Venue and stage

In talking about Carapace’s time at Venkman’s Joyce said:

people really didn't want to be on the stage.

They didn't want the lights.

They didn't want the fancy food.

People didn’t want to be on stage. These would be the storytellers. They didn’t want the lights. My first impulse was to assume this referred to the storytellers, too, but it doesn’t have to. Storytellers or audience members could dislike the lights. They didn’t want the fancy food. People eat while in the audience, not on stage. The conflation of these staging elements and other elements of the venue make me wonder how the larger space interacts with the stage space. Does holding the event in a certain type of establishment start setting the stage before you even get to the stage?