From the stage, can actors see individual faces in the audience?

This follows from a condition common to stages everywhere. Stage lighting is set far brighter than the house. Standing in strong light and looking into a dark auditorium, one can make out the shapes of seated people and how full the room is, but reading individual expressions is hard. The eye is adapted to the brightness, so the dark side becomes difficult to see — a plainly physiological matter.

But not seeing and not sensing are different things. Kabuki actors are said to steer a performance while receiving the house's responses in detail. Whether laughter comes, whether a hush of held breath opens, at what temperature the applause arrives — all of this transmits clearly as sound and atmosphere. The quality of a house differs from day to day even in the same play, and the timing is said to shift in response.

What reaches the stage most surely of all is the ōmukō call. The short cry thrown at the locking of a mie or at an entrance arrives clearly enough to be built into the play's timing. And the hanamichi itself changes the distance altogether. It runs through the audience, so when an actor walks it the gap narrows to a matter of centimetres, and the lighting conditions differ from those on stage. On the hanamichi, one may take it that the faces are genuinely visible.