In my last post, I defined a scene. Read it now, if you haven’t done so. It gets at the heart of good writing in any genre.
Ready? Strap in, this one’s a rant.
I’ll be honest. While I encounter weak scenes all the time in novels, television, plays, and film, there’s something about immersive entertainment that more often loses sight of what makes a good story.
What’s up with that?
Perhaps creators rarely have backgrounds as writers. Perhaps the creators have to do so much else to mount these insane productions that they forget about the writing part (which by the way… writing should come first. Or you’ll have problems. Just sayin’). But look: I get it. Just making the thing exist requires puzzle/interaction designers, set designers, set builders, software gurus, hardware gurus, electricians, prop fabricators, stage managers/game masters, painters, etc. It’s easy to forget in this avalanche of skills to add a writer to the team at project conception. (But please don’t.)
This is a skill, too. If it’s not one of yours, hire it out before you build a single thing.
Perhaps the problem might be that we don’t often have actors (or if we do, not many actors) for whom we can write more traditional scenes. The genre demands non-traditional scene writing. We instead tell stories through environmental engagement, voice overs, video recordings, maybe an actor here and there engaging with the audience. It’s easy to let these scenes fall into the trap of being exposition or world-building, also known as: irredeemably boring. Avoid this trap.
Maybe there’s other reasons. But understanding doesn’t lead to forgiveness. We need to step up our writing game in this industry.
To sum up my thinking on bad writing in the quippiest quip…
Backstory is not story, gossip is not drama, and information is not interesting.
Let’s break it down…
Backstory is not story
What happened before I arrive to the story is not where it’s at, because that’s not where I’m at. Even in a mystery plot, you need stakes in the here and now, a reason that you need to solve the mystery and soon. “The killer is still on the loose—and inside this snowed-in house” sort of stakes.
The killer must always be about to strike again.
Backstory is usually the history of the character or the history of the location or any other events that happened before my arrival on the scene. None of these is exciting, because it’s not happening to me, or even in front of me. You want to give players things that they do and things that they see. If you give them things that they learn, they’ll feel more like students back in school.
Worse yet is when backstory isn’t even a discovery point, but told to me at the beginning by a game master. People’s eyes glaze over when you tell them facts, especially when they’re standing on the threshold of an adventure. Reduce the facts, up the surprise.
Never start your experience with backstory monologues. I recommend crafting an inciting incident in lieu of backstory. Move the past to the present as much as you can. If something bad happened to require the adventure, can players experience that bad thing, rather than being told about that bad thing?
With an inciting incident, you’ll probably discover you can get by with less backstory. Consider too if any remaining backstory may have a greater impact in the middle of the story, rather than at the crucial beginning, when we risk losing people forever.
Think about the story you want your audience to tell to their friends who weren’t there. The best stories will have them using the personal pronoun “I” or “we.”
“And then we caught her lying to us.” “And then we powered up the ship.” “And then we forged the will.”
VERSUS
“And then we read about the maid being unhappy.” “And then we learned why the pirate buried the treasure.” “And then we watched a video about the war between the Snarlofs and Boogatons.”
Let your audience be the subject and give them the very best verbs.
See how much fun they’re having?
The temptation to write stories that only reveal “what happened here” is strong in immersive theatre and escape rooms, I think because they don’t require a character present, and it’s a very easy way to link puzzles and narrative together, with every engagement uncovering secrets of the past. But these stories only exist in the past. Avoid them. What’s happening now is the story. Write for the here and now.
Backstory is not story.
Gossip is not Drama
Discovering gossip about characters is not inherently exciting. I see a lot of gossip in environmental story-telling experiences, where I learn character details and scandals of their secret lives. But if that does no work in the story, it’s just gossip. It’s a dead fact. You can have “nice to know” bits, but if your entire experience is only “nice to know,” then you have no story.
Say I learn that Sandy is secretly dating Andy. Cool, cool. How does that change what I want? Does that change what they want?
Put that gossip to dramatic use in a scene where: people want things, but then the truth is revealed, and the revelation thwarts someone. That’s how you make a big reveal.
I hold Sleep No More as an example of using details in sets and scenes as plot support and not gossip. If you see what Malcolm types on the typewriter, or what he keeps in the drawer, or what’s depicted in that photograph he just found, you’ll learn about what’s happening in the story.
Those who lean over his shoulder get rewarded (Malcolm in Sleep No More)
Meow Wolf’s installations are most often not a good example of this. Sorry, no, I’m not going to visit a second time just because I didn’t read all the diary entries on that computer.
Gossip is not drama.
Information is not interesting
World-building gets wayyyyy too much love. Maybe because of the cultural impact of super-franchises like Marvel and Harry Potter, where the worlds run deep, people think it’s a marker of top-tier writing. But no one memorized the ship names in Star Wars until they fell in love with the movies.
Let’s just say you don’t read this one first.
You shouldn’t skip world-building, but it’s not the heart of the matter. I do not care about the metaphysical underpinnings for the pseudo-technology, nor about what happened on this planet 100 years ago. Unless you connect those facts to my objective (or another character’s objective), I do not care.
World-building fleshes things out, but scenes are what matter. And if you trot out your world-building, it’ll be about as exciting as backstory. It’s information without stakes.
And like backstory, not a breath should be wasted explaining your world to the audience. They must discover your clever little details on their own.
I speak from experience. In The Man From Beyond, the ghost has power through electrical currents, so everything it touches in the game has burn marks on it, and intense electrical sound effects accompany the ghost’s actions. We never point this out to the audience, though; we leave it to them to notice or not.
I also speak from future experience: we could spend two minutes in the upcoming Lucidity show explaining the neuroscience behind Dr. Newmark’s break-through technology that supports group-wide guaranteed lucid dreaming. But we won’t. We didn’t even write a first draft with that in. It’s boring. Nobody but the geekiest of Lore Boys care.
“WITNESS MEEEEEE knowing all the granular details of your WOOORLD!!!” (War Boys from Mad Max: Fury Road)
Don’t write for Lore Boys.
There will undoubtedly be information the players need to know. Divide up your world facts into need to know and nice to know. Embed nice to know as environmental discoveries for solo explorers. Embed your need to know information in bookend or bottlenecked scenes where everyone has something at stake.
Yep, even with need-to-know facts, we need to care, or we’ll tune out. Make opening scenes raise questions that are only answered later via dramatized exposition. Make the facts matter to character objectives. Exposition goes down easier when it comes with a good helping of drama: desire, conflict, surprise, change.
Oh my, I seem to have discovered this bureaucrat secretly worships a demon! Cool, cool. How does that impact what the character wants, or what I want? Does my team need to be super quiet now because Baphomet is always listening?
Make it matter. And please. Resist the temptation to tell me all about the demonology.
Baphomet was formalized by Victorian occultist Éliphas Lévi as a figure representing the absolute in symbolic form, an expression of occult natural forces that are explained by his magical theory of the Astral Light, the context of which…and I’ve already lost you, haven’t I?
Information is not interesting.
Writing is not facts
When writing your experiences (ideally at the start of project conception), remember the difference between writing that matters and writing that just… exists.
Backstory is not story, gossip is not drama, and information is not interesting.
Just because you have words doesn’t mean they do any work.
Writing is 90% structure, 10% words
Scenes are the most powerful tool at your disposal and will be what people remember best. Create moments that thwart your players and characters, or that produce irrevocable change.
Start always with what happens to the audience in the here and now. Give them a narrative they want to tell afterwards… and you may not spend a penny on marketing ever again.
Strange Bird Immersive has been lucky in our press. We recently had the immense pleasure of hosting Room Escape Artist, and we’ve even lured Houston’s local theatre critics to come out and PLAY a play, you know, instead of just sitting there.
Read the reviews…
Room Escape Artist: “an experience that realized what I’ve hoped to see from the escape room medium.”
Partly Wicked: “the single most memorable escape room I have ever seen.”
Hosting critics in an immersive is radically unlike hosting critics in traditional theatre. Here are some tips I’ve learned along the way on how to make the most of it.
Schedule wisely. If you’re in an ongoing production, give your show at least 2 months for testing and iteration, so it can settle into its best form before the critic comes. This is true for immersives, but it’s especially true for escape rooms. The show we ran in January is not the show we have now: the puzzles are smoother, the tech is debugged, the actors can handle every interaction. Be patient, and it’ll pay off. If you’re running a short-lived show, try to dissuade critics from opening night/weekend, at least.
Clean. Your critic will be inside the world and potentially free to explore. You do not want to be called out for dust bunnies.
No last-minute changes. As we’ve learned the hard way, a very small change can create new bugs, new audience behaviors you didn’t anticipate. We always try to run a mock-show in real-time whenever we make any technical changes, but physical changes can only be tested with fresh, new minds—a lot of them. What may look like an innocent dogtag to you may be somebody else’s slotted screwdriver.
”Guys, look! I found a hammer!”
You may want to perfect things for a critic, but don’t do it the day before, or even a week before. You want to deliver a vetted show.
Conquer self-consciousness. Actors get pretty revved up (usually for the worse) when they know a critic is in the house, but they never have to face that stone-cold gaze. Here? Neither of you gets to stay anonymous. That’s scary. A theatre critic is likely to freak, too, because they’re used to the armor that anonymity gives them.
If I had to guess, they probably didn’t become critics out of an intense love of actor eye-contact.
Immersive work is intimate, it’s close-up, it’s scary. There’s no place for them to hide what they’re thinking: the actor will see it on their very faces. Be ready for both parties to feel even more self-conscious than usual. Hopefully your immersive is already designed to limit feelings of self-consciousness, but be ready to conquer this demon more than usual. Don’t give the critic any more attention than anyone else present. Your Meisner gut may even tell you to back-off from them.
No “red carpet” treatment. You want to be on your A-game, but you don’t want to be on your “suck-up” game. They will notice. The critic is here to experience the same show the public would experience. Otherwise, what use is their review? If you have any special moments or one-on-ones, don’t default to selecting the critic unless you’ve received the usual positive signals from them that you always look for when singling out audience members. Bad one-on-one selections lead to bad one-on-ones, period.
Be professional. Take criticism graciously. Take praise graciously. To be reviewed at all is a privilege not every artist gets. Because of the intimacy, you may feel like you have a relationship now. You don’t. If the critic wants to be friendly afterwards, follow their lead—don’t be the initiator in the relationship. A lot of critics prefer to duck out and never see you again, even if they loved it.
Everyone’s a critic. The only publicity in this business that’s worthwhile is word of mouth. Every guest who crosses your threshold could potentially rave (or rant) to their friends—or on Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, or TripAdvisor. Every guest is someone worth winning, so make the most of every show and make the red carpet standard.
Which really means you’ll be doing a lot of cleaning.
As everyone knows too well, the city of Houston (and its many neighbors—Fort Bend and Baytown and Port Arthur and Beaumont and…) suffered catastrophic damage from the floods of Hurricane Harvey. The extent of the tragedy is impossible to fathom. People died. Many others lost everything they own, with no quick-fix in sight.
Meanwhile, I’m supposed to go back to business.
The Strange Bird studio faced not one leak, and our creative team suffered no damages either. We cancelled performances, but managed to reschedule all groups but one. Unlike other theatre companies who have a tragically short window of performances to recoup costs, Strange Bird can lose a weekend or two, and be okay. We’ll be okay.
But in the meantime, I’m supposed to go back to business…? Let’s put aside the “survivor’s guilt” we were all feeling, just for being lucky enough to be able to go back to business. There was something even greater unsettling me. It felt silly to turn my energy to entertainment, when that’s so very low on the list of needs right now. Worse: it’s a show about death and STUFF. Like, you know, all that stuff you accumulate in life that countless people just lost? And then there’s my tarot readings, “The Tower” card that reminds us, “We are always subject to higher forces.” Could I handle that fortune showing up for someone? Is The Man From Beyond really what my city needs right now?
A Harvey tarot spread: an act of God/Nature; seeking refuge; heartbreak.
I had a crisis of faith.
I talked about scaling things back. Removing certain tarot cards from my deck. Cutting a few key lines in a few key places. Emphasizing the hard themes less, and trying to play up the fun more. In other words, fundamentally changing our story.
Then Cameron, my husband, co-artistic director, sometimes co-star, and general favorite human being, said, “Well, do you want to be new Disney or old Disney?”
I knew what he meant. Did I want to sanitize my world, present an escapist reality scrubbed of its evils and painted brighter, more beautiful than the real one? Or did I want to “hold the mirror up to nature,” not turn away from darkness, and see if that darkness has something to say?
“Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come. Make her laugh at that.” (Hamlet)
Needless to say, the latter is the Strange Bird way. Theatre companies long to be relevant, selecting scripts and making production decisions that speak to the current moment, and now was our chance to matter more. And here I was, wanting to abdicate my power for fear of coming off as insensitive.
We seem to have forgotten about this lovely little thing called catharsis. It used to be tragedy’s primary goal, and it succinctly expresses the real impact we can have on our audience. Cathartic-shy entertainment leads us to endless cycles of The Foreigner, Arsenic and Old Lace, Noises Off!—feel good, escapist entertainment that never surprises you.
Strange Bird Immersive revels in surprise. We want you to take a few strides outside your comfort zone. There, we will meet and perhaps experience something important together. After Harvey, well, we’re just a few steps closer to that important place—and need its promised catharsis even more.
Let’s look again at “The Tower.” Here’s my full story for that card: we are always subject to higher forces. Things that we don’t will and don’t want fundamentally impact our lives all the time—often for the worse—and we fall. But the real question is: how do we respond? Do we rebuild the Tower? Do we make it lightning-proof?
The darkness definitely has something to say.
I’m a secular-humanist philosopher. I take my readings very seriously.
We doubled-down. Not only did we resume performances as soon as the main roads were safe, we added more showtimes to our usual schedule, offering free benefit tickets this past week with a donation to the Houston Food Bank. People needed to get out, to talk about something else, and we wanted to help in our small way.
And to be fair, The Man From Beyond is far from a downer. It’s fun, funny, full of magic, an escapist delight in two senses of that word—with the potential for catharsis. I am glad I stood by our work. The result of the benefit was our busiest week yet. My “silly little escape room” provided meals for Houstonians most in need and something meaningful for those who could make it out to play.
So perhaps we shouldn’t consider entertainment secondary, irrelevant, a “distraction” from the real meat of life that should dutifully retreat to the shadows when a tragedy takes center stage. Perhaps it is rightfully at the heart of our lives. Perhaps we need it. It gives us a chance to do something different, to be someone different, to expand our experience of ourselves. It is not the how, but the why of life. The laughter, tears, and cheers are real, even if the world that inspired them was imaginary.
Last week, I examined the Meisner technique for the immersive actor. I am particularly excited by the genre’s promise of a scene partner who has no script. Who is, by the way, you. You’re my scene partner.
In immersive theatre, the audience becomes actors. Think of them that way. When sold out, The Man From Beyond has a cast of 10. It’s precisely this radical reconception of the audience that energizes immersive theatre. Hell, I love it so much, I extended Meisner language to include the audience and enshrined it in the Strange Bird mission statement:
We’re in this together.
But if audiences are truly actors, then they are now facing the same pitfalls all actors do. The audience doesn’t need to worry about not listening—they are hearing the script for the first time—but they do need to overcome the bigger demon: feeling self-conscious.
Most folks associate interactive theatre with self-consciousness, and with good reason. Performances that pull an audience member on stage typically thrive off that person feeling awkward. The performer points up the audience member’s behavior, and the audience subsequently laughs at that person’s expense. This is the stuff of nightmares. This is the OPPOSITE of immersive theatre. Let’s run as far away from that kind of “interaction” as possible.
Lest we forget, there’s this thing called stage fright. We must take this phobia seriously.
Training audiences to be in-the-moment like actors are trained isn’t possible, but what we can do is design environments that engender real interaction. Armed with an understanding of the Meisner technique, designers can help slay self-consciousness for audience-actors, so they, too, can live truthfully in imaginary circumstances.
Here are my Meisner-inspired design principles for killing self-consciousness and eliciting truthful behaviors from your audience…
Make your world rich
Start your world as soon as possible
Limit audience watching audience
Stakes
Dialogue that matters
Really doing stuff
The element of surprise
Make your world rich
Children have no trouble with imaginative play. The entire world still feels novel to them, so behind a bush is as rich a secret hangout as the fanciest speakeasy with trick-wall entrance. But adults must preserve their dignity and need much more help to get them to a point of make-believe. And make no mistake, make-believe is our ultimate goal.
The less your audience has to imagine, the easier it is for them to believe. Immersive actors can help tremendously—they belong to the world, so interacting with them requires adopting their world—but production design also plays a major part. The more you can WOW your audience with a sense that they have been transported, the more they actually have been transported and can act in that world with ease. If you do your job right, they won’t even realize they’re making believe.
Do you have to have a big-budget build-out? No, of course not. While I don’t know of any immersive productions that have done so, you can ask your participants to use their imaginations like black box productions do, but you risk losing a few people in that leap. It’s just easier for me to behave like I’m in a hospital if it looks like a hospital.
Start your world as soon as possible
No matter what you do, there will always be an awkward transition from real world to imaginary world. The earlier your participants can pass through that transition, the easier it will be for them to believe.
I think escape rooms in particular suffer from starting their worlds way too late. You spend a good 15-20 minutes checking in, signing waivers, chatting up the gamemaster, hearing the rules of the game, getting the lock tutorial (oh lord), and then, THEN you cross the threshold to your exciting Egyptian Tomb adventure. No one really expects me to start acting like a cursed archaeologist now, do they? After treating it as a game for so long, I’d feel silly, and making that transition to play-acting would make me feel self-conscious. So I just don’t do it.
(Note that this is where actors inside the game can really help. Escape rooms with actors are the only times I’ve felt motivated to play along. Peer pressure can move mountains!)
I like aggressive worlds, worlds that bleed into the street if possible, with hosts who contribute to the make-believe instead of tearing it down. Think of the pre-show experience in Sleep No More,Then She Fell—even Accomplice. You may be waiting to enter the main attraction, but as for the world, you’re already there. You’re already playing.
”How would you like to die?” he asked me. ”In media res,” I said. (The Manderley Bar at the McKittrick Hotel, NYC)
Limit audience watching audience
There’s nothing worse than feeling the eyes of strangers—or worse, your friends—on you during imaginative play. You feel a little judged, and just like that, you’re hyper-aware of yourself, and all doors to transformation slam shut.
When I speak of The Man From Beyond to people who haven’t played yet, I often have to assuage fears of embarrassment. They don’t want to be actors in the traditional sense: they don’t want to be watched. So we should take great care that they are watched as little as possible. Disperse the audience. I’ll examine in more detail later how audience distribution affects the experience, but for now, I’ll just say that it matters a great deal.
There’s a reason 1-on-1’s feel special—with no one else watching, you’re more open to connect with the performer. You can even keep the content a secret to your grave. Case in point, I am still deliciously creeped out by the fact that a Then She Fell interaction I had (solo with two cast members) was in fact observed by another audience member via a secret hiding place (I found this out later from a friend—such a great psychological twist!). Knowing I was watched at the time would have changed everything.
The sandbox-style also does a good job of freeing folks from the gaze of others; if you don’t like the audience energy where you are, you can leave. Escape rooms and dark rides, however, involve audience groups with no hope of relief. Someone is almost always watching your interactions, and if that someone’s not playing along, your entire show is screwed. Third Rail Project shows always make me feel really uncomfortable with whatever it is I’m wearing—and that has nothing to do with my fashion choices.
Stakes
Not just your characters: the audience too needs stakes in the story they inhabit. Following the Meisner Independent Activity guidelines for drama, actors should be doing something “important, on a deadline, and difficult to do.” Importance is paramount here. If the audience thinks what’s happening around them matters, they’ll enter a true state of flow. Their awareness of themselves will slip away, as they laser-focus in pursuit of their goal. You’ll get some wonderful make-believe behaviors that way. But if the story lacks importance, you’ll wind up with a bunch of disengaged people reaching for their phones.
But that doesn’t mean the world should always be ending. Higher stakes do not translate to better results, as you can easily break the ceiling of believability. See: most escape rooms.
Threatening the explosion of the earth or even just my death if I fail is frankly beyond my imaginative pale (we all know the game master will just enter to console us), so you might as well have just skipped the stakes part entirely. Sometimes the best stakes aren’t the highest or even the most personal ones. We have stakes in other people all the time, so perhaps this is where your characters can step up.
Dialogue that matters
Meisner wants us to really listen. Your audience should be all ears in an immersive, and listening—or navigating to the right place to listen—should engross them. The script should reward those who listen, with every word providing insight into a part of the story. Avoid dialogue that is obtuse, or your audience will quickly learn that their efforts are for naught.
really Doing stuff
To reach a proper flow-state, where the knowledge of the self disappears, you need to be doing something. Like actors on stage, tasks and challenges—from holding up a mirror to deciphering the riddle inside a poem—offer a great path for audiences to forget themselves and engage in the story world.
Escape rooms are masterpieces of doing stuff, and fans get addicted to that sweet puzzle-flow-state. Third Rail Projects adores simple tasks as entry points to relationships, and even Sleep No More, often maligned for not giving the audience activity, packs a wallop of stuff happening in their one-on-ones to the point that you don’t have time to catch your breath.
So give your audience something to do other than “watch.” All the better if it’s important, on a deadline, and hard to do.
the element of surprise
Actors often perform from their heads instead of their guts; knowing what’s going to happen, they plot out their reactions ahead of time. The result is it feels fake—and we remain unmoved. Since rehearsal is unavoidable, Meisner offers tricks for actors to rely more on their gut, but immersive audiences don’t rehearse, and they have no lines to learn. If they go into the experience without any foreknowledge of the script, they are very likely to respond from their gut. And that’s a very good thing.
I don’t recommend reading too much about an immersive theatre production you plan to see. Read just enough for you to decide to buy a ticket, and then STOP. Don’t read the reviews, blogs, or facebook comments, or you could walk into a show like a cold, premeditated killer, acting cerebrally: “What’s a clever thing I could do or say in that situation to surprise them?” When the mind holds the reigns, we stay firmly on the ground. We can’t be transported.
Gut-response requires the element of surprise.
Creators get this. Immersive theatre productions typically say as little as possible about a show. The mystery entices you, and you go maybe not even knowing the themes of the piece until two-thirds of the way through, when it hits you like a hammer. That’s special indeed.
But creators can take surprise too far. Immersive theatre is uniquely visceral—you are there, participating in the world, and leave with a real memory—so we should appropriately warn audiences of potentially traumatic content within. We need to be responsible, to care for our audience, rather than to ambush them. After all…
Given what they’re doing, they’re actually very responsible about it.
But when are warnings needed? It’s hard for me to draw the line. I think The Man From Beyond capitalizes a great deal on thematic surprise, and taking away that surprise at the start would damage its power. Surprise has a huge payoff, but if it comes at too high a cost (trauma to a reasonable percentage of your guests—we’re not talking about that one guy who has a fear of taxidermied turkeys), the art is not worth the cost. We need to be responsible, first and foremost, and earn the trust of our audiences. The genre won’t get very far if our chief weapon is surprise.
Okay, so apparently hurricane stay-cations inspire a lot of meme generation in me. Apologies for that. (Luckily, Strange Bird is coming out just fine through Harvey.)
To wrap up…you know you’ve been self-conscious in an immersive before. It happens—and it’s awful. Think about why you got kicked out or perhaps why you never started the make-believe in the first place. Maybe I mentioned a reason above. If designers are in turn conscious of the scenarios that create it, they can reduce its likelihood and boost the chances of audiences acting truthfully and emerging transformed. Just as Meisner would have wanted it.
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.
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