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When You’re the Star…

Given the most innovative thing about immersives, “Rule #2: The audience is active,” it’s tempting as an immersive writer to create stories about YOU, the audience. Film can’t do it. Fiction can’t do it very well (choose-your-own-adventures hardly made the big time). Theme parks maybe get the chance to explore second-person narratives, but the stories they tell tend to be simple. Immersives provide a more complex story-platform, with detailed worlds and an empowered audience doing things, making choices, even talking. The temptation is great to make the audience the Star in the cinematic world. Haven’t you always wanted to be the Star?

Most escape rooms do precisely that. Some immersive theatre projects have dabbled in it, too.

But does that pay off?

Case study: The Grand Paradise

I am a huge fan of the work of Third Rail Projects. Anytime they produce anything that I can’t see (I’m looking at you, Behind the City!) is a cause for mourning in my household. But I am about to be critical, something I don’t usually do in this blog, because one of their shows taught me a lesson in immersive writing.

Back in 2016, when The Grand Paradise announced that it was closing, Cameron and I made a special last-minute trip to NYC. I’ve recounted before that I had some bad luck that night—being grouped with a Talker, not getting either part of the coffin/bird sequence, which surely would have been a highlight for me (imagine missing the Tea Party in Then She Fell). But I left that show turned-off for a more fundamental reason than bad luck.

The show was about me.

The Grand Paradise transported you to a 1970s pleasure resort, brimming with cocktails, water tanks, and New Age-ism. People wearing very little greeted you with leis and knowing smiles. A straight-laced nuclear family appeared, but was quickly broken up by the resorts many temptations. There was also a creepy fountain of youth, too, but that’s about all the plot you need to know.

Poor straight-laced me, I mean, them. (The Grand Paradise)

When not in set dance numbers, the Resort characters spent their energies seducing me. They looked straight at me and told me I needed to change, or realize who I am, or set myself loose on the world, etc. etc. The show had two sides, Family versus Resort, and they wanted me as a member of the Resort. Seducing me was the heart of the experience. I remember in particular a map-making, fortune-telling sequence about my past, present, future. Then there was a meditation on how I use my time. And ropes as metaphors.

I was there to be transported, and yet all the monologues kept prompting me strangely enough to think about Strange Bird (my future ambitions). That’s nice, but unexpected. That’s not why I came here. The characters again and again kept pushing me into my head. That higher plane we aim for in the theatre experience—where the head shuts up and the heart takes over—was unreachable.

I like introspection. I have a solidly introspective moment in the tarot readings in The Man From Beyond, but introspection does not make a good story-experience. Third Rail always likes to ask personal history questions, and those usually allow you to make a stronger connection with the character you’re with, but in Grand Paradise the questions were pervasive, and they never looped back to the character who was asking them. I do think Third Rail designed the show to be about the audience, for the show to seduce us as equally as the family (our stand-ins) are seduced and set free.

I bucked against the role they wanted me to play the whole time. When I left, it was the first time I had no desire to return to a multi-pathed immersive. I didn’t have the sense that there was more story for me to uncover—and damn, did it make me uncomfortable.

Case study: Sweet & Lucky

The night before I visited The Grand Paradise, I had been to Third Rail Project’s antiques shop in Denver, Sweet & Lucky. This was a hard act to follow.

It opened with characters ushering us from an antique shop to an outdoor funeral. They handed out umbrellas, and some folks had to share—because it was pouring rain inside this warehouse. I stepped onto the astroturf. Who was dead? We sang a hymn badly. Slowly, characters peeled the congregation off in groups, and the story that would answer my burning question began. When we returned at the close of the show to the funeral, there was no rain—because our tears had taken its place.

This show had nothing to do with me—so it had everything to do with me. I watched a romance in its many stages, its ripples through time, how a life touches another life. There was even a scene where the couple had a devastating fight, and despite clues to the contrary, I left thinking they had separated permanently but was later convinced by friends afterwards that they had indeed made it up. (So that says something profound about how sensitive I am to conflict…). I can’t look at a tree or a robot or a glass dish the same way again.

Those who saw this profound production were indeed lucky (Sweet & Lucky)

Through specificity, we get at universality. A story with characters with distinct points of view and rich details resonated with me—they felt truly human, and so felt more like me. The details would be radically different, sure, but I could easily be the person in that coffin.

While actors looked at me, drew me in, even gave me light roles to play, I never felt self-conscious. I was wholly in my heart. I was feasting on them. Who I was didn’t matter. I was not the star—they were.  And that was a good thing.

pitfalls of second-person narratives

When the audience is the true “star,” that means they have the starring arc. They need to start in one place, pivot, make choices, face consequences, and end in a different place, fundamentally changed. That’s…not easy to do. If you insist on making the audience the star of the story, you can only address the audience in the most generic way possible. The number of rich personalities who have come through The Man From Beyond have taught me it’s always best to let them be them—and invest in interesting things happening around them.

By calling the audience to be the star, you’ll be manipulating them constantly along a designed arc, so that you will most likely trigger self-consciousness—the enemy.  People may think they want to be in the spotlight, but they react viscerally against it most of the time when you put them there. You may force them into a role that doesn’t suit them, or on the flip-side, not build a detailed arc at all. (If you want to do this, explore Odyssey Works, which tailors experiences successfully, but for only one person at a time). I’d like to see an immersive succeed at making me the star, but I haven’t seen it yet. Perhaps there are lessons from larping that I need to learn, which are much more emergent and flexible than immersives, but what I do know for sure is…

You must always have a character.

Characters HAVE POV

Grand Paradise was missing characters. I paused at the playbill on the door at the exit, but I honestly didn’t recognize any difference among the paradise characters. They all had the same point of view. I wasn’t convinced that there was any additional insights to be gleaned from the story. Whereas I met impactful characters in Sweet & Lucky—I even believe that one character was another character but older, a theory met with much acclaim by my friends. Now that’s interesting.

Characters have points of view, an opinion about what is happening that differs from the rest of the company. The plot proper should tease out character, prompting the person to show their true colors. This goes beyond the nonsense that actors make up, like what their characters like to eat for breakfast. I’m talking about what the writer shows in the story.

You can have a story without a separate character than the audience, but it’s not going to be particularly compelling. It’s going to be a choose-your-own-adventure, and those burnt out in the night for good reason. At the very least, you need a sidekick. And I’d wager that arcs are more successful when they’re fully in the writer’s hands and not in the audience’s heads. It’s easier to find yourself when you’re lost in somebody else’s world, if you will, then when someone insists on staring at you and asking you probing questions and urging you to change. Or worse—not having any character look at you at all.

What this means for Escape Rooms

Escape rooms often advertise YOU as the STAR. Very rarely does a game deliver the storied experience you’re promised on the website. Sometimes you’re given a role and sometimes you’ve just stumbled upon a rogue submarine, but it’s not very common for the arc to go beyond “in trouble” to “we’re saved!” If you’re given a role, it’s lampshading—no role-play is needed in the actual game.  It is the rare Heist that calls upon you to be sneaky in the slightest.

So while escape rooms may think they’re delivering a cinematic experience where you (finally!) get to play Indiana Jones, throwing challenges at you doesn’t really amount to much. Cinema is, after all, about story arcs. We like to see people change, and thereby learn about ourselves.

I’d like to see more escape rooms featuring supporting or starring characters. Even if you’re not interested in involving live actors, you can still have a character presence. Escape rooms have always compelled me because they scratched an unscratched itch of mine: as a young girl at a slumber party, I always wanted to rifle through my friend’s drawers, discover her drawings, her secrets, her handwriting, the album in her CD player, all the things she loves and perhaps find the voodoo doll devoted to all the things she hates. I wanted to know how another life is lived.

A bedroom worth exploring at Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return (Sante Fe)

I doubt I’m alone in that curiosity. Escape rooms should lean into that unfulfilled desire.

What is a space without a human presence? It’s meaningless, un-immersive, a game at best. But a space with a distinct human presence—logic, reason, passion, handwriting. That’s a space I want to explore, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll come out the other side a bit different.

Yes, I know: most escape rooms aren’t after the same sort of “audience transformation” that I seek. But if you want a truly memorable experience? The kind that makes super-fans? It’s time to start calling ourselves artists—and to start thinking about characters beyond the players.

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Adapted versus Original Immersives

Big news hit the escape room community this week: Time Run announced their collaboration with BBC’s Sherlock in an all-new experience, The Game Is Now.

Meet your new game master. (Mark Gattis as Mycroft Holmes)

The news got me thinking again about the decision all storytellers make to adapt something existing or to compose something original.

Whether you’re excited or not by the Sherlock fusion, you have to admit: damn, this move is SMART. Here’s a look at why.

Advantages of Adaptation

In developing our immersive theatre escape rooms, Strange Bird has talked a lot about whether to adapt a work or to make something original. It’s a particularly interesting question for the immersive industry—a lot of shows and games are inspired by source material. This topic came up again in development as we started work on Show #2, so here’s my dispatch from those front lines. We boiled adaptation’s advantages down to three…

  1. Adaptations can potentially sell more tickets
  2. Adaptations give the audience grounding
  3. Adaptations give the writer creative parameters
1. financial benefits

We all ultimately want to sell our art, get rich quick, quit our day jobs. That’s not easy in this field. With such a wide-open frontier in the immersive industry, it’s hard to get any attention on your own. Your story is unknown, your company is unknown, hell, even your very genre confuses people when you try to explain it.

But if you create a show from an established brand, you immediately tap into an established fan base. Media and social media suddenly appear and drool. People who’ve never heard of immersive theatre or haven’t ventured into an escape room yet are now snatching up your tickets. Instance: in anticipation of demand, The Game Is Now will open with no fewer than FIVE COPIES of the game. That looks incredibly risky in any other context, but given the established fan base, it makes sense.

Even if you’re not a super-fan of the work, people tend to like things they’re familiar with over something totally new. New things carry risk. We are risk-averse. Risks sometimes pay off, but more often than not, they don’t. We all have favorite places to eat. While I could theoretically find a better or equal Thai restaurant in Houston, why risk the dollars, the calories, and the time on a new place, over the place I know is good? In the same way, we buy tickets for story-worlds we already know something about, rather than starting from ground zero.

It’s not entirely dissimilar to the sunk-cost fallacy.

Hollywood and Broadway have been onto this secret for a while now, from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to Sponge Bob: the Musical. Did anyone really want Ghost: the Musical? Perhaps not, but once it opened, it became a safe ticket for summer-time tourists. It was total crap, but lo, it even toured.

Haunting, in all the wrong ways. (Ghost: The Musical)

Taking up an established brand’s very tempting. But just how many works are there that can tap into a rabid fan base or inspire purchases on the “sunk cost fallacy” in entertainment? Unless you work some IP-magical-deal like Time Run did, not many.

INtellectual PropertY (IP) 101

This is a big, sticky area that I’m not an expert in and don’t want to be an expert in, but it’s worth addressing here. Essentially, in the United States, you cannot create within somebody else’s story-world, unless it is in the public domain, that is, published before 1923, or otherwise lapsed in copyright. (Good news: that horizon is about to, at long last, start moving again this year. We’re about to get works through…1924!)

There’s no easy path to acquire IP rights, and if you do connect with the right people, you’re likely in for some serious sticker shock. Only the very biggest of companies can really afford a deal. (See: Time Run, Escape Room Live, Punchdrunk (there’s a Dr. Who immersive in their past)).

You can maybe sneak in under “fair use,” which allows for parody of or commentary on a copyrighted work, but that’s ultimately an act of “crossing your fingers that you never get caught in the first place.” In which case, you better hope you never get big. You’ll almost certainly not have as good of a lawyer as the IP suing you.

There are many escape rooms based on IPs, licensed and unlicensed and hovering in that grey area, and they’re all trying to capitalize on the “established fan base” advantage, hoping a Harry-Potter-style game will be their market differentiator. IP invocations are happening less in the immersive theatre realm in comparison, where we see more shows based on Shakespeare and 19th-Century novelists. A baffling trend, until you realize it’s all about the rule above. Public domain? Fair game!

Nothing will satisfy public demand more than an immersive dinner production of James Joyce’s short story published in 1914. (Production of “The Dead: 1904” (2017) in New York City).

But I’d argue these adaptations are missing out on the big reason to adapt, which is the financial benefit. “The Dead” is easy to pick on—that’s super-obscure. Houdini is well-known, but I sincerely doubt rabid Houdini fans have made an impact on our bottom line. And let’s be honest: just how many more tickets is Sleep No More selling because of die-hard fans of Macbeth?

We have three avid Shakespearean practitioners on Strange Bird’s creative team, but even we’ve faced the truth that, while people would rather see Hamlet than Pericles, no one is going to an escape room because its billed as Hamlet-based.

2. Audience benefits

But Punchdrunk’s choice to adapt Macbeth has other advantages. It gives people an “in” on the world. Immersives use non-conventional story-telling techniques, and it’s truly bewildering the first time you encounter non-linear story-telling or second-person narratives or sandboxes where you have to choose your own path.

These stories…they don’t hold your hand like the stories we’re used to. They immerse you in the experience and dare you along the way (or at the end) to make sense of it all, if you can. It’s almost as if the story itself—what’s going on here—is the fundamental mystery, and it’s your goal through the experience to solve it. Immersives (even non-escape-room ones) are chock-full of AHA! moments.

Knowing Macbeth intimately helped me make fast sense of what I was seeing in Sleep No More. My very first scene of consequence was the interrogation scene. I quickly recognized Act 4, Scene 3—a brilliant back-and-forth between Malcolm and Macduff which, as a wanna-be-rhetorician, I’ve always loved. Here was that scene, cloaked in a violent dance in a closet, with all of its push and pull. And then…the tree! I laughed out loud, I could not have been more delighted. I was won. I wanted to join their forces. But without the background knowledge, everyone else must be like, “What’s with the Christmas trees?” It becomes a radically different experience if you don’t know the source material.

Then She Fell also uses a well-known work as the string inside their labyrinthine mirror-maze of refracted selves. I read Lewis Carroll’s books for the first time in preparation for this show, and I’m glad I did. It gave me the foundation to see the new thing they were doing with the characters. It’s not a straight adaptation at all, but Alice in Wonderland is unquestionably its spine. (And unlike Macbeth, I think Alice is a public-domain story-world that may actually sell some tickets. See also: Les Enfant Terribles’ Alice’s Adventures Underground. Just…don’t get too close to Disney’s aesthetic choices).

The blue skirt is pushing it. (Then She Fell)

Adaptations can fast-track the audience into engaging with the immersive world. But using an established work as audience hooks does carry risk: you risk leaving behind anyone who hasn’t read it or seen it. We all want the barrier-of-entry for our shows to be as low as possible, and that includes not requiring research ahead of time to get the most out of it.

Basically, you risk becoming fan service. And yeah, Sleep No More really kinda is fan service to Shakespeare nerds. Ugh. I don’t like that. Does it go too far?

More to the point: can we really safely assume an audience is familiar with the details of Hamlet? Yeah, no. Maybe if I were producing in England…maybe.

3. creative benefits

Perhaps the most seductive benefit of adaptation is the on-ramp it gives creators, and I think that’s really what’s behind immersives of The Idiot and “The Dead.” I love limitations. It sparks my creativity. To quote Robert McKee, as he pleads for screenwriters to do research in his phenomenal book Story:

“The principle of Creative Limitation calls for freedom within a circle of obstacles. Talent is like a muscle: without something to push against, it atrophies. So we deliberately put rocks in our path, barriers that inspire.”

Couldn’t agree more. Saying “I want to do something totally original!” more or less means infinite options. Saying “I want to create an escape room based on Hamlet!” gives me a cast of characters, major and minor conflicts, and even suggests sets, if not a particular aesthetic (Hamlet is usually medieval gloom in the public imagination, so why not lean into that).

We’re already working in a wacky, wide-open genre, where the very structure of engagement is up for grabs. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some boundaries? Source materials give us that.

The Man From Beyond, while by no measure an adaptation, has deep roots in the true story of Harry Houdini. He suggested a conflict to us, gave us an aesthetic, inspired puzzles (one’s even a historic puzzle, directly lifted from his magic), and even gave us historical films we could play in our show. I read a ton. Watched the movies. Spent days devouring the blog Wild About Harry.

After her husband’s death, Bess Houdini performed magic, supported young magicians, and kept his legacy alive.

The details…so many rich details, all at our disposal. We knocked out the writing-designing of that game in some 2-3 months. That’s not a coincidence.

Our second show, however, is not going to be “inspired by” anything extant—neither fictional nor historical characters. Which is not to say that there isn’t lots of research to do! I’ve been doing my research, Mr. McKee! But I can say with certainty that the writing process is more challenging. It was not completed in two months. All those rich details we got from Houdini? They’re now up to us to make up.

ADVANTAGES of original work

Which brings us to the other side of things: original stories. Note that original work is not in any way inherently superior to adaptations. They may be harder, but that doesn’t make them better. I think we should have both, and both are capable of magnificent and totally crappy things.

The main benefit of creating something original is that it can speak more directly to the moment. It can go anywhere, do anything, be about anyone. Creators can say directly what it is they want to say—rather than twisting Hamlet into some cautionary tale of fascism, or making Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf suddenly about racism.

If all we’re doing is re-mounting old stories, we’re stuck as a culture. We won’t have any stories of historically marginalized groups as protagonists, heroes, anti-heroes. There may be only seven plots, but the details matter. A LOT. Times change, and we require new stories to understand ourselves as we are and to unlock the frontiers of what we can yet become.

But they are harder. In immersives in particular, original stories will need to work harder to tell the tale—there’s no “string” in the chaos for your audience to follow. You’ll need to set-up and then deliver “AHA!” moments on your own. The audience has no preconceived investment in any of the characters, so you’re building their emotions from the ground up. Extra care must be taken.

And dammit, there are NO FINANCIAL BENEFITS to original work. NONE. Except, I suppose, not having to give the BBC a percentage.

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Escape Rooms Will Save the World!

Strange Bird has been receiving a lot of love lately from the escape room community, having recently won Room Escape Artist’s 2017 Golden Lock-in and Partly Wicked’s 2017 Room of the Year. I think it’s high-time I reciprocate that love with a true escape-room-enthusiast post.

Escape rooms could save the world. I mean that. Each time I play or observe a team playing, I sense a powerful force for good at work. Escape rooms present a radically new learning environment that has the potential to train us to become smarter, faster, more open, more complete human beings. And they’re hella fun, too—which every teacher knows reinforces learning. Win-win.

Here are some ways that playing escape rooms has super-powered me.

come together

Most job environments require working collaboratively. As I’ve learned too well, the bigger the thing, the more people are needed to get it done. That means communicating clearly, supporting each other, saying “no” firmly but kindly when something isn’t working (and not taking that “no” personally), keeping track of each other’s progress, and ultimately committing to the final glory being ours, not mine. We’re talking high-level, interpersonal skills here.

School does a dreadful job of preparing us for teamwork, as students fall into the roles of slackers slacking and feverish Hermiones doing all the work for the essential “A.” Active entertainment doesn’t help much either—in board games and bowling, usually you’re competing against each other for solo glory. And no one but the oddest duck competes in team sports outside the school years.

But an escape room is an accessible team sport. One does not win an escape room alone. Every member contributes. Even if you don’t get a big “Hero Moment,” you probably made more than one connection that moved your team forward. Just working a lock correctly is a big step!

Super-Hero Moment if you know how to operate one of these. (Hint: though it may look like a padlock, it is NOT a padlock.)

As long as you’re engaged, talking, and listening, you’re contributing. The teams that fail The Man From Beyond fail to talk (or listen) to each other. They’re trying to play the game solo, and that doesn’t work. And just how often in life does drama ensue because we failed to talk to each other? Play enough escape rooms, and you’ll soon think communication and teamwork are the default modes for success. Which (pro-tip) they are.

I’ve ALWAYS RELIED On The smartness of strangers

“Public ticket” escape rooms, popular in the US, sometimes bring groups of strangers together in the same game. While most people prefer to play with friends, we see a lot of people come through our doors who have only 1 friend cool enough to join them for a séance-themed escape room, so they end up being locked in the room with some strangers. That sounds horrifying.

Turns out it’s not. When people have something to do, and they really want to see it done, the awkwardness melts away. You’re on the same team—and it shows. Friend groups divide up. High fives ensue. You may not know their names, but that’s not really what matters, is it? As a game master, I’ve noticed that stranger bookings tend to be stronger teams: they’re much more likely to come with different backgrounds and life experiences, and so a wider gamut of skills are at the team’s disposal. Granted, it’s not rainbows 100% of the time, but I’m happy to say it is rainbows about 95% of the time. (At least in our game—ours is not one of the frustrating types).

I know it sounds cheesy, but I always leave mixed-company escape rooms with a stronger sense that I can work with anyone, that what we have in common is far greater than what we don’t, and that, as Muppets Take Manhattan puts it, “peoples is peoples.”

Extraordinarily wise.

Kind of a big deal in a day-and-age where people supposedly won’t share a meal with those of an opposite political bent.

looking is not seeing (spoiler level 1)

The hardest puzzle in our game requires noticing the thing that’s been there the whole time—it actually comes up a lot in escape rooms. I know for a fact that if we took “the thing” and hid it in a drawer, every team would pay attention to it stat. That’s because we filter out things in our given environment all the time. We have limited bandwidth. Thanks to evolution, we only pay attention to the things that matter—threats, rewards—and the rest can just disappear from view.

But this is not always an advantage. Sometimes my focus is too narrow. Like a horse with blinders, I don’t see the whole system. How often have I tried to work around an object in the way, rather than stopping and moving it out of the way? I have always been especially guilty of environmental blindness (“Has that building always been there???”), and that habit can hold me back from making key discoveries. Escape rooms have me seeing the wider world a lot more, and this skill not only benefits the practicals of my life, but the poetry as well.

Sometimes I catch a player without a puzzle pacing around the room. There are still puzzles all over the place, if only he would see them. But looking is not seeing, and one does not see with one’s feet. Seeing requires a deliberate act.

power over your environment (spoiler level 1)

Arguably my favorite moment in the Man From Beyond doesn’t involve a puzzle “aha!” nor an actor-player interaction. There’s an item in the room that players activate. It repeats. It’s up to the players to decide if they still need the information or if they can de-activate it. De-activation requires: 1) noticing it; 2) realizing it’s annoying; 3) confirming that your team doesn’t need the information any more; 4) taking the steps to de-activate it. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but ultimately these steps culminate in asserting your power over your environment. You CAN change the world.

This ain’t no “solve.” This is a super-power. If we can really see things, the next step is we can improve things. Instance: why not turn off that TV nobody’s watching at the restaurant? And that’s just the beginning of the revolution, my friends.

Since when did every restaurant become a sports bar?

And yet, about 40% of teams require the game master to deactivate it (we have a lot of redundancy in our control room). They just don’t notice it, or they fail to realize they have a say in their environment. It’s like subconsciously they have hunkered down and accepted their fate of this item repeating endlessly, and it takes a conscious, powerful leader—the game master—to put them out of their misery. Not cool.

Power to the peoples.

you can’t give up

Escape rooms are tough. The vast majority of them require 100% completion of the puzzles to earn the “win” condition. When you get stuck in an escape room, you can’t rage quit. You can’t procrastinate. Someone in that room will eventually need to solve it, so you might as well roll up your sleeves and go at it again—don’t just walk away! In fact, now is the perfect time to call in a teammate who might see things differently. If you don’t get it, share it. Tell them what you know and what you don’t. After all, the most satisfying problems aren’t the easy ones to solve.

Double-check your work

We all have these stupid shackles called EGOS. Egos stop us short of becoming our better selves. We don’t want to improve, we don’t want to change, and we do NOT want to be wrong. Yet we are wrong all the freakin’ time.

That’s okay. Escape rooms taught me that. I can’t tell you how many dumb things I’ve done in an escape room—overseen something obvious, dropped the ball, messed up the math, worked the lock all wrong—and I’m not necessarily getting any better. Thankfully, someone usually corrects me in time. In fact, that’s what it means to be a team: we’ve got each other’s backs. Nowadays, if I suspect something should work when it doesn’t in an escape room, I double-check my work. Ego be damned: maybe I got it wrong. If that still fails, I introduce a new person to the problem to make sure it really and truly doesn’t work. Double-checking your work consistently will not only win you more escape rooms, it’ll get you in the habit of correcting mistakes and collaborating with others to make the Thing the best it can be.

Yeah…this used to be me. Despite appearances, it wasn’t a time-saving approach.
EMBODIMENT

Escape rooms, like other forms of immersive entertainment, give us our bodies back. Too often we chain ourselves to chairs to stare at screens—we might as well be those brains in vats. But escape rooms don’t come with seats. You’ll need your hands, feet, and knees to find the clues. If you’re lucky, the kind of puzzles will even engage your body, and you’ll find yourself running around, lifting, kneeling, twisting on tip-toe to solve a challenge. I think embodiment is why I love escape rooms but don’t dig puzzle hunts (whether at home or at a bar). The tactile experience adds immeasurable value.

I recently spent the perfect 24 hours in the NYC area: 5 Wits West Nyack, an immersive audio tour in Central Park (Her Long Black Hair), Komnata Quest’s Maze of Hakaina, Paradiso’s Memory Room, and my eighth visit to the McKittrick Hotel.

I did not want to yield my scroll quiver (Komnata Quest)

In that short period, I had never felt so deliciously alive, so present in my physical form. I felt…whole. Like a lion. Like I had just annihilated Cartesian dualism. I think this is the way I was meant to feel. But it was foreign. Maybe the last time was on the playground…? Hey! How come adults don’t have playgrounds??? Maybe that’s what immersive design should be about….

save the world? Really?

Okay, yeah, I’m being a bit optimistic. An average escape room doesn’t train people to do more than indiscriminately yell every number combination they can derive from the room. What’s worse: you’re often rewarded for guessing. That’s…not a habit that’s going to save the world.

But if more escape room designers take the guessing out of the game and focus on logical, rewarding design, then every player will walk away feeling stronger, smarter, more eager to work together, more ready to take on the world.

And the world needs taking on. (Good thing I’ve packed my scroll quiver.)

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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.

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On Reviews and Hosting Reviewers

Strange Bird Immersive has been lucky in our press. We recently had the immense pleasure of hosting Room Escape Artist, and we’ve even lured Houston’s local theatre critics to come out and PLAY a play, you know, instead of just sitting there.

Read the reviews…

Room Escape Artist: “an experience that realized what I’ve hoped to see from the escape room medium.”

Partly Wicked: “the single most memorable escape room I have ever seen.”

Houston Press: “superbly unique… meticulously conceived.”

Houston Theatre Awards 2017: Winner of Best Risk

THE CRITIC IS COMING…

Hosting critics in an immersive is radically unlike hosting critics in traditional theatre. Here are some tips I’ve learned along the way on how to make the most of it.

Schedule wisely. If you’re in an ongoing production, give your show at least 2 months for testing and iteration, so it can settle into its best form before the critic comes. This is true for immersives, but it’s especially true for escape rooms. The show we ran in January is not the show we have now: the puzzles are smoother, the tech is debugged, the actors can handle every interaction. Be patient, and it’ll pay off. If you’re running a short-lived show, try to dissuade critics from opening night/weekend, at least.

Clean. Your critic will be inside the world and potentially free to explore. You do not want to be called out for dust bunnies.

No last-minute changes. As we’ve learned the hard way, a very small change can create new bugs, new audience behaviors you didn’t anticipate. We always try to run a mock-show in real-time whenever we make any technical changes, but physical changes can only be tested with fresh, new minds—a lot of them. What may look like an innocent dogtag to you may be somebody else’s slotted screwdriver.

”Guys, look! I found a hammer!”

You may want to perfect things for a critic, but don’t do it the day before, or even a week before. You want to deliver a vetted show.

Conquer self-consciousness. Actors get pretty revved up (usually for the worse) when they know a critic is in the house, but they never have to face that stone-cold gaze. Here? Neither of you gets to stay anonymous. That’s scary. A theatre critic is likely to freak, too, because they’re used to the armor that anonymity gives them.

If I had to guess, they probably didn’t become critics out of an intense love of actor eye-contact.

Immersive work is intimate, it’s close-up, it’s scary. There’s no place for them to hide what they’re thinking: the actor will see it on their very faces. Be ready for both parties to feel even more self-conscious than usual. Hopefully your immersive is already designed to limit feelings of self-consciousness, but be ready to conquer this demon more than usual. Don’t give the critic any more attention than anyone else present. Your Meisner gut may even tell you to back-off from them.

No “red carpet” treatment. You want to be on your A-game, but you don’t want to be on your “suck-up” game. They will notice. The critic is here to experience the same show the public would experience. Otherwise, what use is their review? If you have any special moments or one-on-ones, don’t default to selecting the critic unless you’ve received the usual positive signals from them that you always look for when singling out audience members. Bad one-on-one selections lead to bad one-on-ones, period.

Be professional. Take criticism graciously. Take praise graciously. To be reviewed at all is a privilege not every artist gets. Because of the intimacy, you may feel like you have a relationship now. You don’t. If the critic wants to be friendly afterwards, follow their lead—don’t be the initiator in the relationship. A lot of critics prefer to duck out and never see you again, even if they loved it.

Everyone’s a critic. The only publicity in this business that’s worthwhile is word of mouth. Every guest who crosses your threshold could potentially rave (or rant) to their friends—or on Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, or TripAdvisor. Every guest is someone worth winning, so make the most of every show and make the red carpet standard.

Which really means you’ll be doing a lot of cleaning.
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The Safety Rant (with bonus waiver rant)

Two weeks ago, the Everything Immersive community was up in arms over a very serious safety infraction that resulted in injury to audience members and could have resulted in death. We were all understandably shaken by it.

  • No Proscenium reports about the incident here.
  • A harrowing first-hand account of what happened is here.
  • No Proscenium also talks about safety with leaders in the immersive haunt genre in their recent podcast (starting about 22:20) here.
    Too long, didn’t listen: if you’re not an expert in the field of carpentry or aerial hi-jinks or waterboarding or what-have-you, consult with someone who is an expert to make sure your intended use in the show is as safe as possible. Also, TAKE THE TIME TO BUILD YOUR IMMERSIVE RIGHT. These things do not go up in a couple of months. Only sloppy and unsafe shows go up that quickly.

Since Immersology serves as a platform for the practice of immersive theatre—the big picture, if you will—I feel a need to weigh-in officially on the issue of safety, something we cannot take for granted in this genre.

Immersive designers: your audience is active. They may behave unpredictably. Your behavior to them is also unpredictable. You’re probably planning to do unusual and surprising things to them—that’s why this is fun. For fuck’s sake, make it safe. Really, really safe.  That includes, but is not limited to…

  • No lifting, overturning, or throwing of furniture or other heavy objects
  • Creating clear safe spaces for the audience during vigorous action sequences
  • No audience-navigation in complete darkness
  • Poorly-lit stairs or other uneven surfaces feature glow-tape
No, this does not break your immersion.
  • First aid kits and fire extinguishers on-site (and every company member knows where they are)
  • No one locked in or locked up (handcuffs) without a user-operated safety release
  • All lighting instruments safety-cabled
  • Emergency lighting in case of power outage
  • Limited use of glass, and if there’s glass in the space, that space is monitored
  • No unfinished wood
I really don’t need to be immersed in splinters. Sand it, stain it, seal it FFS.
  • Clear rules of engagement for the audience
  • Proper advance warning for potentially awful stuff inside the show—whether that’s a strawberry cocktail (I’m allergic), forced enclosure in tight spaces, crawling, spanking, simulated drowning, etc.

These are the basics—and they apply to escape rooms, too, who in my experience are the more egregious violators of the above.

But there’s still a lot left off that list that we can do. Design “X” with an eye on that 0.01% chance that “X” fails catastrophically. If you plan to run a lot, you just might see that 0.01% come due. See what you can do to prevent that from ever happening.

But even with the smartest designers in the world, stuff can still go wrong. That’s where your well-trained actors can step in.

Calling Hold

Your actors are the enforcers of the rules and the guardians of the show. But they’re also committed to not breaking character, and they may want to carry on when something goes wrong. Break them of that instinct. Train them to call HOLD whenever they want to.

As creators, we think of HOLD as the worst thing possible, the nuclear option, the apocalyptic experience that breaks the magic. But I’ve been on the audience side of a very long hold once, and we didn’t care. We loved the show enough to wait in silence. I’ve also been on the actor side of a few holds, as escape rooms are rather notorious for something small but essential bringing the entire game to a halt. Really: your audience does not care. They’ll jump back in the moment you release them. In fact, they’ll recognize that you’re giving them the best service possible by addressing the problem, instead of letting the problem fester.

Get the whole cast comfortable with HOLD. Have a procedure for HOLD. Especially if a safety concern occurs, call HOLD.

Establishing safe space

Violent or dance-based immersives need to consider how they will train their audience to get out of the way—and stay out of the way. Third Rail Projects sits you in chairs, or they crawl up on set pieces you’re clearly not meant to access. The space of the McKittrick also has quality safe spaces: think of the step along the wall in the speakeasy during Banquo’s murder or the platform for spectators during the door dance. When it matters most, the actors and black masks make it quite clear that you are not to leave this space. Only an idiot would leave these spaces—although I’m sure someone has.

Black Masks

The cast of Sleep No More do an excellent job of crowd control and establishing spaces for their work, but it’s the Black Masks who really get the safety job done. They’re always there when it gets dicey: Lady Macduff’s murder, the prophecy rave, the banquet table you can’t join, the box you can’t crawl into.

If you’re building a sandbox show, consider if you need a few black masks to ensure safety both for audience and for actors. (They’re also essential to show-function: I definitely saw a black mask deliver Macbeth his missing pants once. Someone really wanted his pants that night).

Disney Keys

Ricky Brigante of Inside the Magic taught me on FB about the Disney Parks tiered-value system, known as the four keys. I think it expresses succinctly how actors should behave in immersives, and Strange Bird Immersive has since adopted the policy.

Not exactly the poster I’m hanging backstage, but you get the idea.

Here’s what I put in our actor code of conduct…

#1 – Safety. Safety must be the priority in every decision we make and must never be sacrificed for another key. Address directly any audience member’s safety concern, and if a safety issues arises, call HOLD until the issue is resolved.

#2 – Courtesy. Never forget that the audience is a paying customer, and you are performing a guest-service role. Stay respectful. When in conflict, courtesy should trump your character’s response (i.e. Do NOT get in a yelling match with an audience member, even if that’s “what your character would do”).

#3 – Show. Serve the story and play your character as much as you can—this is what they paid to be a part of. Do your absolute best not to break the world.

#4 – Efficiency. Try to keep on schedule. Use your time and resources wisely to maximize every guest’s experience.

Audience responsibility

But audience safety is not only up to the designers and actors. It is ultimately up to YOU, the audience member.

Yes, YOU are responsible for your safety, too.

I know you want to tail that actor, I know you want a hero moment, I know you’ll do anything to maximize your experience, but please, BE AWARE OF YOUR BODY.

That includes, but is not limited to…

  • Not launching your body in the path of an actor
  • Not launching your body in the path of an audience member
  • Not getting in the actor’s face (we’re human, after all, and don’t know you)
  • Generally being respectful of the actors. If you’re unsure how they want you to interact with them, default to passive-mode until they signal otherwise
  • Watching from a safe position or space
  • No lifting, overturning, or throwing of furniture or any other objects (FYI no escape room tapes a key to the back of a very heavy desk)
  • Taking care on stairs
  • Accepting your physical limits and not pushing yourself to a breaking point
  • Being ready to say NO anytime you don’t want to do something

You are the person who is in ultimate control of your safety. Please don’t “give yourself up” to these experiences so much that you never ask, “Am I safe doing this?”

Especially in the wild west of this new genre, you may enter an immersive space where the designers have NOT done any of the above. Be aware. Take care. And remember that you can always NOPE the fuck out of there.

Waiver 101

DISCLAIMER: the following is non-professional legal advice. This is the result of my personal research. Nothing can replace consulting a real contract lawyer. And FFS, stop copying the waivers of your peers.

Waivers: you’re probably doing it wrong. If you really want it to hold up in court, you need to give the plaintiff absolutely ZERO excuses for why they retained the right to sue you despite having signed your waiver.

Here’s how to do a proper waiver…

  1. Keep it as short as possible, so people will read it. If I have to scroll on the iPad, it’s too long. Bullet point the assumed risks in the experience and state that I waive your liability. That’s all you need.
  2. Keep it as clear as possible, so people understand it.  That means no legalese.
  3. Provide one waiver per person. If there’s any sort of “line” at the waiver stations, then there’s social pressure to sign it without reading it. (That pretty much means if you’re doing iPad waivers, you need an iPad for every single person who arrives at a given time. Not very feasible). No “one waiver per team” on a clipboard that gets passed around, either.
  4. In the state of Texas, no waiver for anyone under the age of 18, whether signed by a guardian or not, will hold up in court. Just FYI. That’s a good reason to have that age limit.

But ultimately, waivers are not about that day in court. They are about preventing that day in court. I think they are an important step in the immersive process: they create a transitional moment for the audience to pause, realize that they’re about to start behaving very differently, and acknowledge that they will face certain risks. It’s that reminder that YOU are ultimately responsible for YOUR safety.

I’m sure we could all use that reminder before Sleep No More. WHERE THE HELL IS THEIR WAIVER???

What about actor safety?

I’ve only talked about audience safety so far, but actor safety is an even harder issue.

Read this WSJ report, if you haven’t already:

“Audience Behavior Makes Immersive Theatre Highly Unpredictable” (Dec 2016) (follow this FB link to get around their paywall)

It’s important to keep some perspective here. After some 140+ shows, I have not one story fit for this article of an audience member who crossed the line. But we are talking about that 0.01% chance, and it never hurts to be prepared.

Good news is the experience does filter out the craziest of the public via paid tickets. People don’t usually drop $40-200 just to molest actors. But sometimes it was the friend’s idea to go, and you end up with an audience member who wants to break the world and so poses a risk to your actors.

Plan for that risk. That includes, but is not limited to…

  • Designing experiences that don’t prompt seriously inappropriate behaviors (care in particular should be taken with 1-on-1s)
  • Hiring actors who know how to handle themselves and have the instinct to stand their ground or fly, rather than fight back
  • Training actors in HOLD and other audience-control tactics
  • Having doors for 1-on-1s that can lock out audiences outside but never lock in those inside
  • Establishing escape routes when an interaction goes south
  • Establishing a safe-word to use if an actor needs assistance of a company member

Again, Black Masks can provide crucial assistance, as they can protect actors and audience alike. (The trouble is, of course, paying for your glorified security team.)

None of these are perfect remedies, however. We won’t have a perfectly safe immersive until all the world agrees that we be respectful of each other when we interact, whether inside an imaginary world or not.

THe Stakes

Please, please don’t forget about safety. All we need is one negligent audience member inside one negligent show to bring the entire genre crashing down.

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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.

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Meisner for the Immersive Audience

Last week, I examined the Meisner technique for the immersive actor. I am particularly excited by the genre’s promise of a scene partner who has no script. Who is, by the way, you. You’re my scene partner.

In immersive theatre, the audience becomes actors. Think of them that way. When sold out, The Man From Beyond has a cast of 10. It’s precisely this radical reconception of the audience that energizes immersive theatre. Hell, I love it so much, I extended Meisner language to include the audience and enshrined it in the Strange Bird mission statement:

We’re in this together.

But if audiences are truly actors, then they are now facing the same pitfalls all actors do. The audience doesn’t need to worry about not listening—they are hearing the script for the first time—but they do need to overcome the bigger demon: feeling self-conscious.

Most folks associate interactive theatre with self-consciousness, and with good reason. Performances that pull an audience member on stage typically thrive off that person feeling awkward. The performer points up the audience member’s behavior, and the audience subsequently laughs at that person’s expense. This is the stuff of nightmares. This is the OPPOSITE of immersive theatre. Let’s run as far away from that kind of “interaction” as possible.

Lest we forget, there’s this thing called stage fright. We must take this phobia seriously.

Training audiences to be in-the-moment like actors are trained isn’t possible, but what we can do is design environments that engender real interaction. Armed with an understanding of the Meisner technique, designers can help slay self-consciousness for audience-actors, so they, too, can live truthfully in imaginary circumstances.

Here are my Meisner-inspired design principles for killing self-consciousness and eliciting truthful behaviors from your audience…

  • Make your world rich
  • Start your world as soon as possible
  • Limit audience watching audience
  • Stakes
  • Dialogue that matters
  • Really doing stuff
  • The element of surprise
Make your world rich

Children have no trouble with imaginative play. The entire world still feels novel to them, so behind a bush is as rich a secret hangout as the fanciest speakeasy with trick-wall entrance. But adults must preserve their dignity and need much more help to get them to a point of make-believe. And make no mistake, make-believe is our ultimate goal.

The less your audience has to imagine, the easier it is for them to believe. Immersive actors can help tremendously—they belong to the world, so interacting with them requires adopting their world—but production design also plays a major part. The more you can WOW your audience with a sense that they have been transported, the more they actually have been transported and can act in that world with ease. If you do your job right, they won’t even realize they’re making believe.

Do you have to have a big-budget build-out? No, of course not. While I don’t know of any immersive productions that have done so, you can ask your participants to use their imaginations like black box productions do, but you risk losing a few people in that leap. It’s just easier for me to behave like I’m in a hospital if it looks like a hospital.

Start your world as soon as possible

No matter what you do, there will always be an awkward transition from real world to imaginary world. The earlier your participants can pass through that transition, the easier it will be for them to believe.

I think escape rooms in particular suffer from starting their worlds way too late. You spend a good 15-20 minutes checking in, signing waivers, chatting up the gamemaster, hearing the rules of the game, getting the lock tutorial (oh lord), and then, THEN you cross the threshold to your exciting Egyptian Tomb adventure. No one really expects me to start acting like a cursed archaeologist now, do they? After treating it as a game for so long, I’d feel silly, and making that transition to play-acting would make me feel self-conscious. So I just don’t do it.

(Note that this is where actors inside the game can really help. Escape rooms with actors are the only times I’ve felt motivated to play along. Peer pressure can move mountains!)

I like aggressive worlds, worlds that bleed into the street if possible, with hosts who contribute to the make-believe instead of tearing it down. Think of the pre-show experience in Sleep No More, Then She Fell—even Accomplice. You may be waiting to enter the main attraction, but as for the world, you’re already there. You’re already playing.

”How would you like to die?” he asked me. ”In media res,” I said. (The Manderley Bar at the McKittrick Hotel, NYC)
Limit audience watching audience

There’s nothing worse than feeling the eyes of strangers—or worse, your friends—on you during imaginative play. You feel a little judged, and just like that, you’re hyper-aware of yourself, and all doors to transformation slam shut.

When I speak of The Man From Beyond to people who haven’t played yet, I often have to assuage fears of embarrassment. They don’t want to be actors in the traditional sense: they don’t want to be watched. So we should take great care that they are watched as little as possible. Disperse the audience. I’ll examine in more detail later how audience distribution affects the experience, but for now, I’ll just say that it matters a great deal.

There’s a reason 1-on-1’s feel special—with no one else watching, you’re more open to connect with the performer. You can even keep the content a secret to your grave. Case in point, I am still deliciously creeped out by the fact that a Then She Fell interaction I had (solo with two cast members) was in fact observed by another audience member via a secret hiding place (I found this out later from a friend—such a great psychological twist!). Knowing I was watched at the time would have changed everything.

The sandbox-style also does a good job of freeing folks from the gaze of others; if you don’t like the audience energy where you are, you can leave. Escape rooms and dark rides, however, involve audience groups with no hope of relief. Someone is almost always watching your interactions, and if that someone’s not playing along, your entire show is screwed. Third Rail Project shows always make me feel really uncomfortable with whatever it is I’m wearing—and that has nothing to do with my fashion choices.

Stakes

Not just your characters: the audience too needs stakes in the story they inhabit. Following the Meisner Independent Activity guidelines for drama, actors should be doing something “important, on a deadline, and difficult to do.” Importance is paramount here. If the audience thinks what’s happening around them matters, they’ll enter a true state of flow. Their awareness of themselves will slip away, as they laser-focus in pursuit of their goal. You’ll get some wonderful make-believe behaviors that way. But if the story lacks importance, you’ll wind up with a bunch of disengaged people reaching for their phones.

But that doesn’t mean the world should always be ending. Higher stakes do not translate to better results, as you can easily break the ceiling of believability. See: most escape rooms.

Threatening the explosion of the earth or even just my death if I fail is frankly beyond my imaginative pale (we all know the game master will just enter to console us), so you might as well have just skipped the stakes part entirely. Sometimes the best stakes aren’t the highest or even the most personal ones. We have stakes in other people all the time, so perhaps this is where your characters can step up.

Dialogue that matters

Meisner wants us to really listen. Your audience should be all ears in an immersive, and listening—or navigating to the right place to listen—should engross them. The script should reward those who listen, with every word providing insight into a part of the story. Avoid dialogue that is obtuse, or your audience will quickly learn that their efforts are for naught.

really Doing stuff

To reach a proper flow-state, where the knowledge of the self disappears, you need to be doing something. Like actors on stage, tasks and challenges—from holding up a mirror to deciphering the riddle inside a poem—offer a great path for audiences to forget themselves and engage in the story world.

Escape rooms are masterpieces of doing stuff, and fans get addicted to that sweet puzzle-flow-state. Third Rail Projects adores simple tasks as entry points to relationships, and even Sleep No More, often maligned for not giving the audience activity, packs a wallop of stuff happening in their one-on-ones to the point that you don’t have time to catch your breath.

So give your audience something to do other than “watch.” All the better if it’s important, on a deadline, and hard to do.

the element of surprise

Actors often perform from their heads instead of their guts; knowing what’s going to happen, they plot out their reactions ahead of time. The result is it feels fake—and we remain unmoved. Since rehearsal is unavoidable, Meisner offers tricks for actors to rely more on their gut, but immersive audiences don’t rehearse, and they have no lines to learn. If they go into the experience without any foreknowledge of the script, they are very likely to respond from their gut. And that’s a very good thing.

I don’t recommend reading too much about an immersive theatre production you plan to see. Read just enough for you to decide to buy a ticket, and then STOP. Don’t read the reviews, blogs, or facebook comments, or you could walk into a show like a cold, premeditated killer, acting cerebrally: “What’s a clever thing I could do or say in that situation to surprise them?” When the mind holds the reigns, we stay firmly on the ground. We can’t be transported.

Gut-response requires the element of surprise.

Creators get this. Immersive theatre productions typically say as little as possible about a show. The mystery entices you, and you go maybe not even knowing the themes of the piece until two-thirds of the way through, when it hits you like a hammer. That’s special indeed.

But creators can take surprise too far. Immersive theatre is uniquely visceral—you are there, participating in the world, and leave with a real memory—so we should appropriately warn audiences of potentially traumatic content within. We need to be responsible, to care for our audience, rather than to ambush them. After all…

Given what they’re doing, they’re actually very responsible about it.

But when are warnings needed? It’s hard for me to draw the line. I think The Man From Beyond capitalizes a great deal on thematic surprise, and taking away that surprise at the start would damage its power. Surprise has a huge payoff, but if it comes at too high a cost (trauma to a reasonable percentage of your guests—we’re not talking about that one guy who has a fear of taxidermied turkeys), the art is not worth the cost. We need to be responsible, first and foremost, and earn the trust of our audiences. The genre won’t get very far if our chief weapon is surprise.

Okay, so apparently hurricane stay-cations inspire a lot of meme generation in me. Apologies for that. (Luckily, Strange Bird is coming out just fine through Harvey.)

To wrap up…you know you’ve been self-conscious in an immersive before. It happens—and it’s awful. Think about why you got kicked out or perhaps why you never started the make-believe in the first place. Maybe I mentioned a reason above. If designers are in turn conscious of the scenarios that create it, they can reduce its likelihood and boost the chances of audiences acting truthfully and emerging transformed. Just as Meisner would have wanted it.

But if you had, you would.
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Meisner for the Immersive Actor

Back in my graduate school days, when I had ivory-tower wishes and PhD dreams, an advisor told me to think of theory as a toolkit. You go out in the field, you encounter something puzzling, and you then select the theory that can best chisel away at the problem. A nice, utilitarian approach—and I’m definitely a utilitarian.

When it comes to immersive acting, the Meisner technique is the freaking Sonic Screwdriver in my toolkit. I would be at cosmic sea without it, and with it, well, I’m pretty much The Doctor.

Audience control is cool. (Matt Smith in BBC’s Dr. Who)

Disclaimer: I am no Meisner expert. I am a beginner at best, imposter at worst. I’ve taken some 28 class periods, hardly enough to qualify as an authority who knows what I’m talking about. But whatever. It still changed everything for me, so I’ll write about it, and you can decide.

Meisner 101

Meisner wanted what we all want: recognizable human behavior on stage. But that ain’t easy.

The Meisner technique is an inside-out approach: by fixing your inner workings, specifically where you focus your attention when acting, your outer body will follow the lead and behave naturally.

Sanford Meisner told his students, “The text is your greatest enemy.” Why? Because you know what’s going to happen. You’ve memorized it. Your scene partner’s lines come as no surprise to your ears. You tune him out. And the director says you need to move here on this line every time. You anticipate it. How on earth are you supposed to retain a shred of humanity when, after a few rehearsals, you are more like an automaton?

Clinging to spontaneity is the key. We live our lives improvisationally—that’s what it is to be human. We figure it out as we go, we speak at the edge of our thoughts, and we’re rarely self-conscious. Meisner must have a huge thing for improv theatre (it’s electric, after all). His technique is all about bottling that quintessentially human electricity and unleashing it on scripted performance.

The actor has two fundamental problems…

PROBLEM #1: You aren’t listening

SOLUTION: Pay attention to your scene partner with your ears and eyes.

Life hack: we don’t just listen with our ears. We also listen with our eyes. We are extremely fluent in reading human behavior without really being consciously aware of it. Think of how many times you’ve had a gut instinct against someone. Probably nothing in the words spoken tipped you off, but something in the behavior didn’t sit right with you. Think also of how many times you’ve noticed a friend was feeling low before he even spoke. There’s a lot that we’re saying to each other that goes unsaid, but you can hear it loud and clear when you listen with your eyes.

The Meisner repetition exercise forces what is usually subtext into text. It trains you to name the behaviors you see in your scene partner and respond to those behaviors with your gut.

PROBLEM #2: you’re self-conscious

SOLUTION: Stop feeling. Start doing. Focus either on the person you’re talking to or the task you are doing (and really do it), but never focus on yourself.

Once I heard this precept, I realized that my memories of acting were of this sort of “outside viewer” viewing myself (a lot of women project a viewer of themselves in their everyday lives, by the way, but that’s a rant for a different sort of blog). I acted disembodied, focusing on how the audience must see me and making sure it all looked correct. I was horrified when I realized I never saw my Lysander—a damn fine actor. My memory should have been a memory of him. I had missed the opportunity to SEE him, truly to see him, and to work with him. Poor bloke didn’t have a scene partner at all.

When you’re really doing something, from sewing a dress to seeing your partner, you have no spare bandwidth to spend on yourself. You disappear. That’s good. That’s how humans live: un-self-consciously. You never hear someone in the real world complain that he doesn’t know what to do with his hands.

And you’re not allowed to plot your emotions, nor to find your own feelings fascinating when they burst forth, like sparkling diamonds you never knew your soul could conjure. Your attention must stay outside yourself if you want to stay honest. You need to act from your gut, not your head.

Instead of “being mad” on this line, try “convincing” the person instead. Use tactics, not feelings—verbs, not adjectives—to figure out your character, because that’s how human beings live.

The repetition exercise

In his beginner’s exercise (and his most famous), Meisner slays both of these actor demons. How it works…

  • Stand opposite a partner. You play no characters, and you have no scene. Your only goal is to be truthful.
  • You state an observation about your partner, anything from “you’re wearing a blue shirt” to “You’re twitching your fingers” to “You look angry.” Your partner then repeats exactly what you said, changing the pronoun appropriately. You repeat this phrase some 4+ times until one of you has the impulse to change it.
  • Sometimes the repetition will pile-up, and you’ll start forming opinions about your partner, based on their behavior. Listen to your gut—not your head. “I don’t trust you.”
  • Sometimes these opinions will give you a gut instinct to do something. See how she responds. “I want to take a step forward.”
  • Don’t try to control what happens or hold on to what was true a minute ago. Sometimes your partner’s behavior will change, and someone you just hated, you’ll now want to comfort. (A particularly useful point in immersive theatre, as that audience member who was a smartass five minutes ago may have opened up now).

Here is the best video of repetition that I can find. I’m not super happy with it, but it’ll give you a basic idea of the flow.

It’s weird, but it works. It trains your ability to observe your partner’s behavior (you have to give the behaviors words, after all) and to react truthfully to that behavior. It moves you from acting from your head to acting from your gut. You don’t think. In the end, it helps you create truthful subtext every moment on stage.

meisner inside an immersive

Now imagine if you will, please, an imaginary landscape where one half of this partnership has no idea what’s going on, has to listen to you closely because they’re hungry to understand better, and is so deeply invested in what’s happening that they betray the most honest human behavior you’ve ever seen.

I don’t want to get too metaphysically sentimental, but dear audience, sometimes you are too bright and beautiful to look at.

That’s immersive theatre. That’s a Meisner actor’s dream. Even when a show has strict scripted rails, there is almost infinite room for spontaneity when your scene partner is literally improvising. You don’t know what they are about to do, and neither do they know what you’re about to do. It’s the perfect imaginary-circumstances storm.

It would be so easy for immersive audiences to overpower an actor untrained in Meisner. They will quickly detect an automaton actor (the kind I used to be) and will promptly check-out of the show, or worse, screw around with the actors as much as possible like they’re Buckingham Palace Guards. Either way, that’s a disastrous experience for everyone. You cannot get by with ignoring your scene partner in this kind of work.

But with Meisner training, you already know to keep your knees bent in performance. Every show should be spontaneous, and immersives just more so. You’re already trained to listen to whatever your partner says, and respond to them honestly, building a relationship on very little every time. And remember how good you are at reading behaviors? That skill becomes especially important in immersives when there’s little to no opportunity for the audience to speak. You can tell who trusts you, who is bored with you, and who is falling in love with you all without them uttering a single word.

Reading behaviors fast is essential to proper one-on-one selection. Immersive actors often have a chance to vet their audience before choosing someone for a more intimate, closed-door encounter. This vetting is often based on behavior alone, and sometimes they don’t have more than a minute to gather the information they need. Only the actor with the well-trained gut-instinct will flourish.

Our gut also helps us know where the boundaries are for our participants, if we have a scene that can push the envelope for some people. I know there are one-on-ones in Sleep No More where characters can opt to mouth-kiss their participant (which is to say NOTHING about Blackout), and they make that choice based on the participant’s behavior in the moment and the gut instincts they have in response. If your actor makes the wrong gut call…you could get sued.

Seriously, though, does anyone know the litigation history of immersive theatre? PM me, please!

No joke, though. We’re playing with fire here, so we need professionally trained fire-eaters. Which I think in this case means Meisner actors.

Of course Meisner does not hold exclusive claim as the only theory useful in immersives. I am certain outside-in approaches like Viewpoints are also brilliant for immersive performance, especially in shows that emphasize movement over speech. Actors should populate our toolkit as much as possible. But I clearly have a favorite.

Meisner for Life!

Not only as an actor, but as a person, the Meisner technique has leveled me up. Consciously listening with your eyes and reading other people’s behaviors will get you in proper tune with a person much faster. You can care for friends better, identify the cause of conflicts faster (i.e. “You raised your voice, and now I’m tense!”), and avoid true creeps with greater alacrity. A single strong gut is worth a hundred rational brains.

And if you’re ever feeling self-conscious, get off Facebook and start doing something. Really doing something.

Where to start

So you don’t have the time/money/insanity to move to New York City for a two-year intensive in Meisner technique? Neither do I. But you can still make a radical change in your acting style with even a small taste. Here’s some reading to get you jump-started in the Meisner direction…

William Esper and Damon DiMarco, The Actor’s Art and Craft: William Esper Teaches the Meisner Technique (2008)
This book simulates an Esper class, and I liked it better than the official Meisner book for its clarity throughout.

Sanford Meisner and Dennis Longwell, On Acting (1987)
The official book, also simulates what a Meisner class is like.

And of course if you can find someone not fraudulent, someone that you can trust to teach you Meisner, go take some classes the next time you hit a performance lull. If you’re in Houston, I highly recommend taking classes with Kim Tobin.

Tune in next time for “Meisner and the Immersive Audience,” a look at how designers can use Meisner principles to craft powerful audience experiences.

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100 Séances Later…

Tonight at 8 PM, Strange Bird Immersive celebrates its 100th performance of The Man From Beyond: Houdini Séance Escape Room.

Okay, so on the escape room side of things, established companies call this milestone “July.” We’re kind of just getting started. But for a regional theatre production to hit 100 shows is kind of a big deal. Like, there’s Broadway. And then there’s Silos Studio #213.

I am indebted to immersive theatre for this gift. With small audiences and a memorable, active experience driving word of mouth from 0 to 60, I am living in Houston what most actors can only dream of: performing in a long-running show. How cool is that? And I’m even being paid from ticket sales.

Here are some things I’ve learned along the way, both from the immersive theatre and the escape room sides of my brain.

100 IMMERSivE THEATRE SHOWS LATER…
  • There’s nothing like total confidence inside a show. Most plays I’ve done spend about 3 weeks in rehearsals for 16 performances—it’s fast. There’s all sorts of riches I can pay attention to when the routine of the performance comes naturally.
  • You’d think I’d have some set line readings by now. But every audience inspires new impulses, and every night I have new insight. And this ain’t even Shakespeare.
  • Performing doesn’t get old when your scene partner is brand-new, wide-eyed, and excited every time. I can’t speak to what it would be like to be stuck inside 100 shows of Sunday in the Park with George (my favorite musical), but I’m always eager for my next immersive show. It really is different every time.
So many possibilities… (A blank canvas in Sunday in the Park with George)
  • The reality of the moment is holier than the script. When in conflict, let reality win.
  • Every audience is perfect—whatever they give you is their truth. Respond to it.
  • Even if they avoid eye contact, even if they run away from you, don’t take it personally. That’s just them. Work with what happens.
  • It is so, so easy to fall in love in immersive theatre. I knew that was true from one side, but it’s true for the performer, too. There’s something in this work that accelerates intimacy and reveals souls. It’s magic.
  • If Meisner theory excites you, get thee to an immersive theatre. That’s where things will really take off.
100 Escape rooms Later…
  • People respond to things consistently. The behaviors we’ve seen are all very similar, which means you can successfully design for a particular response. This is great news for every experiential designer. It means you can iterate—even the slightest adjustment can change behavior. Instance: we have a very interesting box in the room, but lots of folks were missing seeing the key hole, to the point that I had to run a hint. We added a tiny handle on top of the box to suggest that it opens, and now that hint has disappeared. So if people are responding in a way you hate, you can, in fact, fix it.
  • Paper will last without lamination for at least 90 games. Only laminate it if it would be laminated in the world, please.
  • People don’t want to break your things. Desperate players at the ends of their ropes combined with a negligent game master are who break things.
  • Providing a hint deprives someone of a hero moment. Use only when necessary.
  • Providing a hint is your best tool for curbing player frustration, keeping the experience fun, and protecting the investment of your room. Use liberally.
  • Your immersive theatre verisimilitude is your escape room red herring. There are soooo many details I would add if doing so wouldn’t hurt the game. That sucks. It’s hard to do both.
  • In the current escape room climate, there is nothing you can do as a designer to earn the trust of your players. Players who are new to escape rooms are our best players: they quickly learn that they can trust the design to make sense. But I can easily identify my experienced player: he checks under every chair, he wants to disassemble framed photographs (instead of looking at them), he has an unhealthy fixation with the one 4-digit combo lock and will plug in any random number he can make up in the room until it opens.

If you’ve played a few escape rooms before, you know he’s actually behaving logically. I do the same thing when I play. Sometimes the clue trail is deficient or missing, wild guessing works or is even required, and a weird, twisted “escape room logic” prevails, where numbers under chairs unlock a treasure chest full of Cardan Grilles in the serial-killer basement. What is this, Monkey Island?

Adventure games didn’t make sense, either. And then the industry grew up.

Winning most escape rooms is not about being smart but about being methodically crazy. It’s NOT these players’ fault they don’t approach our room logically: they have no precedent for trusting a game designer. With any luck, they’ll leave realizing what a revelation it is to play a game that makes complete sense, and then demand it everywhere else they play. Right? Alternatively, it’s possible that escape rooms will ruin immersive theatre, creating hordes of people whose learned instinct in immersive environments is to turn over all the furniture instead of engaging with a story.  A disconcerting but very real possibility. We’ll see what happens next.

but most of all…
  • Craft a detailed experience. People will notice. Asking why in every step of the design process, whether immersive theatre or escape room, isn’t just good art. It’s good business. Sure, your audience may not notice that all the antique items feature period-appropriate slotted screws, but they will certainly not be surprised to hear that that’s what you did. They sense the spirit of the details in every nook and cranny.

    And that’s a spirit worth summoning 100 times.