The Institute of Contemporary Art’s (ICA) latest exhibition, “The World as a Stage,” opens with a most fitting visual prologue. Towering over viewers upon their entrance, Rita McBride’s “Arena” transforms the gallery into a theater for the modern art below. Inside the curve of the delicately skeletal set of amphitheater seating, museum patrons interacting with art displace ordinary theater performance on the imagined stage. Taken at face value, “Arena” is a piece of art that makes the life around it into theater. However, the artistic possibilities it foreshadows are undermined by the disparate and fragmentary ways that “The World as a Stage,” which will be on display from Feb. 1 through April 27, offers towards understanding its uniting concept.

The introductory text reads, “‘The World as a Stage’ acknowledges how life and art are experienced in our spectacle-soaked era of reality TV and celebrity worship, in which both ordinary citizens and the famous share center stage.” In lieu of an artist, a movement, or a time period as the orienting category for the exhibition, the unifying theme becomes central for understanding the rationale behind the selection of works. But while the title, introduction, and “Arena” suggest that the exhibition will focus on the gallery as a stage for the art and its patrons, the rest of the works cast the central ideas into confusion.

After “Arena,” the emphasis is no longer on the gallery definitively recast as theater. The “Hunchback Kit” is a novel idea: a do-it-yourself kit for staging “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame”—which actually lacks the do-it-yourself. While about half of the other works in the exhibition are somewhat participatory, the viewer cannot actually use the kit. Without enabling participation, the piece only suggests that the viewer might act as Quasimodo. Considered in the terms of this piece, the art gallery is not a stage, and the viewers are not actors. Instead, the gallery became a museum of theater, firmly keeping viewers separate from the spectacle.

Consequently, while “The World as a Stage” offers different ways of imagining what constitutes a “stage” and its “actors,” it contains one central contradiction. The divide between art and life might seem headed toward oblivion, but the “world” is not yet completely exchangeable with “the art gallery.” “Hunchback Kit” is problematic for the exhibition at large, because “Arena” re-imagines the gallery as a theater, setting up a conceptual promise that “Hunchback Kit” ignores.

The most fruitful way for the viewer to approach the exhibition is thus from the concept of “theatricality.” According to Jessica Morgan, curator of contemporary Art at the Tate Modern, which curated the exhibition, “theatricality” is perhaps more appropriate than “theatre” as the central concept. “Theatre” comes with connotations of conscious, exaggerated, and embellished acting and staging, while “theatricality” extends to encompass “the process of presentation, performance, and participation,” which more accurately describes the multiplicity of ideas within the exhibition.

The pieces explore theatricality through participatory spectacle, through absurdity (as in Cezary Bodzianowski’s “Luna,” in which the artist attempts to rollerblade the circumference of a large, rotating drum), immersion (as in “Séance de Shadow II (bleu)” by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, a room saturated with the color blue whose lights turn on as the viewer passes by), or direct participation (as in “Falha” by Renata Lucas, a grid of plywood sheets that can be rearranged to create a temporary stage, or another structure).

One of the most thematically successful pieces is Mario Ybarra Jr.’s “Sweeney Tate,” a room containing a re-creation of a barbershop. Teeth are framed on the wall outside, with barbershop chairs and daschund statues lined up neatly inside. The room hints at antiquity, and yet everything inside is new and sterile. As a whole, the piece prompted consideration about the function of a museum, and what it “does” to art.

While the brightly colored room might be a warm and enveloping experience as a barbershop on a street corner, in a museum it takes on a slightly cold and eccentric feel. Something about it—and not just the painted sign that said “Sweeney Tate”—feels slightly sinister. Perhaps that’s why viewers stand at the door, unsure if they ought to sit in the barber’s chairs and wait for a phantom haircut to arrive. This participatory art actually casts the museum as an alternate, more theater-like world, moving away from the question “what is reality?” to focus on questioning the experience at hand. Ultimately, this work allows the viewer to explore the questions of “theatricality” that “Arena” posed at the start.

­­—Staff writer Elsa S. Kim can be reached at elsakim@fa.harvard.edu.