Category: Meta-Musings

Posted on

A Tribute to Sleep No More

Yesterday The New York Times announced that Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More will close on January 28, 2024.

A million masked faces cried out that day.

Dear Reader, you are reading this thanks to Sleep No More. I owe my professional life to Sleep No More. And why I love Sleep No More and always will above all other immersives is because I know I am not alone in saying that it changed my life.

Its legacy is an entire industry called immersive entertainment.

So many ambitions derived from seeing this one ambitious couple.
July 3, 2013

The date is seared in my memory.

No sooner was I off the elevator, but I got pulled into the narrow interrogation room with Malcolm and Macduff. The intimacy of an actor shutting me into the room. The violence of the swinging pendant. The interrogation. The tree! The alliance formed. As a Shakespeare super-nerd, I quickly recognized this was Act 4, Scene 3 of Macbeth, a rather knotty rhetoric scene, as post-modern dance: subwoofers blaring, my life slightly at risk.

Whoa.

I followed Malcolm all the way down to the first floor, and right before entering the ballroom for the banquet, he turned around, pulled me aside, and said “Shhhh…”

I was no audience member. I had an allegiance.

Go Team Trees!!!

Later that night I saw the tragedy of youth in Macbeth’s ambition, in a way no spoken-word actor had ever conveyed, as he danced with the imaginary dagger through the cemetery. I tried to help Lady Macduff when she stumbled at the ball, and she held me close in her closet as she, in her drugged delusion, called me her lost child. She left me with an origami pocket filled with salt, the paper ripped from a Bible, to keep me safe. Reader, I have it to this day.

I keep a collection of my Sleep No More souvenirs under my jewelry case. The mask collection goes elsewhere. If this feels like bragging, rest assured it is. This is theatre you can brag about.

For the first time in my life, I left a play and refused to talk about it. How could I even begin to talk about it? Silence was the only conceivable answer.

True to the show’s name, I did not sleep that night.

We did at least take a photo.
The turn

Returning home, my theatrical endeavors now felt hollow. Actors sometimes sneak a sideways glance at the audience, live for the rare Friday night when there are laughs in the house, hoping against hope that someone out there “gets it.” We are so hungry for connection. But in truth, there is an impenetrable wall in the theatre.

The Stage // The Audience

No connection. No immediacy. No relationship.

I was dreaming of the McKittrick Hotel, still haunted by the people there I couldn’t help, the mazes within I hadn’t seen. I became that person (who first told me about the show), proselytizing for a solid half hour about the sheer wonder of the experience, only to forget and say “Oh yeah, and it’s all told through dance.”

But no one minded my proselytizing, and friends were booking tickets. They did not respond to this show like when I say I’m directing The Merchant of Venice or performing in yet another Blithe Spirit. They booked tickets willingly and often came back holding court about it just like I did.

Theatre has been trying to justify itself ever since film came out. The argument usually boils down to the fact that theatre is live and therefore supposedly more exciting. In Sleep No More, I saw what film could never do, leaning into live-ness so much that I had been to the McKittrick Hotel. The place was mine to explore, and the camera was my eye. The story I witnessed was no story, flattened out by a stage, screen, or page, but a memory in my body.

Whoa.

That Christmas, after my second visit, Cameron and I dared to ask, “Could we make something like Sleep No More?” It seemed impossible. No way could Houston support a year-round audience in the hundreds, nor could we handle the scale. But we enjoyed brainstorming a show anyway.

Along came Then She Fell: 8 actors, 15 audience, 3,000 sqft. A scale we could attain in Houston. Then we got serious. While developing show pitches, we played Trapped in a Room with a Zombie, something that Houstonians were buying tickets to. Then those pitches turned into escape room pitches. Escape rooms, to us at least, seemed to be begging for context, connection, immediacy. The rest is Strange Bird‘s history. I still don’t sleep well, because come morning, there is so much possibility.

Would we have gone to those two experiences and seen our vision without Sleep No More to frame them? I am not certain. The scale makes it impossible to ignore. Its confidence always gets me, 22 actors across six floors, perfectly synched. The massive statement that is Sleep No More makes a paradigm shift like we experienced seem almost inevitable. Assuming I would have bought tickets to these experiences at all (something of an assumption), I suspect I would have dismissed Then She Fell as a performance art dance project and escape rooms as cash-grabs aimed at nerds. Instead, I saw kin of the thing we loved the most.

Cameron described Sleep No More as “Mozart in the Stone Age.” When it opened in 2011, the United States had almost no exposure to immersive theatre.

Say what you want about “Tony and Tina’s Wedding”: it did not spark a sea change.

Here lands this insane production, so far advanced in its understanding of immersive craft that it is almost outside of history. It was shocking. I think it still is shocking.

Attention must be paid.

The legacy

I’ve told my story above as a synecdoche. Mine is but one testimony. There are countless more out there. 450 people a night chasing actors in and out of the Gallow Green shops, staying with Macduff as he cradles his dead wife, witnessing Macbeth consumed by the trees. For twelve years.

I have spoken of the epicness, but its stability is as much a source for its influence. I relished Sleep No More‘s stability, to have a work of genius to point people to at any time. “Go to that. Then you’ll understand.”

I’d wager something like 80% of immersive theatre creators in the United States would say Sleep No More was their first and primary influence. The percentage is fewer for escape room creators, but I’ve met several (and their work is excellent).

And how many audiences were created by Sleep No More? People with no interest in creation, but still dreaming of the show nonetheless, hungry for the chance to turn a story into a memory. They started putting “immersive theatre” into Google and took chances on smaller and local productions, helping the industry grow. They probably now play escape rooms, chasing after a taste of Sleep No More.

Neither immersive theatre nor escape rooms would be where we are without the colossus that is Sleep No More.

And that is the true source of my grief. I grieve for the creators and consumers of immersive entertainment who will never be born because they cannot stumble into Sleep No More anymore.

But hey! They can still go to The McKinnon Hotel in Shanghai!

In 2022, we hosted about 3,000 guests at The Man From Beyond. That’s one week at the McKittrick. Us small fry can’t begin to aspire to having the same cultural impact. (Or revenue, for that matter.)

These are giant shoes to fill.

What’s next?

Something new will move into those six floors in Chelsea. I’m hoping for theatre, not a night club. I’m hoping Punchdrunk still has a part in it. Maybe they will make something as insanely precise as The Burnt City, which blew me away with their use of modern lighting and controls. Maybe they will fulfill their promise-threat of a cutting-edge non-masked structure.

Whatever comes next, the closing of Sleep No More marks the end of the First Age of Immersive Entertainment. I do not think it is the Death Knell, but the death of a colossus shrinks us more than the closing of the small scurrying mammals.

It is right to mourn the loss even as we turn to the new.

Thank you Punchdrunk for Sleep No More and to co-producer Emursive for giving it the stability to influence so many of us. This show will be missed.

It’s not Too late…yet…

If you’re reading this blog and haven’t gone to Sleep No More, what are you doing? Book tickets before it’s too late! It is both past and future. It will ground you in the essential history of immersives and still offer you a glimpse of what this form can be.

Final check in is January 28, 2024.

Check out my First Timer’s Guide: some prep and framing will benefit you greatly going in. Also note that you’ll need to be aggressive with other audiences. They’ve been overfilling it for years, and the final shows are likely to be packed with die-hard fans (who are a bit obnoxious, honestly). Some people are very turned off by that aspect, to the point of not enjoying it at all, so consider yourself warned.

Me? I like the aggression part a touch too much. It is my hope against hope that another show will come along in which I can unleash my true self: the hyper-aggressive weasel.

See you on the stairs. I’ll be the Woman in the Red Dress, running the Malcolm marathon on my tenth and final visit.

Posted on

Know What Motivates You

As the date for this year’s virtual Reality Escape Convention approaches, I am getting HYPE by remembering my biggest take-away from last year’s in-person convention in Boston. It’s been in my head ever since. If you bumped into me in the past year, I probably waxed on a little too long about the idea. I love this idea. Time to share it more formally.

In a workshop entitled, “Reflecting your Business in your Brand,” Stuart Bogaty of Trap’t challenged us with the question of why we were in business.

He said there are typically three root whys…

  1. In it for the money
  2. In it for you
  3. In it for them

Stuart then asked us to rank these Three Whys by priority. Different businesses have different priorities, and ranking the three from most motivating to least motivating clarifies decisions that you’ve made—or will make.

Let’s dive in…

for the money

Money is the most obvious why. Most people labor for money. It’s a bonus if they enjoy the labor, but money is usually the primary goal. Small business owners are no different. Many start with the dream they might just strike it rich. The rest at least dream of replacing or surpassing the income of their more boring job.

It is not exactly a glamorous why. Who wants to be a fat cat capitalist when you could be a starving artist? *Commence wild eye rolling*

I hate you, RENT.

Let me push back against that idea. Money is an important why that (I swear) some people prioritize too low.

Yes, there can be a certain commercial sheen in a work created just for the money: it can feel shallow, passionless, rudderless, baffling the viewer into asking “Why does this exist?” Such experiences usually exit through the gift shop. But valuing profit does not guarantee that fate.

Profit and art can not just coincide, but should. Artists who neglect profit either stop being artists (we have to eat, too, you know), or depend upon a patron or outside source of income that, again, makes them and their work extraordinarily vulnerable. I abhor the notion that to make something that is profitable—that “the people like”—is to bastardize the purity of your artistic vision a priori. But I digress.

I really hate RENT.

The degree of devotion to money can vary, from “maximize profit at all costs” to “as long as we’re in the black every month.”

Of course, go too far into maximizing your profits, and you diminish your product. That’s the story of most escape room chains. They prioritize growth to the point of destroying their product and thereby risk the entire escape room industry with their broken games and lost-at-sea game masters not even empowered to take a freaking SHARPIE to a prop where the Sharpie marks have completely faded!!!

“You can do it—fix it now! I’ll just stand here and wait! What do you mean, no?”

Not that I’m speaking from an explicit experience or anything.

The Escape Game is a great example of a business that has money as its primary why, but hasn’t sacrificed the quality of its product in that pursuit. They understand that the best way to make money is to deliver a consistent product that delights a wide range of guests with best-in-class customer service. Rather than create new games for each of their locations, they perfect the ones they have—a cost-saving measure if there ever were one in this industry (I don’t know about you, but working on something new is so damn expensive). I recommend their games to locals and traveling enthusiasts alike.

You can tell that money is their goal because they went back to public bookings after the pandemic, which we all know makes for a weaker product but a better bottom line. But rumor has it if you contact them that you are an enthusiast who is (coughcough) likely to ruin other people’s games (cough), they may offer to make your booking private. Enthusiast money also speaks, apparently.

The Escape Game’s games will never top TERPECA, but they shouldn’t. That wouldn’t be in service of their top priority.

For you

Most small businesses owners could make more money working for somebody else. But that’s not what they want the most. They want something more—a challenge. They start a small business to serve themselves: to be their own boss, to do work they enjoy, to give themselves the space to showcase or grow their talents.

Maximizing profits rarely requires maximizing human potential, leaving so many of us bored and unexplored.

The world is crowded, and people are so creative. They have to claim their own space if they are to explore their creativity fully.

That is one of the things that made me fall so hard for the immersive arts. While the barrier to entry is not as low now as it once was, the immersive arts promises careers that previously were under lockdown, with only Hollywood and Broadway producers holding the keys. Start your own business, and look who’s holding the keys now?

Ever played a game where the creator wants to show you something in progress that they’re working on? Or give you a backstage tour? They always have such joy in their voice. I love it. That’s someone who is in it for themselves. Their self-exploration is what drives the business.

These types of businesses are called lifestyle businesses, as they exist to yield a desired lifestyle to the owner. Such owners may reach a point of contentment with their business, where it’s enough for them to maintain what they have. They don’t need to open new locations because adding more of the same work for more money isn’t a bargain that sounds attractive to these types.

Or they’ll go the opposite route, and it’s never enough. They will be always working on something new and something more ambitious than, quite frankly, it needs to be. But if you are ultimately serving yourself with your ambitious build, then maybe it is as ambitious as it needs to be.

If Felix Barrett’s recent press statement is to be believed, Punchdrunk has produced their last masked show with the closing of The Burnt City and will pursue new structures ahead. Which I think is wild—they have a model that works. But that’s what a business in it for the owners would choose to do. They’re bored. They crave what is new.

Look, Felix, but I’M NOT BORED. The Burnt City is exquisite.
For them

Finally, we come to those who are externally motivated by them, whoever they are: the audience, viewer, player, customer. These creators will spare no expense to deliver something that truly wows the receiver. The sky is not too high.

It’s as if they are in the business of gift-giving.

Are they in love? I wonder.

These owners will be especially keen to receive feedback and adapt the product accordingly. They will want to make sure it works for the gift-receiver. They will often act irresponsibly when it comes to money.

People who prioritize their audience are how we get such indulgences as Molly’s Game and The Dome. Rumor has it neither will make their money back, but rumor has it the creators just don’t care. That’s not what they set out to do. They set out to blow your mind. That’s what matters.

Patented Dome Smiles™

Probably most TERPECA owners are them-motivated people. The games that make that list are irresponsible and off-the-hook.

Enjoy the gift.

My ranking

It will come as little surprise to my avid readers. For my part in Strange Bird Immersive, I am motivated by…

  1. Them.
  2. Money.
  3. Me.

I want to move people. I want to connect at the heart. I want to make my audience feel violently alive, aware of the full span of their lungs, flush with possibility. I want to do that so badly. And I will rewrite it if you don’t get that.

Perhaps the order of 2 and 3 was surprising to you? Where I ranked money surprised me, too. Fiscally, we’ve always structured our business to run a responsible profit, but I’d like to go further still in pursuing that value. Lucidity was designed at the outset to counter the fiscally questionable structure of The Man From Beyond—without sacrificing quality, of course.

It’s wonderful to create things, the sense of purpose I have every morning shoots me out of bed like a rocket, but at the end of the day, I am very open to replicating our experiences in other locations (that is, to make money), rather than always pushing the boundaries of what I can do. Opening other locations some day also serves my primary goal of reaching more people.

How to measure a successful business?

Once I had this lens at my disposal, I started to understand the wide variety of businesses out there. It has made me far less judgy of other people’s approaches. There are many ways to define a successful business beyond maximizing profits.

I’ve always resented immersive experiences that can afford to abandon all hope of making the investment back, as it makes those of us who don’t have that funding look weak in comparison. But nowadays, I feel less angry with the ones who can throw profit to the winds and more grateful that they choose to spend their money on me. So now I simply say, “Thank you.”

I also understand businesses that stop making new things, are not in the most optimal location, or are not doing particularly marquee-worthy things but are perfectly happy as they are. The owners are pursuing a life that makes them happy. Is that a bad business? No!

So next time you play a game or attend an immersive show, speculate on what their why might be.

And I encourage you to make your own list. Maybe it will surprise you, like it did me. It will help to step back and understand yourself—and may help you make your best business decisions yet.

Recon 2023

One of the best decisions you can make for any escape room business is to attend Recon this year, August 19-20, 2023. It’s virtual, so it’s easy to attend. I’m not paid to promote it or anything; it’s just a phenomenal professional opportunity I look forward to every year. The talks will be gold, but the connections more so. I would love to meet you at one of the extended “happy hours” in the wee hours of the morning and hear more about what motivates you.

Posted on

Tarot Wisdom for the Coronavirus Crisis

This is a Tower moment if ever there were one.

In The Man From Beyond, guests have the opportunity for a tarot reading from Madame Daphne. These readings are often my favorite part of a performance—the personal connection in a tarot reading is off-the-charts, it’s really a bunch of one-on-ones—and guests leave not just with a grand adventure from the Séance Parlor but with new personal insight from the Tarot Room as well.

I learned the tarot for the show, and now I am an advocate. In my eyes, it’s not magic, but it is a ridiculously useful tool, and anything that carries meaning carries a kind of holiness for me. It’s helped me personally, and it’s honed my philosophy. There are 78 different cards in the deck, each designed to tease out of us a notion of something specific that is happening in our lives. When we see things, we begin to understand them. That may not be magic, but it is the path to empowerment.

In this extraordinary moment, I’d like to share with you a specific tarot insight.

Welcome to The Tower.

The Tower is the moment when we are subject to higher forces. Something that we did not want, that we did not will has just occurred. Make no mistake: it’s bad. Lightning—an act of God or an act of Nature, as you choose to classify it—strikes our Tower, and we fall. We are powerless against it. The crown of our great plans plummets to the ground.

But there is an opportunity in every tarot card, even the darkest ones (and this is the darkest one, in my opinion). The lesson of the Tower is: how do you respond? How you respond is always within your control. Do you take a moment on the ground and mourn the loss? Do you rebuild the Tower? Do you look into the feasibility of making it lightning-proof? Maybe the rebuilt Tower shouldn’t be so tall, or maybe you should get out of the Tower-building business altogether. Point is: know your sphere of action. What’s outside your control? What’s inside it? There’s a sharp line dividing the two. Focus on what’s inside.

So here’s some Tower-specific wisdom for all of us in the cornavirus crisis…

  • This totally fucking sucks. It’s bad. It’s important to make space for that fundamental fact. Do not deny that you have fallen.
  • It is not your fault. You are not responsible. Yes, the government could have done more to plan, but not you, dear reader. It was not within your power to have prevented this pandemic.
  • Do not blame yourself if you feel you could have planned more personally for this very strange apocalypse. Lightning is random. No one could have reasonably predicted this level of society shutdown. I’m sure some of us are secretly kicking ourselves for being in the arts, or hospitality, or restaurant, or service industries, and not choosing an “essential” business or a viable work-from-home career, but that kind of blame is unfair to yourself. So don’t do it!

Focus as much as you can on what you can control. That means…

  • Stay home.
  • Reconsider going out in public or meeting up—skip it, if you can. There’s a lot that’s unknown and a lot of asymptomatic carriers, so it makes sense to take the most conservative course of action as often as you can.
  • Limit your news reading. Get the information you need to inform your personal actions, and no more. Ask, “Do my actions need to change based on today’s update?” Once that question has been answered, cut yourself off. Staring at things that are out of your control will make you go blind.
  • Think about what you can do for yourself, for your family and friends. Work. Play. Videochat. Find something that puts you in a flow. Do whatever you need in this very strange time. Take care of these people.
  • Forgive your quarantine buddies. They’ve been thrown from the Tower, too.

In the tarot, the Tower doesn’t stand alone: it is part of a bigger story. Twenty-two Major Arcana cards represent the most important moments of life’s journey that we cycle through. The Tower, number sixteen, comes late in the cycle, we’ve gained a lot of wisdom, making this a particularly hard lesson. The Tower dethrones us, thwarts our narrative of progress. But the very next Major Arcana card, number seventeen, is this…

The Star represents hope and healing.

I’ve never felt a personal connection to the Star. All my books say it’s hope and healing, and I’ve never understood how those two different things are connected. Now I do.

Hope is healing. You don’t need to be cured of your illness to experience the healing power of the Star. The Star reminds us that dreams come true. Now, not all dreams come true, but some do, and it is the very act of dreaming that is just what we need.

This crisis has taken our dreams from us. We don’t know how long this near-lockdown will last. Two months? Eighteen? When will we meet at a restaurant again? When will school restart? When will it be safe to visit my parents? We just can’t know right now. (But answering these questions is not within your sphere of control, remember? So let go.)

What we need right now is hope. I am a very future-oriented person. I am driven by my plans for the future, whether that’s seeing the birth of Strange Bird’s next show Lucidity, working on our conference talk for the Reality Escape Convention, or just looking forward to the pleasure of reading a stranger’s tarot cards again. Given the current situation, it’s possible all three of these dreams will never come true. But I’m not about to stop dreaming them. Dreams are not part of what you let go of after the Tower.

The Star says, after the Tower, you must have hope. Hope is the way you will heal from this fall.

The future will come, so please, hold onto your dreams. Dream actively, if you can—perhaps there’s an opportunity for you to lay the groundwork to make them happen. But perhaps just looking outside your quarantine window and daydreaming about a day when hugs are back on is enough.

If you found this post meaningful, consider supporting Strange Bird by purchasing Madame Daphne’s Tarot Deck. Her guidebook features surprisingly similar insights as mine—it’s quite the coincidence! It’s also not a bad time to pick up a new hobby, and it’s one that will make your spirit stronger.

You can also support us with a donation. We are legally required by the City of Houston to have zero income, yet rent and taxes are unabated. What strange times.

All my best, from my quarantined home to yours, for the health of your whole being.

Posted on

The Situated Self: Immersive Theatre’s Gift

Dedicated to my sister who wanted me to explore the recurrence of the word gift in this blog, and my father, who told me over the phone to write this theory down!

With the close of the gift-giving season, I’ve been reflecting about the greatest gift I’ve ever received. Immersive theatre gave me something, something extraordinary, that goes beyond creative purpose and a career in the arts (both tremendous gifts). It gave me myself.

By which I do not mean I “discovered my true self.” We are always talking as if the truth is buried, and if we just have the right archeological tools mixed with the right tenacity (or the right therapist), we can uncover the True Self. The True Self has always been there, since birth, or at least since childhood, and it is our lifelong task to Know Thyself.

That is not what I mean. I mean that immersive theatre taught me that my identity is fluid, able to flex to given circumstances. It taught me that the “I” I call myself is much more expansive than I ever imagined.

The self: mesmerizing, horrifying, fluid.

Western notions of fixed identity

I cannot lay claim to intimate knowledge of Eastern traditions, but in the Western culture I consume, we think in terms of the True Self. Whether at birth or in the crucible of childhood, we supposedly solidify our identity early—and do not deviate from it. Children may learn and play, but adults are certainly set. Think about stories from your childhood that your mother likes to tell, and how they bespeak your present-day personality, crystal-clear even at a tender age. Adults are simply not expected to change much—that’s why marriages can supposedly work.

But marriages don’t always work, do they? Hmm…

We take quizzes online to uncover the True Self, want to know which Hogwarts house we’d be sorted into, exchange our Myers-Briggs personality types with friends, so we can better understand each other. I even buy into the Five Love Languages thing. Mine are, surprise-surprise, determined by the love languages my parents expressed to me as a child.

There are probably kernels of truth in this theory of the self, but like most theories, we’ve taken it way too far.

For one, it’s overwhelmingly fatalistic. There’s not much room for free will here. You chose your career because of who you are. You chose your partner because of who you are. You have kids because you couldn’t choose otherwise—it’s who you are. When really, aren’t we just making it all up as we go along?

Someone very dear to me once transitioned from introvert to extrovert. Verifiable Myers-Briggs reversal and everything. Everyone was shocked. We didn’t think a change like that was possible. Suddenly we were dealing with a whole new person, with different desires and needs.

But this shouldn’t be shocking. People change—yes, even as adults. Our identity is not ordained or gifted to us by a Creator. We craft our own identities on a daily basis, in our situations and our choices within them. I call this “the situated self.”

IDENTITY as what you do

At those awful, theoretical cocktail parties where strangers for some reason gather together, we ask and anticipate one simple question: “What do you do?”

That’s a very interesting question. It suggests that identity comes from doing, from the actions we take. But that’s not really what we’re asking. We really mean, “What’s your job?”—a more boring question. The answer to that question supposedly encapsulates identity, gives the querent a succinct portrait of the stranger. Additional follow-up questions include, “Are you married? What does your partner do? Do you have any kids?” And maybe, if you’re lucky, we get to, “What do you do for fun?” These questions cover how you spend your time. They get to “the point” fairly quickly. What role do you play?

Your life situation molds your identity. Being and doing are intertwined—that I agree with. We experience existential crisis whenever we lose a job, divorce, etc., in part because our identity is tied up in our situation. The situation is changed, and so identity must change. Now that most people don’t stay with one job for 30 years, we’re beginning to open up to the notion that people can indeed do many things and so can be many things.

IMMERSIVE Theatre’s NOTION OF FLUID IDENTITY

In traditional theatre, the audience does nothing. They are not active, they are not present to the performers. It is rare for audiences to leave traditional theatre with an expanded sense of self. That’s not what it’s designed to do.

Enter an immersive theatre piece or an escape room, and you—body and all—find yourself in a radically different situation, a place and circumstance you’ve never encountered before or dreamed possible. Whether you’re cast in a specific role as an Egyptian archeologist or just given a task to perform, you are role-playing. You’re doing new things and so try on a new identity.

Yes, it’s make-believe. But that doesn’t make it any less real.

Humans are ultimately conservative. We like life to be predictable, each day to follow a structure similar to the last. We don’t like shifting situations, we don’t want to change our identity. No one would ever elect to change careers every year. But for us to do out-of-the-ordinary things requires encountering an inciting event from which we must take action. The old way of doing things just won’t work anymore in the new circumstances. Something must be done, and we must step up to the plate.

That, my friends, is participating in a story. Stories require conflict, but we eschew conflict in life. Immersive entertainment creates a safe space for us to encounter an inciting event and so take extraordinary action and become extraordinary people. Nothing is at risk here, but the reward is very real.

In escape rooms and immersive theatre, I have: lied to an Alzheimer’s patient, embarrassed a naked man when his lover asked me to, drunk glitter Champagne, stepped on a friend’s foot without even noticing, pushed strangers out of my way, french-kissed a stranger, stacked a deck in a casino, reunited lovers, summoned a ghost, sung to whales, translated binary, kept secrets, squeezed through cell bars, jumped through a window, flown up and down four stories of stairs as fast as the man I was following.

This is me. These are actions I am capable of—in the right situation. I carry all of this knowledge with me now. And sometimes I like to fly up stairs in parking garages, just to check my current capabilities.

And I’m no runner. But I guess, in the right situation, I am.

Some of these actions I’m proud of, some I’m ashamed of, all of it I find surprising. Radical departures from my usual narrative of “who I am.” It’s empowering. And it’s in my body as a true memory—I was there. This is what I did.

This is the gift of immersive theatre: to call an audience to action inside of imaginary circumstances. It awakes us from our slumbering adult selves and invites us to play, to explore new identities, like children or actors do, and potentially, to take a new identity home. Talk about a souvenir.

Quality immersive theatre transports the audience into an easy-to-believe world, but falls short of requiring them to lead the story, as children or larpers do so easily, so un-self-consciously. That’s a good thing. It makes this kind of play accessible. The circumstance is all there for you. All you have to do is act. Go on, try on somebody else tonight. This could be you!

A blank slate.

And it is you. When an immersive experience is well-designed, I leave with a strong sense that I can be anyone, do anything. I can choose my identity.

And that’s one hell of a gift.

Posted on

Meditations on Relevance

As everyone knows too well, the city of Houston (and its many neighbors—Fort Bend and Baytown and Port Arthur and Beaumont and…) suffered catastrophic damage from the floods of Hurricane Harvey. The extent of the tragedy is impossible to fathom. People died. Many others lost everything they own, with no quick-fix in sight.

Meanwhile, I’m supposed to go back to business.

The Strange Bird studio faced not one leak, and our creative team suffered no damages either. We cancelled performances, but managed to reschedule all groups but one. Unlike other theatre companies who have a tragically short window of performances to recoup costs, Strange Bird can lose a weekend or two, and be okay. We’ll be okay.

But in the meantime, I’m supposed to go back to business…? Let’s put aside the “survivor’s guilt” we were all feeling, just for being lucky enough to be able to go back to business. There was something even greater unsettling me. It felt silly to turn my energy to entertainment, when that’s so very low on the list of needs right now. Worse: it’s a show about death and STUFF. Like, you know, all that stuff you accumulate in life that countless people just lost? And then there’s my tarot readings, “The Tower” card that reminds us, “We are always subject to higher forces.” Could I handle that fortune showing up for someone? Is The Man From Beyond really what my city needs right now?

A Harvey tarot spread: an act of God/Nature; seeking refuge; heartbreak.

I had a crisis of faith.

I talked about scaling things back. Removing certain tarot cards from my deck. Cutting a few key lines in a few key places. Emphasizing the hard themes less, and trying to play up the fun more. In other words, fundamentally changing our story.

Then Cameron, my husband, co-artistic director, sometimes co-star, and general favorite human being, said, “Well, do you want to be new Disney or old Disney?”

I knew what he meant. Did I want to sanitize my world, present an escapist reality scrubbed of its evils and painted brighter, more beautiful than the real one? Or did I want to “hold the mirror up to nature,” not turn away from darkness, and see if that darkness has something to say?

“Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come. Make her laugh at that.” (Hamlet)

Needless to say, the latter is the Strange Bird way. Theatre companies long to be relevant, selecting scripts and making production decisions that speak to the current moment, and now was our chance to matter more. And here I was, wanting to abdicate my power for fear of coming off as insensitive.

We seem to have forgotten about this lovely little thing called catharsis. It used to be tragedy’s primary goal, and it succinctly expresses the real impact we can have on our audience. Cathartic-shy entertainment leads us to endless cycles of The Foreigner, Arsenic and Old Lace, Noises Off!—feel good, escapist entertainment that never surprises you.

Strange Bird Immersive revels in surprise. We want you to take a few strides outside your comfort zone. There, we will meet and perhaps experience something important together. After Harvey, well, we’re just a few steps closer to that important place—and need its promised catharsis even more.

Let’s look again at “The Tower.” Here’s my full story for that card: we are always subject to higher forces. Things that we don’t will and don’t want fundamentally impact our lives all the time—often for the worse—and we fall. But the real question is: how do we respond? Do we rebuild the Tower? Do we make it lightning-proof?

The darkness definitely has something to say.

I’m a secular-humanist philosopher. I take my readings very seriously.

We doubled-down. Not only did we resume performances as soon as the main roads were safe, we added more showtimes to our usual schedule, offering free benefit tickets this past week with a donation to the Houston Food Bank. People needed to get out, to talk about something else, and we wanted to help in our small way.

And to be fair, The Man From Beyond is far from a downer. It’s fun, funny, full of magic, an escapist delight in two senses of that word—with the potential for catharsis. I am glad I stood by our work. The result of the benefit was our busiest week yet. My “silly little escape room” provided meals for Houstonians most in need and something meaningful for those who could make it out to play.

So perhaps we shouldn’t consider entertainment secondary, irrelevant, a “distraction” from the real meat of life that should dutifully retreat to the shadows when a tragedy takes center stage. Perhaps it is rightfully at the heart of our lives. Perhaps we need it. It gives us a chance to do something different, to be someone different, to expand our experience of ourselves. It is not the how, but the why of life. The laughter, tears, and cheers are real, even if the world that inspired them was imaginary.

And that’s work I’m very proud to resume.

Please consider a monetary donation to those in need after Hurricane Harvey.
Houston Food Bank
JJ Watt’s Houston Flood Relief Fund
…or another charity (or for that matter, hurricane) of your choice.