As I’ve claimed before, “Rule #2: The audience is active” is the game-changer in the genre. Theatre is good fun, I’m usually laughing or learning in the dark, but immersive theatre sees me. It gives me opportunities to explore myself in new contexts, face new challenges, and come out on the other side a little different for the experience. I did not just witness the story, I built a relationship with it. I lived it.
It’s amazing when a gorgeous set is all around you, and perhaps you can even smell the meat pies, but things don’t get really interesting until you’re invited to make those pies yourself. Or perhaps, when you have to decide if you’ll help Sweeney Todd enact his revenge or not.
As rich as the surroundings no doubt are at the Barrow Street-turned-meat-pie-shop, Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney ignore the seated audience, as is tradition. (Credit: Joan Marcus)
That, my friends, requires a new kind of writing, a new kind of performing, and a new kind of audience. It’s theatre that mirrors the imaginative play of childhood, except with way higher production values. This is how theatre can (finally!) meaningfully differentiate itself from Hollywood.
But not all activity is created equal.
A big difference among immersive theatre productions is how the piece engages you, and you often don’t know what you’ll be doing until you’re inside. Sometimes characters will float in and out of awareness that you’re there, some will build relationships with you that reward commitment, while yet others will directly ask you for aid. Sometimes even, you get to be the protagonist, and the actors buoy your story, functioning more like NPCs (non-playing characters). Different structures invite different activities.
For me, I don’t like to call it immersive theatre unless there’s sustained audience engagement. But once a production passes that initial hurdle from passive to active mode, there’s a lot of colorful territory to explore.
the activity spectrum
Because I have a strange fetish for the codification of qualitative stuff, I’ve categorized the range of activities common in immersive theatre into a spectrum.
Note that being on the left side of things does not make the production any less awesome than shows in the red zone. This is not a quality spectrum. Nor does a structure being on the right side guarantee that it will include the other forms of activity to its left. You can have a sandbox where characters never make eye contact with you, for example.
As you move left to right, you can expect to do things more like you do in real life. Presence turns to activity turns to agency. I consider these 3 very distinct stages. The first knows you’re there; it’s the start of a relationship. The second employs you but doesn’t make much distinction between one warm body and the next. The “tasks” tend to be easy, and if you fail at the “task,” there are no consequences. The third means you—yes, you! the particular you—can make a difference.
activity IS NOT AGENCY
To have true agency requires altering the story, whether that’s your story or the central story of the characters. “Challenges” lead to alterations in what you experience and typically present as binary: win/lose, pass/fail, do/do not. It’s up to you. “Choices,” on the other hand, have a deeper impact and influence the headlining story, affecting change that goes beyond “I saw this” or “I unlocked that.” The characters and/or other participants are affected. Choices are not necessarily binary, but can be.
Example: Completing a quest falls under “challenge,” but if completing it then alters the fate of a character, it moves into the zone of “choice.”
Escape rooms and sandboxes usually don’t go beyond the “challenge” stage. There aren’t many examples of “choice” immersives, and I can’t think of any common structures but LARPs (which may or may not be immersive theatre). There’s a lot of territory to explore in the red zone, but it poses many challenges—how do you structure an evening’s experience for multiple participants that allows each to exercise meaningful choice without ruining the show for the others? Perhaps a many-branched one-on-one train? And is that economically feasible?
bragging zone
I’ve identified the warmer area to the right as “the bragging zone.” While you can certainly tell the story of what you saw in a dark ride over drinks, you cannot claim to have earned it. In my first viewing of Then She Fell, I received the Alice letter-quest. While I was thrilled by what happened on that track, I could not brag about it afterwards—what happened to me was pure luck. I was navigated to it. I couldn’t own it.
But I can brag about puzzles that I solved or completing “the Malcolm Marathon” (he has a fondness for the fourth and first floors). Shows that enter “the bragging zone” mean you get to exercise your specialness.
Just don’t brag too much. (The Simpsons)
Some people crave shows in the bragging zone: it engages more of themselves, and they leave with a more satisfying experience.
And yet others may want a little less engagement, a little less challenge, and a little more guarantee. Less choice means you’re free to focus on other things, like connecting with the performer in front of you, exploring where you happen to be, or piecing together the story. You won’t get a bad show because you can’t make poor choices. I get the sense that about 95% of people who visit Sleep No More come out dazed and confused, whereas Then She Fell guarantees every participant a quality experience.
And besides, don’t you sometimes want a break from the existential avalanche of never-ending choice that we call life?
Henri, le Chat Noir, understands. (Click for amusement)
Some days, I really wish I were on rails….
for story’s sake
Choose your activity wisely. The story of Sweet & Lucky would have been disastrous as a sandbox; gamification would do it a disservice. And yet its quiet invitation to do a task or two moved me no doubt more than if I had experienced it as a proscenium show. It’s at home exactly where it is.
In our turn, take the escape room out of The Man From Beyond, and you have to re-conceive pretty much everything about it, to the point that it would be unrecognizable. The player experience is its foundation.
So before you jump on the immersive theatre bandwagon, consider the story you want to tell. What impact will different modes of audience engagement have on your story? Why is the audience there? Why invite them to do anything at all? What happens when audiences act more like friends? Or like players? I don’t want to be doing something just for doing’s sake—you need to go somewhere with it. Invest my activity with meaning. Then we’ll be really going places.
This is gonna be a long one, but an important one, so strap in.
It’s time to tackle escape rooms. I love them. Even when they have no story to tell, even when the set is an office, even when the clue-structure has gone AWOL, I love them. They get me off my butt doing something I’ve never done before.
Super-stoked and a bit sweaty after Escape Games NYC
I’ve made vows to immersive theatre, but a piece of my heart is with escape rooms. Everything Strange Bird Immersive will produce will be immersive theatre, but not everything we create will be an escape room. But our first outing, The Man From Beyond, belongs to both worlds, so today I want to look at the relationship between escape rooms and immersive theatre, and see what it takes for a production to be both.
Think of immersive theatre and escape rooms as siblings. They have more in common where it counts than they have differences. Both industries invite customers to take action inside a designed world. Both invite grown adults to play like kids again. Both use the buzzword “immersive” to sell the experience—and want to deliver on that, too. Together, we make up the new landscape of experiential entertainment.
But escape rooms own a LOT MORE LAND, guys.
Holy crap.
Immersive theatre creators, take note. Escape rooms have already achieved what we can only hope to do in the next ten years. They are the ones mapping the frontiers of what immersive entertainment can be. Like immersive theatre, escape games vary widely in budget and quality, but unlike immersive theatre, people outside of NYC and LA have actually heard of them, and some have even played them. Oh, and did I mention that they easily operate 15-30 times a week, make decent money as for-profit companies when well-managed, and run for years?
Granted, we have different end goals: one wants to give people a fun night of puzzling and the other, well, let’s just say that they never get asked by critics if they consider their work “art” or not. And yes, this may be a novelty bubble, and escape rooms may go the way of laser tag.
But holy crap.
what’s an escape room?
Escape rooms are much easier to define than immersive theatre—although they may not involve escaping, nor do they necessarily happen in a room.
An “escape-the-room” game puts a small team in a room (or series of rooms) and requires them to solve a series of puzzles/challenges/tasks in order to achieve their goal. They have the following features:
It’s on a deadline: an in-room clock counts down from 60 minutes. When time’s up, you lose.
It’s hard to do: to win, teams must complete 100% of the puzzles in the game. Puzzles range from complex ciphers involving a Welsh dictionary to rotating bicycle pedals attached to the wall to see what happens.
It’s important: most often the player objective is to escape the locked room, but sometimes teams need to steal a painting, find evidence of a murder, banish a ghost, etc.
Those of you trained in the Meisner acting technique may recognize these three characteristics as essential to the Independent Activity exercise. When you’re doing something on a deadline and it’s hard and it’s important, you have the key ingredients of drama. And that’s what escape rooms deliver: a dramatic, adrenaline-pumping experience where everything is heightened. Honestly, I go a little crazy under these conditions and inevitably end up in a shouting match with a directional lock. GREAT DRAMA.
”I WISH YOU’D NEVER BEEN BORN!!”
Escape rooms may have started for puzzle people, by puzzle people, but they’ve rapidly grown into much more than that. They are an art form.
But can ESCAPE ROOMS be immersive theatre?
Absolutely. I include the escape room in my list of structures that immersive theatre creators work with. But even they are opting more often for sandboxes or dark rides than the more popular escape rooms, and escape room creators in their turn are just beginning to realize that, like it or not, they need the theatrical arts (at the very least, they need to consider sound, light, props and set design).
Despite the commonalities, it’s rare to find an immersive theatre escape room. Remember that tiny purple sliver in the Venn diagram? That’s tiny for a reason other than “we’re not interested in what the other one is doing.” An immersive theatre escape room is super-hard to do. Why? The generic requirements of immersive theatre (specifically: immersion and storytelling) conflict with the mechanics of the game. Boom. My thesis.
For those of you new to the genre, a typical escape room has an employee greet you at the door. He explains what an escape room is, assuages your fears, collects your waivers, and sometimes reads a story or plays a video that kicks off your game. He is not an actor. He then leaves the team alone in the game. With help from cameras and mics, a remote observer provides the team with hints and supervision.
But a few of these games go for something with more flair and involve actors, either outside or inside the room. This is where things start looking like immersive theatre.
To the best of my knowledge, there are only two games in the United States that advertise themselves as both an escape room and immersive theatre: Paradiso (New York City) and my work, The Man From Beyond: Houdini Séance Escape Room (Houston). You can safely assume the creators had the genre in mind when designing the experience and that those who know immersive theatre won’t leave disappointed.
I’m not certain why other games with actors aren’t marketing themselves similarly. Perhaps they’ve never heard of “immersive theatre,” or perhaps they know they’re light on story and don’t want to set up false expectations for anything more than a game. In Scott Nicholson’s survey of escape rooms in 2015 (ancient history for escape rooms, but this trend hasn’t changed much), he reported that 10% of games involved an actor. So actor-games are hard to find, but there are many more escape rooms with actors out there than the 2 who claim the immersive-theatre mantle.
So what does it take for an escape room with an actor to be immersive theatre?
I’ll start with Rule #2 because this is where escape room SHINE. Everyone is active in an escape room, on their feet exploring, observing, twisting, using their eyes, ears, hands, knees. This is what they came here to do.
A good wholesome dose of doing stuff (Escape the Room’s “The Home,” credit Benjamin Norman for The New York Times)
Escape rooms do a phenomenal job of making you feel special. You encounter something puzzling, you pursue it (don’t give up!), you have a flash of insight, execute it, and then trumpet: “I HAVE A KEY!!!” Whether you solved it solo or with teamwork, you’ve accomplished something real.
Well-designed escape rooms feature a variety of puzzle types, so the game rewards all sorts of behaviors and personality types. Immersive theatre tends to reward one kind of personality, whether that’s the empath (Third Rail), or the hyper-aggressive weasel (Punchdrunk). The things I do and become range more in escape rooms.
Escape rooms also deliver an individualized experience. Unless the puzzle flow is ferociously linear, people work on multiple puzzles at the same time. Like the best of immersive theatre, you’ll want to froth afterwards—to share a drink with your friends and swap stories of your individual experiences.
Rule #2 is actually the criterion that is hardest for theatre productions to meet, and escape rooms freakin’ nail this. Immersive theatre creators, pay attention. Think about game mechanics. Dare to make your audience more active. Rule #2 is what makes you both popular.
Rule #1: The world surrounds the audience, or “Immersion”
Escape rooms are certainly 360-degree spaces that you can touch, but I need a bit more world building than just “being in a room” to feel truly transported.
Most escape rooms feel like spaces designed for a game more than inhabited places. They often look a little empty. And there are good reasons for that…
1. Less stuff minimizes red herrings and streamlines puzzling.
2. Owners tend to be puzzle people, rather than set designers, artists, or theatre artists. Immersion, whether DIY or contracted out, costs money. Some owners also consider it non-essential, “nice to have,” but secondary to the puzzles. (For deep immersion, you need to design sets, puzzles, and story all at the same time).
3. People break things in escape rooms (especially in the ones that boast about their level of difficulty. Hard => frustration => destruction). The more stuff there is, the more stuff there is to break, which again, costs money.
There’s a thing in the business called “red herrings”—something that looks like a clue but isn’t. They can vary in degrees of evil from a book with pages circled in it in a room with number locks (most evil) to a chair with a lot number on the bottom (negligent) to a piece of art on the wall (fairly innocent). None of these are the clues you’re looking for. But how should you know better?
I’m pretty sure this film introduced me at a tender age to both “communism” and “red herring.” (Tim Curry in Clue)
Most escape room designers recognize that red herrings frustrate players and are not cool. And no matter what you do, players will always make up their own red herrings inside your room. So to streamline the puzzle experience, designers leave in only what’s relevant and kick out anything that’s extra. This leads to a sparse room that feels designed for a game, because it is.
Real spaces have stuff. LOADS OF IT. Imagine the escape room that would happen in your average American bathroom. It’d take 30 minutes just to correctly identify the puzzle. Compare it also to the deep décor in the McKittrick. How long would it take to find and solve just one puzzle in the fifth-floor hair-lock filing room? Because it’s not a game, but an experience, immersive theatre can go all out on décor in a way an escape room never can.
I recently played a game that went for immersive décor. In his introduction, the game master requested that we handle “the museum room” very gently. I’m sure this rule was instated retroactively, when they realized that the room as-designed couldn’t withstand the beating that escape rooms take. And even with the rule, the game master had to tell my team twice to get out of that room and stop searching in there. There was a lot to look at. How were we supposed to know there was nothing more to find in that space? But it was a beautiful room, totally befitting the absent-character who inhabited the space.
In that escape room, the immersive environment came in conflict with the mechanics of the game. Which should win?
I stand guilty of a similar sin. I took an immersive-theatre-design approach for our tarot reading room at Madame Daphne’s—it hosts a density of details.
Madame Daphne eyes the details in her tarot reading room
But I can only get away with it by explicitly telling players that you don’t have to remember anything in that room. And even with that rule, I still hear the occasional team talk at the start of the game about potential “clues” they found in the lobby. It’s a hard tightrope to walk.
But immersion goes beyond what you hang off the walls. There should be a deliberately-crafted logic to the space, evidence of human, or alien, or cat behavior that informs everything there. Nothing should be random—every item contributes to building the world.
The generic conventions of escape rooms make this exceptionally hard to do. We call it “escape room logic”—there are numbers on the back of these pillows, so let’s go put some iterations of these numbers into this lock that happens to be on this cupboard—wait, what? Who the hell lives in this apartment?!?
In a recent game I played at a high-quality company in the US, the immersion actually fooled me. I expected a device to work, like in Myst, and kept waiting for my team to do the thing that would inevitably give it power. Instead, I should have paid attention to what was sharpie-d on it and plugged it into a nearby lock. In a way, the absurd, not-a-thing-a-human-would-do escape rooms tropes stood out more in this game because the sets were so believable.
But even with all these hurdles, escape room creators are beginning to consider immersion an essential part of the experience, and I couldn’t agree more. Strange Bird Immersive has placed a bet that people want a unique experience much more than they want hard puzzles. We love puzzles, but we got into this business to deliver a potentially-transformative experience, with puzzles conceived as a means to that end. Every escape room advertises itself as a cinematic adventure in which you’re the star of a story. Shouldn’t the game itself make good on that promise? Good news is more and more companies are delivering on that promise every day, walking that tight-rope of deep immersion and clean gameplay.
rule #3: live performers telling a story
To be “theatre,” we need an actor. Some games use an in-room game-master to monitor and hint the players, but putting on a lab coat doesn’t make you an actor. There’s a difference between an in-character game master and an actor. Is the actor a pillar of the experience? Is there a character arc, and is this person advancing a story? Or could you replace the actor with cameras and a video screen and not have taken the soul out of the game?
Which brings us to story. Characters in theatre are there to progress a story. Story has a beginning, middle, and end—what’s happening changes. A scenario is not a story. I’m not certain where to draw the line, but “escape the zombie” doesn’t quite count. Granted, every team leaves an escape room with their story: “first we did X, which unlocked Y, which we paired with Z to get the key to Q, etc.” But immersive theatre delivers narratives more interesting than a list of actions taken. There needs to be more, a there there, whether that’s players uncovering a story from the past or a narrative journey that players experience for themselves. Real story in escape rooms is rare.
Because it’s hard! If the story is presented tangentially, the players will ignoreit—the things must be solved! Integrating story into an escape room means making the solution to the puzzle require engagement with the story. You can’t solve it unless you pay attention to the story. That’s a damn high bar for your average escape room puzzle. I’m not sure even we achieve it.
I think an escape room is by its nature hostile to immersive theatre work. Everyone’s too frantic and focused on the puzzle in front of them to heed the actor, who is rarely the center of puzzle-attention. In the same way that people scan a letter to find “the tricky detail” instead of reading it, they tune out the actor until the actor’s “tricky detail” is needed. The actor is just another obstacle on the path to winning.
”Trapped in a Room With a Zombie” gets it: the actor is a literal obstacle to gameplay. The Zombie does NOT waste time giving us her character arc.
Despite these difficulties, I believe story is worth fighting for. Story is what can lift an entertaining night of puzzles into a transformative experience that unseats your soul. That is the aim of art, isn’t it?
Strange Bird decided back in 2015 that if we wanted to tell a story with actors, we had to do so outside of gameplay. Our actor moments function as cut-scenes and bookends: we offer a longer experience than the traditional 60 minutes of gaming, which frees us to deliver a complex narrative that doesn’t compete with the game for player attention (get a taste of the story in our new trailer). It’s not the wisest financial move—we can run far fewer games a day than our competitors—but it’s what the narrative needed, and I hope other companies try out a similar structure some day. It makes for a more complete experience.
But it is financially stupid.
room escape artist’s list
Lisa and David Spira over at Room Escape Artist are the juggernaut reviewers of escape rooms. They’ve played over 360 of them, and they’re also fans of immersive theatre.
David and Lisa Spira: Room Escape Artists, reviewers, and genuinely nice people. (Photo credit: Michael Zawadzki)
I asked them for rooms they consider to be immersive theatre experiences as well, and here is their list of games that meet their criteria:
“1) Have actors; 2) Are escape rooms; 3) For whatever reason I think they capture the immersive theatery je ne sais quoi”
Note that this list is only for rooms they have played, so it’s not comprehensive, but it’s a great place to start! (Updated February 11, 2018)
CLOSED Club Drosselmeyer in Boston (Review), “which is one of the best examples of escape room / immersive theater intermingling.” A sequel is rumored for this winter… A Pirate’s Tale in Orlando (Review)
Go PLAY!
Unless you’re in LA or NYC (the current hubs), you probably don’t have any immersive theatre within a full-day’s drive of where you live. But chances are you do live in a town with an escape room—or twenty! And even if it’s missing a narrative, even if it’s not striving for immersion, an escape room always delivers an active experience.
Strange Bird Immersive decided to launch with an escape room, because Houstonians had actually heard of them. It’s our foot in the door. Escape rooms offer a major opportunity for introducing immersive work to wider audiences, getting folks addicted nationwide to experiential entertainment. Yes, it’s seriously hard to meld the two genres together in a way that doesn’t frustrate players nor shortchanges the story, but it’s not impossible.
We have a lot to learn from each other. I hope immersive theatre starts experimenting more with gaming elements—a wider range of engagement. And I hope the escape room industry in its turn will pivot towards what immersive theatre does so well—a transportive experience that delivers immersion and story—actor or no actor.
In The Man From Beyond, our acting style is like jazz. We have a set structure and certain beats to hit, but the cast interprets the tune a little differently every time to fit our audience’s behavior and our own impulses in the moment. After a performance this weekend with a talkative group, Brad Winkler gushed, “I was scat-singing that whole scene!” Which, like jazz, feels magical.
Sometimes it feels REALLY magical
Here are a few ways we’re using the concept of responding to reality—that thing that just happened—to enhance immersion.
Suddenly, a theme
Recently Strange Bird Immersive had the pleasure of hosting Jessica Goldman of the Houston Press (read her review of the show here). Early in the experience, I looked over my shoulder at her, a classic “clocking of the audience.” Her friend grinned and warned me, “Don’t trust her.” Daphne responded, “My dear, I don’t trust anyone. I’m a medium. I’ve learned that over time.”
Whenever I get interesting material from the audience, I try to call back to it, even beyond the immediate response. I saw an opportunity to thread the concept of “trust” through other moments in my scene work, so this simple comment grew into a larger and totally original theme that night, highlighting Daphne’s vulnerability with her audience. It was neat—and it’ll never happen again. That’s special.
Audience Care
Not many immersives have the luxury of being able to stop the show, but the structure of ours allows some wiggle room. An audience member once started coughing something fierce during Rules Hall. With a space so intimate, no one could ignore it—and why should we? I stopped the scene, asked if I could help, and she said “Yes, I’d like to use my inhaler. Could I go get it, please?” (We lock up personal belongings in the neighboring room on a voluntary basis).
“Of course, my dear.” Two minutes later, we resume, and everyone proceeds to enjoy a cough-free experience. Now that’s customer service. Eat your heart out, proscenium theatre!
Backstory becomes story (Spoiler level 1 for MAN FROM BEYOND)
Our other character in the show once had the players run out on him into the neighboring room, in a wild attempt to “solve his puzzle”—when the correct solution is a simple answer to his simple question. I’m not certain what they were hoping to find out there, but the actor had to get them back in the other room. He objected, “This doesn’t feel right. I don’t think I should be here. I should be back in the other room, with all my things.” He used the metaphysical logic that we created for the show to lure them back to where they needed to be. Brilliant.
I am all for writing backstory for your characters, with the guidepost being choosing details that raise the stakes of your text (it’s not imagination for imagination’s sake). But in immersive theatre, it’s even more important to know your character. That backstory may just become the story sometime.
What’s that noise? (SPOILER LEVEL 1 for MAN FROM BEYOND)
I once attended a performance of Hamlet a little too near MinuteMaid Park. That night’s baseball game ended in a fireworks show of 15-minutes-duration that landed smack-dab in the middle of Ophelia’s funeral sequence and the fencing duel. What could the actors do but ignore it? The poor audience too was tasked with pretending it wasn’t happening. An impossible task. The cast bravely ignored it, and the audience bravely strained their ears to here iambic pentameter instead of BOOM, but we all know our efforts failed that night. There are limits to what we can ignore.
Why didn’t they just halt the show?
But would that have been better? Which is the greater sin: to stop the momentum of Hamlet at its climax, or to forge ahead when you know no one can hear you? Honestly the only good solution available to them is to MOVE, which this company promptly did when a better location presented itself.
An infelicitous location is not a sin Strange Bird is immune to, either. The Silos at Sawyer Yards, where we installed The Man From Beyond, resides next to some active railroad tracks. Within our first week of build-out in the space, we realized we’d need to say something about trains. With player-responsive sound effects and a cleverly hidden sub-woofer to give the room a good rumble, teams could easily misinterpret the rumble of a train as positive feedback on a puzzle.
The Red Herring Express pulls into the station. (“leviathanation” by artist Huang Yongbing)
Solution? Acknowledge it. During Rules Hall, Madame Daphne declares, “Sometimes a train is just a train.” It elicits a laugh, but the best part comes when a train goes by, and players reassure each other out loud, “Hey! Sometimes a train is just a train!”
Just a train. Right? Right?
It’s the exact opposite of what a theatre gets to do. And guests love it. Rather than have a moment that kicks them out of the experience, we harness the inevitable appearance of a train to help blur the edges of our show with the wider world.
payoff
I’ve been talking about it for weeks. What does all this response amount to?
Specialness: guests feel special because the performance is tailored to them.
Relationship: you can’t connect with someone who’s express-training a script.
Presence: immersive theatre gives the gift of bodily presence to the audience. Response confirms to the mind what the body knows: a sense of beingthere. When they push on something, and it gives, that only plunges them deeper in the immersion.
Liminality: each time we own the reality, the boundary between the real world and our imaginary world blurs. As an immersive theatre artist, I want to create experiences that flirt with reality as much as possible. That paves the way for such transformative notions as, “I was a different person in there. Can I be that person out here, too?”
The world in Silos Studio #213 is real. And that’s our super-power.
In traditional theatre, directors and actors talk a lot about subtext. After all, the playwright has set the text for us, the words are not in dispute, so we devote our creative energies to realizing all the ways people would live out these lines and communicate non-verbally. How would they move, respond, and betray their deeper meanings? That’s subtext.
In immersive theatre, when performers respond to their audience and other realities around them, not only do we deliver subtext, but we can wield the far mightier weapon of text proper.
The Albee Controversy
This past May, the theatre community enjoyed a great kerfuffling that had everyone taking sides. A producer in Portland had cast a black actor in the role of Nick in Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? When the Albee estate got word of this, they more or less requested that Nick be re-cast as Caucasian as intended by the author. When the producer refused, the Albee Estate rescinded the rights to the show.
Note that this casting choice requires cutting lines that refer to Nick’s blonde hair and blue eyes, so it’s not just subtext that changes with this casting. (Although this raises another the question: should only Aryans be cast in the role?)
So: is the Albee Estate correct in policing the interpretation of the play? Or should directors be free to cast differently than the author imagined, and so tell a new story within the old story?
I fall heavily on the side of the Estate. Virginia Woolf? is a staunchly realistic play that reflects a specific time and place (personally, I consider it too old to be understood by 2017 audiences, our culture of relating has changed so much). A mixed-race marriage, although legal in New England at the time, would hardly be common. Add that to the mix, and you alter the fundamental dynamics of the play. As Albee himself considered it, a mixed-race marriage “would not have gone unacknowledged in conversations in that time and place and under the circumstances in which the play is expressly set.”
Essentially: there would be text. Adding subtext where the behaviors of George, Martha, Honey, and Nick acknowledge the race issue isn’t enough. It’s simply not a thing humans would do. While it’s true that we don’t always say what we feel, things can reach a point where something is a big enough deal that we’d respond with words proper. And words are not within the rights of directors who’ve licensed a play.
And honestly, if you want to tell that story, get thee to a keyboard. Write it yourself! No one’s stopping you but you.
authors vs. Auteurs
I think theatre is suffering from an epidemic of auteur directors: directors who feel they can—or should—tell “new” stories with the same old scripts. Most often, they want to cast light on prejudices, or perhaps they just want to make things more interesting. Likely there’s some vanity involved in doing something “unique” with Hamlet. But this approach, if not handled very astutely, ends up fundamentally changing the story as written. It can easily slip into Stunt Theatre.
Probably our Shakespearean traditions are to blame: to keep his supremely old plays relevant, directors often take wild liberties that involve unusual casting and bizarre settings, plus plenty of judicious cuts or textual changes to make it all hang together. No problem—there’s no Estate to defend Shakespeare! I myself have indulged in such liberties in the past: modernizing Hamlet and gender-swapping Horatio into a friend-zoned woman, turning Salerio into a courtesan fond of serving the priest Solanio.
Baker Shakespeare’s production of The Merchant of Venice (2013)
Note how both of these changes gave a new and sizeable part to an actress—the real goal behind my machinations. Did I go too far? I thought my Salerio/Solanio choice added to the sense of Venetian corruption, important in a play where there are no heroes. I think I toed the line of auteuring that underlines themes instead of undermines them. But no doubt Shakespeare would have written very bawdy text if this was what he intended! Were my audiences confused that the characters never verbally acknowledged Salerio’s status in the community? The reality of the world I gave them grated against the text-as-written—and only words could resolve that tension.
It’s more acceptable in Shakespeare: the heightened language has an alienating effect on the audience—we’re already experiencing unrealistic behaviors—and so we can live with the lack of people talking about what’s actually going on before our eyes. Plus we know Shakespeare’s plays well and can usually identify the director’s flourishes. With other stories though, auteurs can easily leave their audiences fundamentally confused.
Words speak louder than actions
We communicate a great deal with our bodies, but to really get things done, we use words. It’s one thing to be eyeing me all night, but a totally different, impossible-to-ignore thing when you ask, “Want to go back to my place?” We miss body language all the time (my now-husband missed mine for months!), but unless we have our earbuds shoved deep into our auditory canals, we don’t miss words.
Obligatory otter
When it comes to communication and response, words are the more powerful tool. Immersive theatre, uniquely positioned as responsive storytelling, should use words freely. Especially when something attention-grabbing happens, words help diffuse the tension between the reality of the moment and the imaginary world of the story. Auteur theatre can only dream of such powers.
Now of course, I got permission from my author before that first time I veered off-script. Happily the authors of The Man From Beyond decided that it’s more important to respond to the moment than it is to stick to the script. So sometimes text gets skipped or replaced, and I keep that up until it feels natural to get back on track. I think that’s great. Keeping things real should matter more in this genre.
If there’s a ban on text as in Sleep No More, performers have to rely on body language to respond to or correct their audience. How adept they are at manipulating our bodies to do what they want! But if the format of the show allows for words, more powerful response is possible. The audience may not respond to Madame Daphne parting the curtain, but they’ll never ignore “Please, follow me.”
I think language is particularly helpful in audience correction: it’s faster, clearer, and easier to internalize as you continue inside the experience. My first time at the McKittrick, I got in a brief skirmish with a black mask. I didn’t understand at first that he was blocking my way on purpose; if he could have said “You can’t go in there,” it would have cleared matters up much faster. (Yeah, I…uhhh…tried to follow Lady Macbeth into her glass box.)
So whenever a player goes astray, has a clever notion, or something interesting happens, expect Madame Daphne to throw down some serious TEXT.
When it comes to wielding the superpower of response, nothing compares to improv theatre.
Improv’s life-blood is being responsive. It’s made-up on-the-spot, more human in many ways than a play. Without a script or even a set destination, improvisational actors have to respond constantly to each other, and they’ll often incorporate audience response as much as they can. Basically, they don’t ignore a damn thing.
Audiences explode with laughter when a performer deftly responds to something that just happened. The more an improviser can integrate the reality of the current situation, the better. “Your name is Carly, and you’re a biologist? Let me sing a song tailored just for you.” “Damn, I just forgot your character’s name in this scene. Let me acknowledge that with a quick quip.” Crowds go wild.
The atmosphere becomes electric. This is LIVE! The audience feels special, because they are witnessing something real and unrehearsed, happening only in the here-and-now of this time-and-place.
And we love it the most when even they crack up. (The inimitable Colin & Ryan, Whose Line Is It Anyway?)
Note how audiences of comedy-improv are not the same folks wandering into your local professional blackbox. One does not get from a play what one gets at an improv show, and vice versa. Can immersive theatre—devoted to designed storytelling and live response—capture both audiences? I hope so. (Granted, there aren’t a lot of comedy immersives being done right now, and people want comedy. Thoughts for another day).
SPECIALNESS
Giving audiences a sense of “specialness” is key to improv’s success—and immersive theatre takes that to the next level. The more room we allow for response and relation, the more audiences will go away feeling special. That’s a serious gift.
The generation brought up with “special snowflake” sydrome is all grown-up and looking for entertainment. We want to brag to friends about the once-in-a-lifetime thing we witnessed last weekend. We want the celebrity experience. When an actor chooses us for a scene or incorporates our presence or, better yet, actions into the show, we feel HUGE and will undoubtedly brag about it at the watercooler that is Facebook.
Hopefully with your company’s hashtag.
IMPROVISING INSIDE A SCRIPT
But immersive acting is not improv. I’m an utter dunce at improv and was intimidated at the prospect of being cast in my own show (a choice we made for financial reasons. Okay, and I’m not terrible at it). To my delight, I discovered I could handle immersives just fine. My goal isn’t to be imaginative or funny; it’s to be honest to my character in that moment. Improvising within those parameters comes naturally to me. It’s more like when something goes wrong on stage, and you address it…except that happens about 20 times a performance instead of once a production.
At a recent show I attended of True West, an actor struggled to hang up a phone on the wall. Once he finally got it to stay, he flipped it off—the realest and funniest moment in the performance. That’s improv. That’s the wondrous “live” part of “live theatre,” that we trumpet so proudly to get butts in the seats, but so rarely actually occurs. Ask any actor or avid-theatre-goer for a favorite moment in a play: my bet’s they’ll recall some wonderfully wild improvised moment.
Immersive theatre guarantees that improvisation happens every show. Instead of waiting for a prop to go rogue, immersive theatre introduces the wild card of the active audience. Everything and everyone is in play—electricity pervades the air. And people love the hell out of it. “Every show’s different” is a promise that immersive theatre actually makes good on.
But here’s the rub: in a play or otherwise rehearsed piece, audiences can always tell the difference between improvisation and the script. The voice shifts, the body changes. (Which says something about how far actors are from being convincing humans. Oh, well. It’s hard.)
Immersive actors should learn to shift seamlessly between the two modes: script-improvised response-script. We don’t want the improvisations to stand out as “of a different kind”—the more improvised the entire show feels, the more special the audience feels. In The Man From Beyond, we made a deep commitment to pass off the fantastical as actual. If we did our job right, you should find yourself asking “Is this real? Or part of the game?” Everything, from my props to my actors, needs to feel real in The Man From Beyond (well…with one major exception…and that’s specifically designed to feel fake).
“Stop acting” is my go-to note as a director.
A THIRD STYLE OF ACTING
Acting schools approach improv and scripted acting as separate disciplines—you will rarely encounter a true master of both. With immersive theatre, we now have a third style of acting, somewhere in-between the two pillars. It’s not all fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants like improv: there’s a story (or at least a very specific scenario) that doesn’t change night to night. But it also lacks the rigidity of scripted acting: there’s an audience around you that you cannot ignore.
Should we open a special school? As a holder of a useless master’s degree, I’m not clamoring for it, but I’m positive we’ll get there eventually. Right now all immersive actors are learning on the job, and probably each show will always have a learning period, as the available real estate for response depends greatly on the immersive’s structure.
Scripted improv?
L’esprit de l’escalier (literally)
At Strange Bird Immersive, we keep a living document that we call “l’esprit de l’escalier,” or more simply, “answers to weird responses.”
In improvisational theatre—or even in staged acting, when something goes wrong—a performer often thinks of the super-clever response after the moment has passed. But immersive actors, thanks to the genre’s devotion to small audiences and extended runs, will most likely face that moment again.
While there’s a very long tail for audience responses, I can attest that the same sorts of behaviors keep coming up: laughter in this section, jackassery at this question, some guy lies that he did it (when he didn’t) just to see what you’ll do about it, etc. We write down every unusual audience behavior and then set an ideal response to that behavior. This way audiences can get the best response without breaking immersion. More than making me look cool under pressure, the document primarily serves to give new actors in a role a jump-start on the behaviors they are likely to face.
Is anyone else keeping logs like this for their immersives?
I’m sure improv actors are appalled right now: it’s against the spirit of the whole thing! Isn’t scripting improvisations like this taking away the electricity of the moment I’ve been praising this whole time? Maybe. Like all things in acting, it depends on delivery. What I do know is it does make the script and the improv feel more of the same kind, and I think I value that more. Plus it saves us from asking every new actor to the fight the wolves anew. It’s the responsible thing to do.
We’ve all been there before: our hero on stage is tearing up a letter, but then an errant piece drops to the floor. This was not rehearsed. This was not a part of the plan. He exits, the scene ends, but the scrap of paper remains. Scene after scene: it remains. You can’t help it. You’re looking at one thing. We no longer have a play about revenge, we have a play about a scrap of paper, journeying through time and space.
A cause we can all get behind.
Sure, it’s acting 101 to take care of things that go wrong on stage, from dropped props to flubbed lines. But when the moment’s not rehearsed, actors can get anxious and think ignoring it may be better than addressing it. They’re not authorized to change blocking or add text, so ignoring it is their default option. In fact, ignoring things is part of the fundamental contract of traditional theatre. Actors need to ignore a lot of things, the audience most of all, to believe in their imaginary circumstances. We ask the audience to join us: ignore your seat, ignore the artificiality of the fourth wall, ignore the lights, ignore all ambient noises, ignore the velcro on the costumes—we need you to imagine with us (see Henry V: Prologue.) And above all else, please ignore the strange fact that these people in front of you can’t seem to see you or hear you when you laugh, cry, or cough.
What happens when we remove that contract and burst that weird bubble in front of us where some things are happening and some are not?
Immersive theatre doesn’t make ignoring things a cornerstone of the art. Even in a dreamscape immersive that isn’t aiming to deliver realism—and where people seem to be of a dancing species—the audience does not have to make as many imaginative leaps. We’re there. So are the performers. Whatever you see, hear, touch, taste, or smell IS happening in the world of the show, too.
Okay, granted, you should still ignore the lights. And some immersives will still ignore the audience (a cowardly choice, in my opinion, as actor-audience eye contact is the most powerful tool of this trade). But just your physical presence alone in the space gives immersive theatre a super-power. It feels realer, truer, more in your bones when you experience it. And when the performer is free to live the scene with you? It’s a game-changer. Not only will immersive performers pick up every fallen prop, they have an open invitation from the genre to acknowledge anything that’s happening, whether that’s an audience member’s response or an unplanned noise.
Go ahead. Get that audience member a tissue.
Thing is, human beings respondto things. One of my acting coaches, Philip Lehl, has a favorite phrase when correcting actors: “That is not a thing a human would do.” To which I say, let’s pursue that more thoroughly. How can we make this art form more recognizably human? To not respond to everything that’s happening, as players on stages do, diminishes the character’s humanity and ultimately fails to build a reciprocal relationship with the audience. The vast majority of plays require performers to ignore responses from their audience (Shakespeare and his marvelous asides being the exception here). And love isn’t much fun when it’s not requited.
Immersive theatre requites. This genre offers actors the chance to be more human than stage plays ever dreamed possible. It’s up to creators to decide what we want to do with that power.
GEEZ, lady, What DID traditional theatrE EVER DO TO YOU?
It’s possible value language is creeping in here. I should perhaps state my bias before it’s too late, that I have a psychological fear of not being seen, and I love immersive theatre because it loves me back. Lately, when a close-up actor in a traditional play studiously ignores me, I’ve felt compelled to trip him on his way out, as negative attention would be better than none. And at least THAT would be REAL. I should probably stop seeing theatre.
So while I may find it personally frustrating, I don’t want to say categorically that the “bubble” is “bad.” But it is quite clear that immersives burst it, and some new powers come from that. And, well, I’m excited by that. I didn’t start a traditional theatre company.
More to come on this “superpower,” with comparative thoughts on improv and anecdotes from The Man From Beyond.
If an immersive production offers the audience any opportunity to speak, chances are actors are going to get some smart-ass remarks.
Design can do a lot to reduce this problem: invest the story with importance, make the stakes personal, have the actors take the story seriously, deliver a realistic world so the audience isn’t embarrassed to be “caught” playing along. All of these things can help communicate to the audience that it is in their best interest to go along with the world. But there’s inevitably still that person who would rather watch the world burn.
And The Man From Beyond has lots and lots of opportunities for the audience to speak.
Why Be a smart-ass?
While audiences may not be aware when they are disrespecting the actor, smart-asses know full-well what they are doing. A smart-ass wants to assert his/her power, usually at the expense of someone else. There’s a “Gotcha!” edge to these remarks, whether they are pointing out a technicality in your language or just screwing around with you.
The story of The Man From Beyond climaxes with a very hard question. It’s jolting, it requires a deep belief in the world we’ve built to answer, and it’s HARD. (And we know it. We have a complex decision tree for the actor to memorize for this moment.) Some teams sit in silence, barely daring to breathe. Sometimes, a brave soul steps up. And every once in a while, a wild smart-ass appears. Or 2 or 3 at the same time.
They seem to come in packs.
The audience has paid good money to enter a new world and to play along. Why would someone want to break it? Some theories…
Believing in the world makes you emotionally vulnerable. A “smart” comment keeps you in control and emotionally distant (= safe).
Your friends are watching: you don’t want to appear foolish in front of them and instead you want to show them how “smart” you are.
You want to see the actor squirm. Treating the performer as an actor instead of as the character also translates to enforcing your emotional safety.
All of these motivations are ultimately about maintaining power. But no worries, smart-ass audience member. I get it. Emotions are scary, powerful things. You don’t have the dark anonymity of a traditional theatre to protect you. You don’t want to betray your “weakness” under the lights of the show or in the eyes of your friends.
Despite its reputation for intimacy, immersive theatre is a profoundly public experience. To be active is to be an actor. Even in a 1-on-1, you are being watched.
It’s okay. Your behavior is totally justified. But you’ll also never be moved.
What happens next?
When smart-asses play “Gotcha!” they are expecting the actor either to:
1) Flinch momentarily, and then keep plowing through the script, or
2) Break character, so that “they win.”
Which means the actor should respond with…
3) Taking what was said as truth and responding to it honestly from the character’s POV as much as possible.
They aren’t expecting that at all.The world is not supposed to be that real. This tactic has the two-fold advantage of not-rewarding the smart-ass (so the behavior won’t continue) and making for a better, more truthful scene. At the end of the day, the smart-ass is my scene partner. I need to take as true whatever text and subtext they give me. For me, even more important than the planned script is the truth of the moment. I follow that truth wherever it takes me. And most often my audience quickly follows in my wake. (And then I can get back on script.)
The mantra to not take it too personally is important here. The goal is not shaming or revenge; it’s honesty. You don’t want to answer your smart-ass with anger. In fact, upping your vulnerability may work best. I advise against aggression and recommend making a positive claim: “I thought we were friends. Please help me,” etc. It’ll depend on the situation. But I do sometimes tell someone who’s obviously lying, “You’re lying.” They guffaw and agree—I’ve just wonthem with that response.
But this technique does come with a risk of escalating the situation, in a way pretending you didn’t hear them doesn’t. It feels really, really good to the actor and potentially puts down the smart-ass—this is a power-play situation, after all! But 95% of cases I’ve seen won’t fight when they realize I can fight back within the parameters of the world.
But when they smart-ass me again, and again, and perhaps a fourth time, I bow out. They clearly want nothing to do with me.
The most important rule goes unspoken. I have not yet encountered a production—immersive or otherwise—that explicitly told audiences “to respect the actors.”* After all, no one sneaks tomatoes into the theatre anymore.
A bushel of Renaissance disrespect.
Theatre creators hope respect happens naturally.
Spoiler: it doesn’t.
Note that I am not defining “disrespect” as talking to the actors (unless there’s a no talking rule). Disrespect in immersive theatre is any audience behavior that blocks the actor from performing the rehearsed scene/interaction. This block may be verbal or physical (refusing to leave a chair, stealing props, not moving out of the way, etc.). Immersive theatre is often a designed experience (rather than an emergent one), and the show is at its best if audiences yield us the space to deliver the experience we designed for them.
*I haven’t witnessed it myself yet, but some immersives like Delusion do deliver rules about actor-audience interaction. Haunts definitely have a long history of rules like “don’t touch the actors,” and immersives could do worse than to borrow a page from the haunt playbook.
When was the last time you saw a play?
It is very, very rare for an audience member to behave badly at traditional theatre. But what if you’ve never attended traditional theatre before? Or maybe the last time was 10 years ago, back in school? The passive-mode that comes naturally to those of us attending shows on a monthly or even weekly basis isn’t an ingrained behavior in such a person.
Immersive theatre reaches out to new audiences. Younger generations who would find The Odd Couple boring (and offensive). People who play video games. Tourists. Sky-divers. Seekers of the new. Runners who think stories are better when you’re running after them. You know, anyone under the age of 60.
It’s best to stretch before the show.
When the theatrically-uninitiated encounter an actor on their own plane, they don’t default to respectful-audience-mode. Immersive theatre puts them in active mode; why should they suddenly be passive just because an actor showed up?
We’ve had several teams come through The Man From Beyond that I lovingly deem “assholes” whodo not knowthey are being assholes. Their faces betray no smirk, no smugness, no consciousness of power play. They see nothing inappropriate in their behavior with the performer. Since they seem so ignorant of their disrespect, I can only conclude that they go to the theatre very, very rarely. To such an audience, an actor is just another person; s/he has no privileged status in the group. How can we get mad at such an audience? They believe in the world perhaps more deeply than we do.
Why are you here?
In proscenium theatres, the audience signs a contract: whatever it is the actors are doing is what I’m here for. Even if it’s crap, the story they are telling is what I paid good money to see—so hush up. But immersive theatre offers myriad goals. People can attend to explore environments, to experience a dreamscape, to play a game—or to interact with actors and witness the story. If you’re not attending for the actors, you’ll be less inclined to give them the space they need to proceed with their part of the experience—because you’ve got something more important to do! Sometimes the actor’s goal and the audience’s goal may even be in conflict, say, if you’re exploring a desk, but the actor needs to sit there. There can be only one winner.
Hey actor! You’re blocking my game!
Certainly the award for most-likely-to-disrespect in The Man From Beyond are die-hard escape gamers who buy tickets for the pleasure of solving at least three convoluted ciphers (so sorry to disappoint, guys!). While we carefully crafted the show so our actors don’t interrupt game play, these sorts of players will always consider the actor a bit of a nuisance, or sometimes even an obstacle in the way of solving the next puzzle. Which (spoiler!) is not the case.
how to earn respect
Like with all rule-breaking, it is up to the immersive actor to enforce the rules in real-time.
Earning the audience’s respect starts with “presence”—that allusive magic that all actors seek. The performer is on the same plane as the audience, but with physical presence, can establish a privileged status within that group. The actor’s confidence will lead to audience trust. It is perhaps not pure coincidence that when I was most exhausted as an actor, I hosted one of my most disrespectful teams to date. I failed to establish a strong presence, and they caught on to that energy and so ran a few circles around me that afternoon.
The writers must also invest the actor’s role with importance. If the audience sees that what the actor is doing matters and isn’t just a waste of their time, they will give the actor room to work. The actor, too, must take the story seriously—certainly for dramas, but even if it’s a comedy, as all comedies are funnier when they’re deadly serious to the characters. A serious tone leads to respect.
But even with strong presence and a sense of importance, you’ll still get that kid in school who refuses to respect Teacher on principle. When disrespect happens, the actor must immediately address it (verbally or physically). The audience doesn’t always know in immersive theatre what we want from them, so a prompt correction will let them (and anyone around them) know they are crossing the line. Once is usually enough. Performers in the McKittrick correct behavior all the time with glares or physical maneuvering. I like to use words, so the correction is even more public.
But what about the second time? Or the third time? What if correction fails to stick? Well, then…I guess they didn’t want that scene…did they?
We have aborted scenes before in The Man From Beyond. We fight hard and try to win them, but when the audience continuously fails to yield the actor the floor, then we simply retreat. I guess story isn’t why you bought your ticket. And that’s okay.
a word on walls
As stage actors, we want to take everything personally—to have “no wall” with our scene partners. But immersive actors can’t take everything personally. The audience is our scene partner, which could lead to some truly hairy customer service situations when they disrespect us and we take it too personally. Immersive actors need to keep a wall up, but about 20-yards back from the usual wall. When audiences hit that wall? Shut down, retreat, and don’t take it personally. It’s not you, it’s them. You fought valiantly.
Third Rail Projects takes a very different approach to immersive storytelling than Punchdrunk (see Breaking the Rules: Sleep No More). Instead of an open-world, “sandbox” experience, a Third Rail production divvies up the audience and puts them each on a set of rails, something kin to a “dark ride” of amusement parks. (I’ve always thought this company was well-named, given the house-style they developed). To keep audiences on these invisible rails, they provide an unusual set of rules.
(See my post on the importance of rules in immersive theatre here.)
RULES FOR THIRD RAILS PROJECTS
Do not open any doors yourself
Do not speak unless spoken to
I’ve witnessed these rules in action in their productions of Then She Fell (ongoing in Brooklyn), TheGrand Paradise (Brooklyn 2016), and Sweet & Lucky (Denver 2016), and I expect the same rules will apply in their upcoming Ghost Light (limited run in NYC this summer).
Calm Down, PLEASE
When I attended Then She Fell for the first time, Sleep No More was my only point of reference for immersive theatre. That show rewards me for being a hyper-aggressive weasel and will never be surpassed in my esteem because it made me realize who I really am.
Author showing here in SNM-mode, poised to tail her prey
To put it mildly, this is not the skill-set needed in Then She Fell. I entered the lobby space a little late, having waited in line for the restrooms, and when I noticed folks exploring the space, I went up to the closed door and opened it.
Luckily, the nurse pounced on me, iterating the rule “not to open doors.” Which she hadn’t told me yet. (All the more reason to cover the rules with the whole audience present instead of piecemeal.) Not a big deal, but I did have the reveal of one of the more magical sets spoiled for me. Me and my lame curiosity!
My first scene also made swift work of correcting my weasel-instincts. The doctor wanted me to sit far away from him across a table. I thought that was lame and got up to get closer to him. He insisted I sit back down—I bet they can tell when you’ve been to the McKittrick. I eventually took my cues from the performers, and I highly recommend that audiences accept the more relaxed, under-active, “you’re in good hands” experience. It opens you up to a different kind of connection. Third Rail Projects is never a game, and it’s certainly not a sport. The only way you can fail the show is by failing to be present with the actors.
DEfine “Door”
Unfortunately I still had not learned my lesson when I went to see Sweet & Lucky in Denver.
Those who experienced this production were indeed lucky (Sweet & Lucky)
I attended on the opening weekend. Again, we heard the rule not to open doors. My group had been following our main character for a while, but she yielded the set (and us) to another character, who turned off a few lamps and then promptly went through an “L shaped” passageway made of curtains. The show took place in a giant one-story warehouse, so sometimes curtains filled in for walls. PLEASE NOTE that she did not part the curtains, she didn’t need to touch them at all to go where she was going.
Naturally, I followed.
And my group of 7 more followed me.
About 15 minutes later, when we’d seen the most incredible sequence in the show (in a rather overly-crowded house), they activated the God-mic: “HOLD, PLEASE. ACTORS HOLD.” My heart was pounding, screaming “God, please no. No fire, no medical emergencies, don’t let them stop this show, I HAVE TO SEE THE END OF THIS SHOW.”
“We have a sorting error.” Eventually a very unhappy stage manager walked up to my overly-large group and asked, “Who here hasn’t seen ‘Swimming Hole?'” I raised my hand. Seven other people sheepishly raised theirs.
We had jumped the tracks.
He politely guided us to the space where we were supposed to be, but resetting a show of Third Rails’ complexity is no easy feat. If they take the show back 15 minutes, every actor has to go back 15 minutes, but so does every single audience member to the exact place where they were on the ride. Sorting the audience backwards couldn’t have been easy.
A typical Third Rail Projects spreadsheet. Not really. But I bet I’m close.
And in fact, they tried to start the show again, realized they had picked the wrong spot, and had to stop it and re-sort us all AGAIN in a totally different place (a mistake I am so grateful they caught—every moment in Sweet & Lucky matters). It wasn’t Episode 2 Cycle 2, but Episode 2, Cycle 1 where we needed to be!
Once we were all properly placed, they still had to work on going back to the right spot in the tech cues. The audience waited in place for 20 minutes in an un-air-conditioned warehouse while the tech team got things going again for us. I’ll never forget that moment. Nobody talked. NO ONE. We stuck to the rules. We believed in them. We all wanted to sustain the emotional place where we had been before the interruption. I’m grateful to everyone in that truck with me for committing to the magic so completely.
The show resumed, and it was magic. I don’t think I’ve ever cried so thoroughly.
But a simple rule in a vague situation misinterpreted by a single audience member literally broke the entire experience for all 70 people.
This is sort of on them for making the door in this case ambiguous. Are curtains that we don’t even have to touch technically doors? It’s also on the actress we followed for not clearly signaling we were to stay where we were and wait patiently for another character to guide us to where we needed to go next. (I bet she got much better at directing audiences as the run went on; I know I have.) It’s also on the story for having a moment where we didn’t have a guide and weren’t left closed off in a private room (we were in a large, open corridor).
But it’s also sort of on me and my damn weasel-mode. So let me say definitively, THIRD RAIL PROJECTS AND OFF-CENTER AND THE WHOLE CAST AND AUDIENCE OF SWEET & LUCKY: I AM SO SORRY.
This is not a conversation
Since the audience activity isn’t “where to go,” Third Rail uses eye contact, speech, and the occasional task to great affect to make the audience feel active in the story.
Most people come back from a Third Rail show recounting the profound questions they were asked. More than the tasks, the questions forge deep connections between character and audience, and the audience gains a sense of how the story relates to them. It’s brilliant. But it’s also dangerous. Hence the rule, “do not speak unless spoken to.”
They smartly recognize that too much speech in the experience would ruin the magic. You’re not often the only audience member in the scene, and if you can speak freely within your group, you might brush it off, make light, break the immersion. Enforcing silence makes us process what we see differently.
I’m not a fan of The Grand Paradise for many reasons, but no doubt my particular experience tainted it for me. You never get to choose your audience group. By bad luck, I was paired through the whole show with a talker. She kept asking our actors questions, engaging with them with tongue firmly in cheek, and making jokes—essentially making the show about her. It was a power play. She was clearly uncomfortable and refused to let the actors have any power over her whatsoever. Talking was her defense mechanism.
I was miserable. Magic wasn’t possible. I’ve never been made so wildly self-conscious, even as an actor, as “the talker” made me feel.
If only I could have drowned her in that tank (The Grand Paradise)
I partly blame the performers of The Grand Paradise for not enforcing their own rule on this unruly participant when the behavior presented itself and continued to present itself. It wouldn’t have taken that much effort to correct, and instead, it broke my show.
rules on rules
Audiences: know the rules of the particular show, and stick to them. Rules for one immersive are not the rules for another. More than just the quality of your personal experience is at stake here; everyone’s show is at risk. When in doubt, resort to passive-audience mode.
Producers, designers, actors: enforce your rules in real-time. Always err on the side of too much direction than too little. You’re doing incredible work, and you should stand ready to defend it.
99.9% of audiences don’t want to break the rules. But sometimes people go rogue, or more commonly, someone makes a mistake, and when a rule gets violated, the entire experience can break.
(See my post on the importance of rules in immersive theatre here.)
RULES FOR PUNCHDRUNK’S SLEEP NO MORE (NYC)
No talking
No cellphone use
Follow the guidance of the black masks
Wear your mask the entire time
Simple. Right? And yet I will hear people talking to their friends, flipping their masks up, or fiddling on their phones in the stairwell (which despite appearances is the highest trafficked area in the entire McKittrick). I WILL SHUSH YOU. If more than 1% of the audience committed these behaviors, I’d stop going. It’s no longer the experience it was designed to be.
I know it’s uncomfortable and sweaty. DEAL WITH IT.
No mask? No Mask!
The most unusual rule on this list is “to wear your mask the entire time.” While Punchdrunk’s custom-made bautas do wonderful artistic work (empowering the audience with anonymity, making the otherwise dopey-looking audience look spooky), their primary purpose is practical. Given the show’s large real estate and free-roam structure, audiences need to tell at a glance who’s a performer worth pursuing and who’s an audience member just screwing around.
At one memorable performance, my close friend earned the Malcolm one-on-one. He removed her mask, as in all SNM one-on-ones, to facilitate a more intimate connection. But he had gotten behind in the scene, and when the bell tolled Duncan’s death (Malcolm’s cue to run), he bolted out of there even faster than usual.
He forgot to return her mask.
She bolted out of there, too, tailing Malcolm down to the mezzanine. She arrived but didn’t realize she had no mask, and there was no way for her to get it back behind the locked door set on the fourth floor. Luckily a black mask pulled her aside, pointed out the problem, and asked her to wait. She sat on the couch and waited for her new mask.
Now I advise all of my friends to dress distinctively for immersives. Bold, dressy clothing tends to get the actor’s attention. Plus the performers can quickly confirm that it’s you that’s still following them.
Sporting my SNM uniform (center): no one can resist the red dress paired with running boots.
As my interestingly-attired friend sat on that couch without her mask, the audience started noticing her, and a small crowd formed. Unsurprisingly, she felt very self-conscious and did her best to look uninteresting. Which only made her more interesting. For some guests that night, she was a performer. What story of loss or acceptance did they see in her profound stillness?
The mistake wasn’t her fault, and it didn’t take long to correct. But within five minutes, the show broke because of a missing mask. Keep your mask on, please.
At New Year’s Eve 2014, the McKittrick spray-painted their typically white masks gold. A nice aesthetic touch, but practically it was a disaster. The gold didn’t contrast well enough in the dark for me to tell who matters at a distance. And when you’re on the actor-hunt, every second counts. Good designers know these details matter.
I am uncertain that a free-roam immersive can function smoothly without a means to distinguish audience from performers. I could be wrong. Maybe it’s not that hard to tell: audiences tend to be pretty boring. I hear that Speakeasy in San Francisco doesn’t make any distinction, and they even encourage the audience to dress in the time period. I look forward to a trip out there where I’ll wear my white beaded flapper dress, style my hair in bobbish curls, and fool the hell out of everyone.
No talking?
After (only) seven visits, I am still uncertain if Sleep No More wants me to hew religiously to the no-talking rule. It’s definitely a clear requirement out in the open world of the hotel. But what about in the locked door one-on-ones?
Most of the one-on-ones scripts don’t invite any response from you, but a few of them do present the possibility for you to talk.
Light spoilers ahead. I am often near Malcolm at the right time (or perhaps I’m subconsciously addicted to his wall slams), so I’ve won his one-on-one four times. Malcolm asks “Who are you?” Seems like he’s asking a question, right? I’ve offered four different actors different responses: Donalbain (my favorite), the Raven Queen, “never more.” In all of these Malcolm fails to acknowledge my response, and he never plays back in turn. In fact, I think he just slams me harder. Once I even filled out his line “Me thought I heard a voice cry” with “Sleep no more! Macbeth doth murder sleep!” (Okay, that was just pure cheek). From none of the actors, did I get a clear behavioral signal that he wanted me to answer his question.
But then why ask the question? This rule has me very confused! I’ve recently stopped answering Malcolm and focused on enjoying the ride instead. I think he prefers it that way. I think, even with the door locked and your mask off, Punchdrunk wants you to stay silent. The performer is the one showing you incredible things, after all, and (as witnessed above) he’s got a schedule to keep.
While we may like exceptions to rules in life, designing for a little exception in an immersive experience will only sow audience confusion and lead to behaviors you didn’t intend.
