there to give it, would have carried the same limited meaning. She might have admired the production while keeping her memory of that night exactly as it was. Colin, however, reasons differently, and his reasoning is worth following one step at a time. The strangers in the house applaud an artist they know only from the stage, and if they knew what Priya knows, he suspects, some of them might applaud less. Priya does know. Her applause would therefore seem to him to carry a special message: that someone who had seen the worst of him in rehearsal still found the work worth standing for, and by extension that the man of tech week has been outgrown by the artist the house is cheering. In this way Colin wants a judgment of his work to absolve him of his conduct. The empty seat leaves that wish unanswered, and the wish, more than the seat, is what follows him out of the theatre.
A theatre artist knows the limits of what a performer can control. A director shapes nearly every condition of reception: the timing of a light cue, the length of a pause, the angle at which an actor turns toward the house, the music that plays as people find their seats. These choices can make applause likely, even overwhelming. They cannot make it obligatory, and they cannot determine what any single spectator thinks on the drive home. Every performance rests on this asymmetry, and most performers accept it without much thought, because the house as a whole tends to respond and individual judgment disappears into the collective sound. The difficulty begins when a performer needs a particular interpretation from a particular person as confirmation that the performance has succeeded. At that point, success has shifted from the room to a single mind. In practice, this means that the evening’s outcome is no longer decided by what happened in the theatre. A production can play beautifully to a full house and still fail by the director’s private measure, because the one response that counts was never given. The performer has given that single mind an authority it never requested.
The distinction between Priya and other unconvinced spectators clarifies why. A critic for a regional paper panned Colin’s previous production, calling it handsome and hollow, and he was irritated for a day. The critic had never seen a rehearsal, never watched him under pressure, never sat beside him at two in the morning. Her judgment, however harsh, came from outside the rehearsal room and could be set aside as an outsider’s opinion. Priya’s reserve, even unspoken, comes from inside. Firsthand knowledge gives a witness’s response a different weight, because it can be checked against events. A critic who calls a production hollow describes what she saw on stage, and another critic may see it differently. Priya, if she said anything, would be speaking about what she watched Colin do, and he fears that the events themselves would bear her out. A stranger’s disapproval can be attributed to taste, while disapproval from someone who was there threatens to function as testimony.
A second imagined example adds another dimension. Graham, a finance executive in his fifties, lost his father last spring after a long illness. In the first months of that illness, it was Graham who pushed for a second opinion, found a specialist two states away, and arranged the change in treatment that likely gave their father most of the year he had left. Graham paid for the home aides, the hospital bed, and the modifications to the bathroom, and he spent many nights on the phone with doctors and insurers, frightened in a way he did not show his family. His younger brother Tom, who teaches band at a public high school two hours from their father’s house, drove up nearly every weekend and handled much of the daily care: the bathing, the medications, the long afternoons when the aides did not come. Both sons mattered to the outcome, in different registers. At the funeral, Graham gave the eulogy, and afterward people told him it was the finest they had heard. He spoke about the specialists, the decisions, and the fight for more time, and he spoke less about the weekends. Tom sat in the second pew. After the service, while relatives embraced Graham, Tom shook his hand and said it was a good speech. He said nothing else. Graham has replayed that handshake many times since.
Tom carries a weight Priya doesn’t, because he once admired him. As a boy, he sat in the bleachers at every one of Graham’s games and kept his brother’s newspaper clippings in a shoebox. Sam Vaknin’s account of narcissistic supply in Malignant Self-Love (1999) is useful here, though it rests on clinical observation and self-description rather than controlled research. Vaknin uses the term narcissistic supply for the attention, admiration, and recognition on which a narcissistic person relies to sustain an inflated sense of self, much as a body relies on food. He distinguishes two kinds.
Primary supply comes from the wider world: the notice of audiences and strangers. Secondary supply comes from people closer at hand, and Vaknin associates it especially with those who were present for what he calls the narcissist’s past successes. Their value lies in memory. A brother who sat in the bleachers can bring up the championship game at Thanksgiving twenty years later, and in doing so he hands back a little of the admiration the crowd gave that night. When present admiration runs short, people like this can supply it from the past. For most of Graham’s life, Tom has been that kind of witness, and as long as Tom admired him, the boy who won those games was still, in a sense, being cheered. Tom’s reticence therefore threatens more than the present. To Graham, the brief handshake feels like a revision of forty years, as though the boy in the bleachers had quietly put away the shoebox. Whether Tom meant anything like that is a separate matter.
Psychological research offers partial support for the idea that one person’s judgment can carry this kind of weight, though it does not test the idea directly. In a well-known experiment, Brad Bushman and Roy Baumeister (1998) had participants receive either an insult or praise from another person, then gave them a chance to retaliate, either against that person or against someone uninvolved. Participants high in narcissism who had been insulted retaliated strongly, and they aimed it at the person who had insulted them; they showed little interest in taking it out on a bystander. The study captured a reaction in the moment, so it cannot tell us how long such feelings last. What it does suggest is that, for people high in narcissism, a blow to the self-image is felt as coming from someone in particular, and the response travels back toward that someone.
Other research helps explain why that someone might stay on the mind. Mitja Back and his colleagues (2013) identify a form of narcissism they call rivalry, in which people protect their sense of superiority by putting others down. Stathis Grapsas and his colleagues (2020) describe people high in narcissism as continually tracking where they stand compared with specific others. Taken together, these findings make a pattern plausible: if a threat is felt as coming from a particular person, and if standing is measured against particular people, then the person whose judgment poses the threat may remain a fixed point of comparison long afterward. That is close to what happens when Colin measures each new success against Priya’s imagined response, or when Graham weighs a room full of praise against one handshake. The research stops short of the larger claim this essay makes, that a single witness can become the one audience whose verdict matters for years. That claim is my interpretation, which the research makes reasonable but has not tested.
Ordinary people care about the judgments of those who know them, and that care runs through the performance of winning without being reducible to it. Mark Leary and his colleagues (1995) proposed that self-esteem functions partly as a sociometer, an internal gauge that monitors how much a person is valued and included by others and that responds with distress to signs of exclusion. Graham’s pain at Tom’s reticence is in this sense entirely ordinary; he has just buried his father, and he wants his brother. Carolyn Morf and Frederick Rhodewalt (2001) describe something more specific in narcissism: a self-construction that depends on others as means for sustaining an inflated self-image, combined with strategies that tend to erode the very relationships it requires. In practice, the two motives often travel together. Graham can want reconciliation and vindication at the same time, and for months both are present in him. The difference lies in the authority he gradually assigns to one particular response and in what he comes to require that response to accomplish. A brother’s warmth would ease the first wish. Only a brother’s agreement can satisfy the second, and as the second grows, warmth without agreement begins to feel to Graham like no warmth at all.
The actual witness should be kept distinct from the witness the performer imagines. Priya did not attend the opening because her daughter had a piano recital that evening at a church across town, and she had said yes to the recital months before Colin’s ticket arrived. She meant to write him a note and forgot in the ordinary crush of the week. She remembers the tech-week incident, but she also remembers the night he stayed until four to rebuild a scene for a struggling actor, and her feelings about him are mixed, distant, and seldom on her mind. The Priya in Colin’s imagination is different. She deliberately chose the empty seat; she knows about his reviews, is unmoved by them, and quietly keeps her own account. What looks to Colin like an ongoing exchange, his successes on one side and her pointed silence on the other, happens almost entirely in his interpretation. The relationship can persist indefinitely because it requires nothing from her.
Silence is especially susceptible to this kind of occupation. A witness who declines to applaud may disagree openly or hold a different understanding without wanting to argue. She may also have stopped engaging with a chapter of her life that has ended. These differ in meaning, and from the outside they often look identical. Tom’s “good speech” might express restrained disapproval, or the exhaustion of a son at the end of a long year, or a grief that had no room for commentary, or an honest judgment that the speech was good. Silence leaves another person’s interpretation unknown, and an unknown interpretation is the condition in which the imagined witness flourishes, since the performer is free to supply whatever response his anxiety predicts. Graham hears reproach in the handshake. The handshake contains only what Tom put into it, which Graham cannot know.
The performer has several ways of trying to resolve the difficulty, and they tend to reinforce one another. The first is to present further accomplishments as answers to the old judgment. Colin’s production transfers to a larger theatre in another city, and he finds himself imagining the program in Priya’s hands, her eyes on his biography. Each success is composed, at least in part, for a reader who has not asked to receive it. The second is to recruit other people’s approval as evidence that the witness must be mistaken. Graham mentions to cousins, to old family friends, and to his own adult children how hard he fought for their grandfather, and he listens for agreement, which he usually receives, since people offer agreement easily at such moments. Each assent feels like a vote in a case whose single dissenting juror has never acknowledged that a trial is underway.
The third strategy is more complicated. People question a witness’s credibility for many reasons, some of them fair: memories differ, and a colleague’s judgment can be distorted by her own grievances. In Colin’s case, the revealing pattern lies in what accompanies the questioning. On a Tuesday he tells his new assistant that his former stage manager was talented but disorganized and never quite suited to professional theatre. On Wednesday he checks whether Priya has viewed the announcement of the transfer, and when she has, he spends part of the afternoon wondering what she made of it. The dismissal lowers her standing in the account he gives others, while the checking shows that her attention retains a value the dismissal denies. Graham’s version is quieter. He begins describing Tom to his wife as someone who always resented his success, and in the same week asks their aunt, lightly, whether Tom has said anything about the scholarship Graham endowed in their father’s name. The two gestures pull in opposite directions, and the effort of holding them together is part of what keeps the witness at the center of the performance.
Graham does try, eventually, to speak to his brother directly. Months after the funeral he sits down to write Tom a letter. In the first draft he describes what the year was like for him: the fear he felt on the phone with doctors, his guilt at living far away, his sense that money and arrangements were the help he knew how to give. He writes that Tom carried the daily weight and that he has not said thank you properly. He also writes that the eulogy was his best attempt to honor what they had done together, and that he would be glad to know Tom thought it fair. The draft wants something, as most letters between brothers do, and it leaves Tom free to answer however he likes. Then Graham reads it again and begins revising. He adds a paragraph listing the specialists and the costs. He cuts the thank-you. Near the end, he writes that he does not see how they can spend Thanksgiving together while Tom “still believes the eulogy was dishonest,” and that he will wait to hear that Tom understands what really happened before he makes the drive. He also declines, in a postscript, Tom’s earlier invitation to his students’ spring concert.
Nothing in Tom’s handshake said the eulogy was dishonest; that word is Graham’s. The second letter turns acknowledgment into a condition of continued relationship, and it makes clear that the only acceptable acknowledgment is one in which Tom’s own memory of the weekends no longer stands beside Graham’s account of the fight.
The witness, for his part, remains a person with an independent perspective, which includes the possibility of being wrong. Tom may underestimate how much the specialist changed the course of that year. Priya’s memory of tech week may be harsher than the event deserved. Refusing applause establishes nothing about a witness’s moral standing or accuracy, and the dependence this essay describes would be just as complete if the witness were mistaken, since the performer needs the verdict regardless of whether the person withholding it has the facts right.
The consequences for achievement are considerable. Once a particular person’s judgment becomes the thing that must be overcome, that person acquires authority over the meaning of everything the performer subsequently does. Colin’s transfer, a genuine artistic success, registers as one more exhibit submitted to a reader who may never open the file. The scholarship Graham endowed will help a student every year for decades, and its first recipient, a trumpet player from a rural school, wrote him a letter of real gratitude, which he skimmed while wondering whether Tom had heard about the ceremony. The achievements are real, and their beneficiaries are real, yet their value has been made to wait on a response from someone who may not know he is being asked. Approval that is given can be received, enjoyed, and eventually absorbed into the ordinary background of a life; once the performer has it, he gradually stops needing it. Approval that is withheld cannot be absorbed in this way. It stays open, like a debt that has not been paid, and every new success arrives as another occasion on which it might finally be settled. In this sense the witness who won’t applaud can govern the performer’s life more thoroughly than any admirer, because admirers give their approval and move on, while withheld approval remains permanently outstanding.
Actors learn early that they cannot play to a single seat. A young performer who discovers that a teacher or a rival is in the house will sometimes aim the whole evening toward that person, sharpening a line here and holding a look there, and the performance thins. Directors warn against it because the work then exists for an audience of one, and the rest of the house, which came in good faith, receives a performance that was never really offered to them. The discipline that replaces it involves playing to the house that is actually present and accepting that reception belongs to the audience. Each spectator, including the one whose judgment the performer would most like to change, leaves with an understanding the performer did not author.
That acceptance is harder than it sounds, because it asks the performer to live alongside an account of himself that he cannot revise. On the night of the transfer’s opening, Colin might stand at the back of a larger house and find his eyes moving across faces rather than toward a single seat. The applause would be the same applause, and it would mean what it had always meant: that these people, tonight, were moved by the work. The audience in the first theatre was never a consolation for Priya’s absence. It was the audience the production was made for, and it had been there all along. Graham might reread the trumpet player’s letter and let it be what it is, a young man’s thanks for help in becoming a musician, addressed to the person who gave that help. The fight for his father’s extra months would remain his to have fought, real whether or not anyone certified it. Tom would go on remembering the weekends as he remembers them, and Priya would go on half-remembering a director she once worked for, and each history would continue to hold more than one account. One spring evening, Graham might even take a seat in a high school auditorium while his brother’s students played, in the place a younger boy once occupied for him, listening to Tom’s work without needing it to say anything about his own.
The Performance of Winning series:
- Still Taking Bows: Narcissism and the Performance of Winning
- The Stage with No Wings: Narcissism, Social Media, and the Performance of Winning
- The Witness Who Won’t Applaud (this essay)
Further Reading
Back, M. D., Küfner, A. C. P., Dufner, M., Gerlach, T. M., Rauthmann, J. F., & Denissen, J. J. A. (2013). Narcissistic admiration and rivalry: Disentangling the bright and dark sides of narcissism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105(6), 1013–1037. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034431
Bushman, B. J., & Baumeister, R. F. (1998). Threatened egotism, narcissism, self-esteem, and direct and displaced aggression: Does self-love or self-hate lead to violence? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(1), 219–229. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.1.219
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday Anchor.
Grapsas, S., Brummelman, E., Back, M. D., & Denissen, J. J. A. (2020). The “why” and “how” of narcissism: A process model of narcissistic status pursuit. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(1), 150–172. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619873350
Leary, M. R., Tambor, E. S., Terdal, S. K., & Downs, D. L. (1995). Self-esteem as an interpersonal monitor: The sociometer hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68(3), 518–530. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.68.3.518
Morf, C. C., & Rhodewalt, F. (2001). Unraveling the paradoxes of narcissism: A dynamic self-regulatory processing model. Psychological Inquiry, 12(4), 177–196. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1204_1
Vaknin, S. (1999). Malignant self-love: Narcissism revisited. Narcissus Publications. (Subsequent revised editions.)
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