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.
Two summers ago our eldest was terrified of the Big Wheel at Cedar Point. The sun was setting and we were making our way out of the park, and wouldn’t it be nice to get a relaxing view from 136’ above the park after dark?
They hated it.
It scared them the way a human should be scared when perched in a gently rocking open canopy, 136’ in the air.
In the time since that first visit to Cedar Point two years ago they have returned to that park several times and have developed a great love of roller coasters. Earlier this month we visited Coney Island and we rode the Cyclone — which is awesome — but still I was surprised when they not only expressed interest in taking the Wonder Wheel (which is not only 150’ high, but also features cars which periodically lurch and swing on a track) but that they actually thought it was fun!
Wonder Wheel is right next to a classic “dark ride” called Spook-a-Rama and when they saw that they asked if I wouldn’t ride it with them, and I said sure. Why not?
They hated it.
Legend has it the original Spook-a-Rama was a much longer ride, but it currently clocks at about a ninety seconds. It’s one of those deals where you sit in an open car for two that travels on a single track through a darkened room that takes you past creepy animatronic displays of ghouls and witches and monsters that hydraulically lunge and shake and also gibber and scream and moan.
There are no physical interactions, no real people in costume or actors to introduce variety, nothing comes into contact with you. Each ride is mechanically exactly the same.
I was trying to get into it, to laugh and gasp and shout a bit but they were entirely quiet. After, they said they had their eyes shut the entire time, though in the weeks since they admit they were squinting, watching a little.
I'm reminded of the first time we went on the Corkscrew together, their first inverted roller coaster. They didn't know what to expect. They hated it. They have since been on it a bazillion times.
Sleep No More
Recently I checked the Yelp reviews for Sleep No More. Originally announced as a two-month run, I attended after it has been playing for two years and they have since celebrated their fifth anniversary in the Meatpacking District.
People still rave, but I was drawn to the one-star reviews. You know what they say haters gonna do, and they gonna do it on Yelp, but I did find one significant, often repeated complaint among them.
Sure, folks whine because they got separated from their date, others because of the masks. Did they do any research, did they have the slightest clue of what they were getting into? Were they even surprised there would be naked people?
No, the thing that struck me were the comments from those repeat attendants who were disgusted by the sheer number of participants and by their behavior.
“Too many audience members. Looks like they increased the audience number limit.”
- Roslynn
“SO CROWDED! I really am sad that they let so many people in. It takes away from the beautiful show when people are pushing and shoving.”
- Leslie
“... did i mention about being pushed by rude and manner-less tourists ?”
- Alex
My attractive companions at "Sleep No More" (2013)
Alex is from Huntington Beach, so they should know from tourists. But, anyway, you get the point. Can’t imagine the overhead on a production like this, but even three years ago they were engaged in the hard sell, hawking the program and pushing cocktails you never have the time to consume.
We attended on a Friday night, but I wouldn’t call it “crowded” at least not in any way that was remarkable. Maybe the bar, but not the show. However, there have been so many write-ups, many describing where and when to be in just the right place to see all the “good stuff” I can imagine there would be quite a bottleneck in certain rooms and stairwells.
But what if this were your first time? Your first time experiencing everything, all of it. As though this thing had never happened before and would never happen again. But we are sentient beings and we know this is not the case, and can be extremely aware that this is a performance which has been created and rehearsed and performed numerous times.
Then again, it is a live performance, and that is what makes every performance unique, that it is live, that these performers will be performing 1) this one time 2) this one way 3) just for you.
Is the event more or less special if there are only twenty-five people in the room, as opposed to one hundred. Does it feel different? Do you feel different?
I had a one-to-one performance that evening, when I was brought into the witch’s hut. My friends did not. The experience is burned into my memory, I remember that moment with greater clarity than anything else that happened that night. I know exactly who the performer was, too, I looked her up, I know her name even if she does not know mine. Doesn’t matter. We had a moment.
Ha ha, I’m just playing with you, of course we didn’t. She and numerous others in that role have performed the same combination almost the exact same way, night after night, for five years. It’s documented, others have described the exact same actions and words. It was a private performance, but not unique.
Love In Pieces (2014)
Actually, she didn’t even ask if I wanted sugar. But maybe she already knew.
But to my friends with whom I attended the performance, to those who watched as I was taking by the hand (by the hand) and ushered into that intimate space, I had been chosen, chosen receive an experience to which they had been denied.
When we produced Love In Pieces in 2014 our guest list was limited to those who would fit into any of the rooms, settling on between sixteen and twenty attendants an evening, for three performances. They were chosen, too.
Hamilton
What does the Spook-a-Rama and Sleep No More have to do with each other, apart from the fact that they are only fifteen miles from each other? Well, some have referred to Sleep No More as a “haunted house” and not a theatrical event. You wander around for a scare or a thrill, but there’s no story there, nothing to be gleaned.
But that’s not true, or at any rate, does not being meaningful disqualify a play from actually being a play? When I attend the theater, I desire for a unique, emotionally affecting experience, whether I am sitting in row with an audience, witnessing in stillness, or wandering the halls of a fabricated, period hotel, seeking out the performance on foot.
Then there’s the sense of exclusivity, and by that I mean those limits imposed upon the experience for an exclusive audience. My child and I as the only two in our barrel car, the animatronic horror show presented at that moment solely for the two of us. Being led into the witch’s hut to be an audience of one.
Or even the entirely absurd sense of exclusivity felt by those of us who have seen Hamilton on Broadway. How did you get tickets! Well, I guess we paid a lot of money for them? But you can’t get them! Well, uhm, you really can? You are so lucky! And you begin to feel you are lucky. After all, you are a member of an exclusive club consisting of over thirteen hundred people a night, every night, eight times a week, every week, since July, 2015.
Source: The Great Fredini's Cabinet of Curiosities
Hurricane
The wife and I discovered a mutual admiration for roadside attractions and honky-tonk during our first road trip in 1995. Truth is, my family never went in for that. My older siblings never even wanted to go to Disney — openly disdained it, actually — so my parents assumed I didn’t want to either.
I miss the dark rides of Cedar Point, the disturbing Fun House, the racist Earthquake, the mostly harmless Pirate Ride. Unlike the eldest, I wasn’t into roller coasters until I was in high school, and so taking rides through bizarre landscapes was my personal jam.
Four years ago this October, Spook-a-Rama was submerged in six feet of water during Hurricane Sandy. Built in 1955, it had already been through many renovations over more than half century, and persevered as those attractions which we never built to last generally do, limping along and continuing to make a buck. But this "super storm" left the ride virtually unsalvageable. Little of the original mechanics were still functional.
Yet, the owners decided to rebuild and have created a functioning dark ride where it would no doubt have been much easier to raze the whole thing and install another traditional ride, arcade, snack bar or souvenir shack.
Maybe my kid hated it, or maybe they were acting cool because it was spooky and they needed time to deal. Maybe they will always remember the time they asked their dad to go on the Spook-a-Rama at Coney Island the day before the night they got to see Hamilton.
Maybe some once-in-a-lifetime, emotionally affecting events are more important than others.
My companions at Sleep No More, James and Emily, reported strange, performance-induced dreams the following night. I had no such dreams that night. In fact, it took two days to decompress following that event and to truly sort things out.
I do not normally reflect immediately upon emotionally-effecting events. I can say good-bye to someone I know I will never see again, and be sincere and even wistful, but never cry, not then. That comes later when I am suddenly surprised by a reminder of their being and the full weight of loss and sorrow crash upon me like a fool.
We saw the show on Friday. Our final performance in New York was last Saturday. We packed up and departed on Sunday. James slept for a couple hours in the early afternoon and I drove in silence, and that was when I had the chance to think. I thought about everything, the previous ten days -- the whole summer, really -- and all of it rolled together into one big thing.
This was a theater festival for the record books, if because this time I was not alone. Very little downtime, if I did not choose to act, then someone was choosing an action for me. I did not go from point A to point B without stopping at points C, D & F to meet one or another friend, colleague or family member. So many places, people and things.
And then there was the witch, or nurse, whatever she was. The one who chose me. Because that's part of the attraction, you know? That's what the people hope for, it's not about the one-on-one performance experience. You could get that in one of the open rooms just because no one else happens to be there at the time. When one of them chooses you ... well. That means there's something special about you, right? Even if you are wise enough to know that there isn't. You can't help it.
It was entirely by chance, because I knew these things happened, but it still took me entirely by surprise. It happened like this:
There is this corner room, with a platform elevation, all the walls floor to ceiling painted in black, I passed through it quickly once, but heading through again saw a nurse, a brunette, writing something on the wall. I went and stood next to her. She was writing the same thing over and over again.
The Thane of Cawdor The Thane of Cawdor The Thane of Cawdor
That's when I assumed she must be a weird sister. (Patrick Stewart's recent TV version of Macbeth featured witches in the guise of nurses, too.) The music changed, she stiffened, and walked out of the room. I followed, as did many others, through the branch-maze, but then we encountered another witch, the red-haired one.
They stared at each other, but then she looked at me. Unconsciously, I had put my left hand over my heart. Was that what she noticed, that I was lost in it? That was when she offered her hand.
As I said, I won't describe what happened when she took me by the hand and led me into her little room ... except for this, because this was most troubling.
Near the end of our time together, in that little room, she again took my by the hand, and held me hard. Then she leaned back in her chair, holding me to the length of her entire arm, trembling and shaking me. She sighed piteously, and just I thought she was going to pull me off my seat, she yanked me close and whispered in my ear.
That done, she let me go, and showed me out the door, and as I took the last step turned to see her slowly close the door behind her, and to the last the light of her eyes were bent on me.
This final image has been blazed into my thoughts, as though it were a lost memory of something I had once experienced, some haunted, familiar recollection. It took an entire week before I finally realized where this had happened before.
Oph. He tooke me by the wrist, and held me hard,
Then goes he to the length of all his arme,
And with his other hand thus ore his brow,
He falls to such perusall of my face
As a would draw it, long stayd he so,
At last, a little shaking of mine arme,
And thrice his head thus wauing vp and downe,
He raisd a sigh so pittious and profound
As it did seeme to shatter all his bulke,
And end his beeing; that done, he lets me goe,
And with his head ouer his shoulder turn'd
Hee seem'd to find his way without his eyes,
For out adoores he went without theyr helps,
And to the last bended their light on me.
Another bright, beautiful day in New York City. For reals, we got rain dumped upon us on the drive into Manhattan last Thursday. Tuesday morning was cold and rainy and I did my laundry ... and then the skies were bright and clear and stayed that way.
Also, it has been warm, but not hot. I mean, the weather has been ideal. This morning James and I headed out to pass out palm cards at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park. It's Friday, so I assumed the line for this evening's performance of Love's Labour's Lost would be long, but I had no idea. I mean, there were at least a hundred people in line who couldn't possibly have gotten tickets.
But still, morning in the park. Good times.
James and I passed out at least four hundred cards. No kidding. We ordered five thousand cards for this trip, they came in 20 boxes of 250. We have one more show, and we are down to two boxes, that is some good distribution work for six people. James and I emptied the better part of two just on the trip this morning.
I am always delighted when people ask questions about the show, that's a good sign, where, exactly, and when and what, who wrote it? James says it's in verse and someone asks, what kind of verse and I poke him and say, "Do Messina." He fills the air with:
Messina! Fair Sicilian burgh, at last! From northern climes I’ve soldiered, twice enlisted To defend this federated kingdom, Italy. But leaving Padua I’ve never yet encountered sun so bright, Air so fresh and salty from the sea, The sight and scent of citrus, hanging low. If I must rest and recreate abroad, Why then, Messina is the place for me!
There was applause and smiles all around, because that's what you get for having a good voice in Central Park.
Shakespeare & Co. FringeNYC literature display.
How do you get people to come to your FringeNYC show, when you are not a New York company, have no local following? We have spent cash on advertising, well-placed advertising, but not an absurd amount of advertising. Mostly online, at various sites.
We hired a p.r. firm to bundle our materials with the rest of the FringeNYC press releases, which may or may not stand out, with so many others vying for attention. But Robert Muller's production photographs are solid, attractive, just what a blog or paper or magazine wants to see. Colorful, with costumes, a set, from a performance, not posed, lively. Interesting.
For these efforts we had advance notice in The New York Times, and Backstage.com. This is exactly what you want, what you need, to get noticed before the festival begins. And we met people on line at the Delacorte who said they'd seen it! In The Times!
And there are reviews, and those have been good. I get the impression that some people do not find my performances to their liking. They love our lovers, however -- and praise my writing, which is more important to me, anyway.
... and our attendance has ranged from 25 to 40. So, okay. Better than some. I was hoping for more. Asked prior to the Fringe, I said I wanted 50. Fifty per show. But what do I know from attendance, I have done solo shows at FringeNYC twice before, and each time I didn't come near what we have seen this year.
... and we're not done yet! One more show tomorrow. A Saturday at noon, not exactly when I'm out seeing theater, but pre-sale is as good or better than previous performances, so we have have a good showing. Or, you know. The same. Lots of friends are coming ... the question is whether people we met on line in Central Park will be joining them.
Today we all ventured back into the audience. Diana and her family went to see Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark. Annie and her NYC friends went to see a cabaret -- it was later I was surprised and delighted to find they were seeing the majestic Ute Lemper!
Annie, Diana, her aunt and I all went to see a FringeNYC production -- Jen Bosworth's Why Not Me this afternoon at Subculture. We had been hoping to see her entire routine since both her show nd ours were featured in three promo events last weekend. Frankly, it was worth the price of admission just listening to her accompanist, Briar Rabbit, play and sing.
By the way, that's just a brilliant idea, ask a talented, young guitarist to vamp while you perform your solo work. It's like beat poetry. Solid. So glad to meet her and see her, she tells great stories, tells them well, she's hilarious, sincere and just really cool.
Tonight, however, James, Emily and I went to see Sleep No More. An immersive theatrical experience, SNM tells a 1930s version of Macbeth in an abandoned hotel, audience members are free to wander the entire space, taking in hours of dialogue-free movement events on three different floors.
I have been interested in seeing this for some time. Developed by a British theater company called Punchdrunk, it was supposed to run two months and has already run two years. I was curious as to how the concept might fare in a long-running circumstance, when it has moved from hip-and-hard-to-get-in-to, to move of a "hey, this looks weird, and there's naked chicks in it, wanna check it?" kind of event.
Regardless, the masks help. The audience members all wear masks, rendering themselves mostly anonymous, cargo shorts notwithstanding. Once engaged, I was taken by the performances, but also anxious that I was missing something on a different floor or in a different room ... until I was singled out by one of the witches, taken by the hand, and led into her room for a one-on-one event.
No, I won't tell you what happened. Or I might, in person, but not here.
Yes, I am very glad I went, and not just for the special attention. Also very glad to share it with James and Emily, who were ecstatic about their experience. Sometimes you get just what you expect, and maybe a little bit more, and that can be a very good thing.
For the past several years, artists have been leaning on the boundaries of live performance by creating interactive or intimate theatrical events, plays where the audience either has a (sometimes very limited) choice in the manner in which they observe or engage with the performance, or are made part of the performance itself in some creative fashion.
One of the most recent, much-ballyhooed productions in 2011 has been the arrival in New York City of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, in which an entire hotel is the setting for a remake of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Emphasis is placed little on the text, and more on the mood and atmosphere. Audience members wear masks, watching as actors murder, party and have sex right in front of them -- and the audience is permitted to get as close to the action as they like (so long as they don’t touch anyone.) One review noted how audience members would pick up things to look at them, like discarded letters, or rummage through cabinets or cases, and discover something relevant everywhere they did.
Over ten years ago I heard of the Neo-Futurists staging their version of Crime and Punishment, where every participant (audience member?) was handed a portable cassette tape player -- like I said, over ten years ago -- and had to follow whatever instructions were given them through their headphones. Which room to walk to next, whether to act as accused or judge. Each audience member went in on their own, though they may find themselves in a room with another audience member, whom they most likely did not know, playing their part in that moment’s scenario.
Nick Denny & I "Voice In Head"
Nick, my brother Denny and I joined the audience of Voice-In-Head at the Theatre Garage during the 2003 Minnesota Fringe which followed the same model only with absurdist results. We had minidisc players (things change) and were given instructions to carry out throughout the proceedings. My brother told a surprisingly funny joke, considering he is very bad at telling stories, and Nick apparently had two minutes to tell the audience anything he wanted, and chose to praise me and my overwhelming talent and general goodness, and that if everyone that night saw just one more show the the Minnesota Fringe, it had better be I Hate This, which was opening the next evening.
I didn’t hear any of this, my brother asked me later if that embarrassed me or if I was moved or anything because I had this frozen mask on my face the entire time Nick was lauding my glory. I had to admit that for the entire two minutes this was going on I was receiving complicated instructions about how it was soon necessary for me to leap up, swirl around the room and deliver the worst fake-Shakespearean monologue I could muster.
Even more recently, the concept of salon performances have swept the theater world. Not simply the type of play where actors perform for an audience of one (although that is also a big deal deal right now) but situations where an actor or small company holds a performance in their own home.
The first I became aware of such an idea was in the early 90s when I first learned of Wallace Shawn’s The Fever which he introduced to select audiences in an apartment near Seventh Avenue. Wow. That’s exclusive, I thought. I wonder who was there. Given the opportunity to experience such a thing, I would not pass it up. Strange that I never had the nerve to do it myself.
Because really, I feel there is an emotional leap required to attempt such a thing, even now that it has become en vogue. And it has to be artistically requisite. A solo performance, sure, but that seems arrogant in the extreme. I have thrown a party where you have to sit quietly while I talk about me for an hour. A narcissist’s wet dream.
Last year I attended a performance of Kirk Wood Bromley’s It Was a Setup …performed for an audience of 20 in his living room in Gowanus, Brooklyn. It was an open, advertised performance, but only if you had a reservation would you receive the address. A play for three, a domestic drama, it was perfectly suited to the realist, well, real space and the confined proximity to the performers.
Yes, it took me twenty years to find and attend a salon performance.
A few weeks back my wife and received a Facebook invitation to Terence Cranendonk’s I Dreamed of Rats. Terry has been working on this piece for over fifteen years, a one-hour, solo adaptation of Gogol's The Inspector General. We attended last night, arriving just in time, at his lovely home in Akron, and joined an audience of eight for a startlingly good event. Terry has always been a member of the physical theater, and he is a joy to watch in performance. Surprise is humor, and his work consistently leaves me surprised and delighted.
And, as most nourishing artistic experiences do, last night’s event left me hungry, wondering what I will do next to fill it.
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