HER Cooper, Author at Immersology

August 15, 2017August 15, 2017

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.

August 5, 2017January 31, 2019

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.

July 27, 2017October 3, 2022

The Activity Spectrum

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.

July 21, 2017July 5, 2023

Hard Mode: Making an Immersive Theatre Escape Room

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.

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?

Let’s look at the criteria that need to be met for immersive theatre…

Rule #2: the audience is active

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.

You have to jettison escape room logic for total immersion, and that isn’t easy to do. I predict that once the industry gets the décor thing figured out, this will be the next step. (For a good challenge to designers, read Scott Nicholson’s “Ask Why: Creating a Better Player Experience through Environmental Storytelling and Consistency in Escape Room Design“)

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 ignore it—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)

ATLANTA
Al Capone’s Speakeasy (Review)

HOUSTON
The Man From Beyond (Review)

NEW YORK
Accomplice (Reviews)—multiple games
Paradiso: The Escape Test (Review)
Paradiso: The Memory Room (Review)
The Sanatorium (Review)
SPECIAL SHOUT-OUT: RED (Review)—”not an escape room by any real definition. It’s an immersive game.” While it shouldn’t be confused for an escape room, RED doesn’t have any peers in the realm of immersive-theatre-games, so I couldn’t leave it off this list.

LOS ANGELES AREA
The Basement (Review)
The Basement’s The Study (Review)
The Nest (Review) Not considered by its creators as an escape room, but features light escape room-style elements
Zoe (Review)

PORTLAND AREA (BEAVERTON, OREGON)
Madame Neptune’s Voodoo Curse (Review)

TORONTO, CANADA
Escape Casa Loma (Review)

THE NETHERLANDS
The Girl’s Room (Review), “no actors in this one, but the tech made it feel like there was one.”
The Vault (Review)

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.

July 10, 2017February 1, 2019

Immersive Theatre’s Superpower, Part 4: Tales from The Man From Beyond

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.

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!”

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 being there. 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.

July 1, 2017February 1, 2019

Immersive Theatre’s Superpower, Part 3: The Primacy of Text

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?

A righteous defender of his story, or a dead author whose plays should allow open casting and new visions? (Edward Albee, © Christopher Felver/CORBIS)

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.

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.

June 20, 2017February 1, 2019

Immersive Theatre’s Superpower, Part 2: Improv and not Improv

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.

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?

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.

June 8, 2017February 1, 2019

Immersive Theatre’s Superpower: Responding, or You Don’t Have To Pretend Like That Didn’t Just Happen, Part 1

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.

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 respond to 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.

June 1, 2017February 1, 2019

Answering the Smart-Ass

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.

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 won them 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.

May 28, 2017February 1, 2019

Respect the Actor: the Unspoken Rule

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.

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.

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” who do not know they 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.

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.