Are you talkin’ to me?

A few minutes into the musical “The Drowsy Chaperone,” the character known as Man in Chair confides to the audience, “I didn’t pay $100 to have the fourth wall come crashing down around my ears.”

From that point on, that’s exactly what happens.

In fact, up and down Broadway, actors are breaking out in seemingly uncontrollable fits of self-awareness, addressing the audience directly or acknowledging their own artifice in what is known as “breaking the fourth wall.”

That breach of the proscenium arch can be accomplished in two ways: when actors step out of character to acknowledge that they are really actors performing for the audience, and when the characters themselves refer to the artifice of the theater.

This is not a new phenomenon; it started with the Greek chorus acting as annotators to the action on stage. From the asides of Restoration dramatists to vaudevillians commenting to audiences in sketches to Eugene O’Neill’s “inner monologues” in “Strange Interlude,” the audience has always had some sort of direct interaction with the dramatic proceedings.

Craig Jacobs, a production stage manager who has worked on Broadway for more than 30 years with such shows as “Phantom of the Opera” and revivals of “Gypsy” and “Grease,” notes that in musicals, interaction has always been present, if not always so direct. “When you had Ethel Merman and company perform ‘Anything Goes,’ they acknowledged applause from the audience in encores and so broke the fourth wall in that way. Cole Porter would often write a series of encores just in case the audiences demanded additional choruses before the show could continue,” he says. “Until the 1960s, book musicals were locked into what took place behind the proscenium, but directors like George Abbott and Bob Fosse broke the mold in shows like ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum’ and ‘Chicago.’ In ‘A Chorus Line,’ the auditioners, in essence, gave their monologues to the audience, but ostensibly were speaking to the stage manager who was out in the house.”

It’s not just musicals that sometimes eliminate the invisible wall. Many of today’s Broadway plays also have characters acknowledging the audience. In “Well,” playwright Lisa Kron portrays the character of Lisa Kron. Interacting with Lisa Kron, the character, is actress Jayne Houdyshell, who plays Lisa Kron’s mother. At the end of the play, which closes today, Houdyshell steps out of character and questions the lines the playwright Lisa Kron has given her.

For actors, crossing that imaginary line between performer and audience can be tricky. “It’s a high-wire act you cannot stop,” Kron says. “It has to be real, but then you have to assert your authority enough to say we’re all here together but you’re coming with me.”

Alan Bennett’s “The History Boys,” which takes place in a boys’ school in Britain, features many of the students and the teachers stepping out of the action to examine their thoughts with the audience. For veteran actress Frances de la Tour, one line she utters in the play marks the first time she’s been asked to break the wall. “It’s rather lovely and seductive. You just grab the audience and say, ‘I’m going to make you my friend. I’m going to flirt with you now,’ ” she says.

“When we said it in rehearsal, it wasn’t funny. When I came out with that line in the first preview, the audience went balmy,” de la Tour adds. “I really didn’t know what the animal was ‘til I rode it. Then you have the awesome responsibility of hitting the bull’s-eye every night.”

Audiences seem thrilled when performers include them in the evening’s drama. “The first time I saw it happen was in 1962, when I was just 16,” recalls author and critic Peter Filichia. “At the end of the first act of ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,’ Pseudolus turned to us and said, ‘Intermission!’ I remember adoring that.

“I think the reason people really like it so much is that it acknowledges them,” he adds. “It makes people feel more a part of the experience.”

*

Acting up

“WELL” and “The History Boys” may be unusual because of the naturalistic aspects of straight plays. In musicals, it’s a different story. Take, for example, “The Producers,” the Mel Brooks musical that lovingly mocks theater and its conventions. At the start of Act II, “Producers” writers Brooks and Thomas Meehan have Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom stunned as they return to their office to find it covered in white paint. “When did you do all this?” Max asks his blond-bombshell secretary. “Intermission,” she responds.

“Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” the musical based on the film of that name, breaks briefly through the wall when globetrotting divorcee Muriel Eubanks wisecracks that she might be needed in the second act.

More surprising is “The Light in the Piazza,” a serious musical concerning an overly protective mother taking her mentally challenged daughter to Italy. While there, the daughter falls in love with an Italian boy. From the beginning of the show, Margaret, the girl’s mother, directly addresses the audience.

“Margaret has no one to confide in, isolated as she is in Italy, without her husband, with no English-speaking adults to help her work out her dilemma,” explains book writer Craig Lucas. “So the audience becomes her confidante.”

During the second act of the stylish, romantic musical, the fourth wall is broken again when Signora Naccarelli, the young man’s mother, steps aside to translate an Italian lyric for the audience.

Though it elicits laughter, it also surprises. “It’s one thing if it’s a comedy when there’s a free-and-easy, happy-go-lucky feeling,” Filichia says. “But in a drama ... it ruins the illusion.”

For Lucas, this conceit works. “I’ve used the device before. Of course, the entire convention appears throughout the Greek canon and all of Shakespeare’s plays. Michael Bennett described the difference between a cool musical [with no direct address] and a hot one [with direct address]. It’s a straight shot to the heart.”

This trend hasn’t escaped the attention of Bob Martin and Don McKellar, librettists of “The Drowsy Chaperone.” The fourth wall is broken right off the bat. When the curtain rises, Man in Chair (played by Martin) is sitting in his living room enthusiastically playing his cast recording of “The Drowsy Chaperone” for the audience, which serves, in effect, as a guest in Man in Chair’s home.

As the album plays, scenes and songs from the faux ‘20s musical appear before the audience’s eyes. Meanwhile, Man in Chair starts and stops the action of the show within the show to gleefully share tidbits about the show, the actors playing the parts, the joys of cast recordings and a bit about himself.

“We scripted the show so I’m not really asking the audience questions -- though we did in previous versions, and people did respond,” Martin says. “But you can’t control it and the whole show becomes dealing with drunken patrons.” Filichia thinks audiences tire of the gimmick. “It can be a cheap way to get a laugh, no question about it -- but it doesn’t seem cheap the first time you see it, it seems delightful. In some cases, I feel it’s an excuse for bad playwriting, the easy way out of dramatizing a situation.”

Perhaps the technique will become overused and fade away. But will it spread to other areas of communication? Books? Magazines? Newspapers? Could be, but, unfortunately, this writer has just run out of space.

*

Ken Bloom is the co-author of “Broadway Musicals: The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time.”