On Site-Specific Theater

BorderLight Theater Festival presents The Right Room, a new play by David Hansen and directed by Jasmine Renee, July 16 - 19, 2025

Let us define our terms.

Dr. Suzy Woltmann defines immersive theatre as “a performance art movement that aims to transform audience members from passive recipients to active participants.” Furthermore, she highlighted features of immersive performance which may include:

• Blurring the line between audience and performer
• Leaving the stage behind
• Including sensory experiences
• Shifting between the personal and the collective

An immersive experience can often be described as site-specific theatre, though those terms are not necessarily mutually inclusive. The folks at the Australian Performing Arts Conservatory states that site-specific theatre “breaks free from the confines of a traditional theatre where actors perform on stage. The performances take place in unexpected locations, from bustling city streets and historical sites to warehouses and parks.” Site-specific performance can:

• Create a more immersive experience
• Add a layer of authenticity and depth to the performance
• Allow creative teams to innovate and experiment with storytelling techniques

Site-specific performance is not, of course, a recent thing. By any basic definition, we may assume theater originated any place people were, and only later did everyone decide it needed to happen primarily in what we call a “theater.”

Sleep No More (2011)

But it is because of this codification of theatrical traditions that producing a play in a non-traditional space became something of a novelty. In early years of this century, for example, Charenton Theatre Co. produced a string of site-specific performances across the city of Cleveland, staging Albee’s Zoo Story on a park bench, Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology on a tour of cemeteries, and James McLure’s Lone Star in a number of local drinking establishments.

Site-specific and immersive cross over when they engage the audience in some unique, sensory way. Perhaps the most famous recent example of this was Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, which was set in a vast warehouse made to resemble a stately and crumbling hotel through which a masked audience was welcome to freely wander, handling sets and props and even on occasion, the actors – this last was not specifically encouraged, but it happened. A lot.

Inspired by this, a team of us created the Love In Pieces project in 2014, in which we produced Sarah Morton’s play of that name inside an actual house. Due to space limitations, an evening’s audience was between sixteen and twenty people, and they were split into four groups, each group of four or five experiencing one of the four, ten-minute scenes, before being escorted to the next one.

In 2023, the Give Me Your Keys company presented my play Step Nine as part of the BorderLight Fringe. Director James Rankin had asked for a play for two men to be performed in an actual bar, and I provided him one. Thirty or more crammed into the Snug at Parnell’s in Playhouse Square as two actors spoke at normal, human volume, forcing the crowd to lean in, as if eavesdropping on a private conversation.

I had not planned to apply for BorderLight myself this year, until I read the application and found this note about submitting a site-specific adaptation.

Site-specific Adaptation
Are you willing to adapt your performance to a site-specific location? For example, an alley, a hotel room, a park, a car, a loading dock, or a public street. Artists are also encouraged to suggest a site-specific adaptation/production. (emphasis mine)

Nicholas Chokan, Jason Leupold
Step Nine (2023)
BorderLight Theatre Festival

A hotel room? I have spent the past year writing a script that takes place in a hotel room! I took it as a challenge – a challenge to them. If they could really find a hotel room in which to produce my new play, then by God, I would present my play there.

And so, I am happy to announce that my new play, The Right Room, will be performed as part of the BorderLight Theater Festival 2025 this summer, and produced in a room at the Crowne Plaza Cleveland in Playhouse Square. One single hotel room will represent four different hotel rooms, in four different cities, in four different eras, to tell one very epic narrative. Epic – but intimate.

Source: 

“What Is Immersive Theatre?” by Suzy Woltmann, Backstage, May 8, 2023
“The Role of Site-Specific Theatre in Contemporary Performance Art,” Australian Performing Arts Conservatory, September 19, 2024

It Was A Setup

When I was last in New York I had the unique opportunity to drop in on the rehearsal of a new work written by a playwright I admire. In 2004 I directed The American Revolution by Kirk Wood Bromley, artistic director and playwright-in-residence for Inverse Theater. He specializes in modern verse plays, often creating five-act compositions in iambic pentameter. This most recent piece, It Was A Setup is a brief, personal piece of work, and one I have made plans to see when it debuts next month.

I contacted Bromley earlier in the year — I hadn’t spoken with him since our production of AM REV. At that time, I was delighted when he and a number of his crew journeyed to Cleveland to witness the production. A few months ago I asked if he had anything in the works, and he let me in on this new work. I read the script a few days before visiting in late June, and joined him and the company at his place in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn for the rehearsal.

It Was a Setup is a three-person play, inspired in part by the work of Bromley’s collaborator in this project, Leah Schraeger. She creates “phoems” — or photograph poems. She is also the choreographer for this piece. The script does not consist of realistic dialogue, but the rather the honest, emotional expression of a relationship is crisis. It is poetic, satiric, acidic, forlorn, angry, hilarious … but upon first read I have to admit I had no idea how one could stage it.

The night in question I was privileged to witness the most challenging scene of the piece, the least “obvious” of the scenes, where it was not clear to me, reading the script, exactly what was happening. It was fascinating, having this opportunity to watch and listen as the director-playwright explained, negotiated, and shaped the intentions and action of these three performers. Having the chance to watch a rehearsal as an entirely disconnected observer, with nothing at stake as writer, director, performer or designer was truly a unique opportunity, and I am extremely grateful all of the artists involved allowed me to be there.

It was, I felt, a very successful night. There appeared to be a great deal at stake, and after an extremely swift three-hours, these disjointed thoughts had the semblance of a through-line that could be carried forward into the next rehearsal. In brief, Charise and Tim have a relationship which has stalled, and is put into crisis by the appearance of a third character, Juliet. In this scene she is not actually there, but she is, if you follow. This is a sensation which is not unfamiliar to me.

The performance is scheduled to take place in an equally intimate space, identical to the one in which they rehearsed (location to be announced only when you purchase tickets — sweet.) The close proximity of the performers gives the piece an uncomfortable intensity. I cannot imagine how it will feel with twenty other audience members present — for that is all the space will hold.

Today we finalized my plans to return to NYC two weeks from tomorrow, in addition to attending this production I hope to revisit the Performing Arts Library, and maybe even check out the shows at the New York Fringe Festival.

UPDATE: BorderLight Theater Festival presents The Right Room, a new play by David Hansen and directed by Jasmine Renee, July 16 - 19, 2025. Help support our production by dropping a donation on our GoFundMe campaign!