fourth wall

fourth wall

The imaginary barrier separating performers in a TV show, film, or play from the audience. I hate those shows that break the fourth wall—I don't want to feel like the characters are having a conversation with me! Stay in character and don't break the fourth wall!
See also: fourth, wall
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.
See also:
  • break through
  • this side of the black stump
  • the wooden spoon
  • crash through
  • crash through (something)
  • brass ceiling
  • spill into
  • spill into (something or some place)
  • spill out into (something or some place)
  • spill over into (something or some place)
References in periodicals archive
In 2018 the fourth wall of separation seems to have disappeared.
More information about Fourth Wall Productions:http://www.fourthwall.productions/
For those who only dimly recall their high school English lessons, the fourth wall is the imaginary divide between the characters in a story and the audience.
Instead, he says, retailers need to treat the fourth wall as a department within the store, just as they would dairy, deli, meat or produce.
He's familiar with this and can cope with the fourth wall easily.
Like Burden and Piper, Lorraine O'Grady operates at the edges of performance art, "defining its tense and bitter borders." Breaking the fourth wall rids us of all sense of fiction.
On the fourth wall, a cloudy white screen of fibreglass acrylic is a backdrop for an information desk.
Such a play finally premiered last spring - but in The Fourth Wall, Gurney didn't move away from drawing-room comedy so much as he rushed at it and tore it limb from limb.
The film was produced by regional Emmy[R] nominated filmmakers Kelly Rundle and Tammy Rundle of Fourth Wall Films, and Garry McGee of McMarr, Ltd.
And intimate scenes can be tougher to enact without the protection of the fourth wall. Still, the added rigor, they say, helps them improve their dancing in ways a more careful approach might not.
Performers lip-synched to the words of front man Casey Spooner, who levels any remains of the fourth wall with his feigned unpreparedness, like wondering aloud which song is next.
Bettendorf, IA, September 26, 2012 --(PR.com)-- Forest Grove School Preservation, together with Fourth Wall Films, will present a special benefit screening of the Emmy[R] nominated documentary "Country School: One Room - One Nation" on Saturday, September 29, 2012 at 6:30 p.m.
By contrast, the Robbins work is an inward-looking encounter for two dancers, both lost at times in narcissistic reverie while looking at their reflected image in an imaginary mirror--which is the fourth wall, where the audience is.
The IPTV-PBS broadcast premiere of "Lost Nation: The Ioway," the award-winning documentary by Kelly and Tammy Rundle of Fourth Wall Films, will launch the historic tribute.
Verisimilitude may be a plausible goal in the kinds of plays that Shaw and Ibsen and Chekhov taught us to esteem--plays in which we are meant to believe that real people just like us are having real conversations just like ours in real rooms that we can peep into, thanks to an open fourth wall. But verisimilitude is surely an absurd goal in a form in which an Oklahoma cowboy declaims in song about the weather and an aging Yonkers widow enters a restaurant serenaded by the waiters.