Don’t Miss These Shows At Without Walls Festival 2023

(Disclosure: La Jolla Playhouse, producers of the Without Walls Festival, arranged for accommodations for the writer.)

The first Without Walls Festival to be produced by the LA Jolla Playhouse on a new annual timeline, the 2023 edition (April 27–30th) is bringing one of the most dynamic immersive & interactive line-ups yet to the decade-old performing arts festival in San Diego. All of it at the The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park™ as part of the Playhouse’s partnerhip with the San Diego Symphony.

WOW, as it is best known, has long been the most significant performing arts festival in the United States to focus on work that takes place outside of traditional theatrical venues. In years past that has encompassed both large-scale, family-friendly outdoor performances and intimate experiments in experiential storytelling.

To be sure, the festival’s broad mandate hasn’t always added up to a dream slate for immersive heads, but this year’s fest has some real ringers on deck and a risk-free deal maker: tickets are free this year. Reservations open on April 4th, and with everything the festival has to offer, we expect them to go quick.

The WOW team, headed up by Amy Ashton and Mia Fiorella have cast an international net this year and more than a few names familiar to NoPro readers have gotten swept up in their catch. Indeed, the Southland is going to be spoiled at the end of April when critically-hailed immersive creators gather for the weekend long event.

On top of all that, the festival will coincide with the preview run of Optika Moderna’s LA LUCHA, the latest creation of San Diego’s own David Israel Reynoso whose previous works Las Quinceñeras and Waking La Llorona have been revelations in and of themselves. (For the record, those tickets will start at $39.)

Before we get into our picks for what immersive fans should make a bee-line for, a brief overview, courtesy of the Playhouse’s press team:

Joining the 2023 WOW Festival lineup will be 360, from The Netherlands’ Benjamin “Monki” Kuitenbrouwer & TENT; Brassroots District: Live in the Lot Summer ’73, from the Los Angeles-based Brassroots District; The Cell Plays, from San Diego’s Playwrights Project; Fair Trade, from Philadelphia-based artists Jessica Creane and Yannick Trapman-O’Brien; It’s Not That Way, It’s This Way, from France’s Galmae; Moving Spaces, from San Diego Dance Theatre (WOW Festival productions of Senior Prom and Dances with Walls); Yellow Bird Chase, from the Boston-based Liars and Believers; and two pieces from The INKubator Collective’s Herakles Project: CLEANING THE STABLES, from local artists Robert Twomey and Ash Eliza Smith, and GLACIAL INCANTATIONS, from local artist Hortense Gerardo. The WOW Festival will also include presentations of the Playhouse’s 2023 Performance Outreach Program (POP) Tour Jin vs. the Beach and a devised piece, Community Canvas: Making Our Mark, by students in the San Diego Unified School District’s 2023 Honors Theatre Program.

These works join the previously-announced WOW Festival roster, including Ryan Carter’s A Shared Space, from the San Diego Symphony; Birdmen from The Netherlands’ Close-Act Theatre Company; Circular Dimensions, from Coachella Valley artist Cristopher Cichocki; Choreo & Fly, from San Diego’s DISCO RIOT; Broadway veteran Sharon Wheatley’s Drive, from Diversionary Theatre; The End, from Denver’s Control Group Productions; Las Cuatro Milpas, from San Diego’s TuYo Theatre (WOW Festival’s On Her Shoulders We Stand); The NEST, from St. Paul-based artist Megan Flød Johnson; and salty water, from San Diego’s Blindspot Collective (WOW Festival productions of Black Séance and Hall Pass).

Now that you know the full slate let’s get into NoPro’s picks from the WOW line-up, and we wish everyone good luck on scoring tickets when they go live.

NoPro’s Ten Can’t Miss Picks (In Alphabetical Order)

A Shared Space — Ryan Carter Presented by the San Diego Symphony
Interactive Music Experience

Composer Ryan Carter’s A Shared Space is one of the more technically ambitious entries in this year’s WOW, taking the over the lawn at the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, hone to the San Diego Symphony. A Shared Space will transform the audience into members of said Symphony with their cell phones acting as instruments.

These newly christened symphony members will get to play alongside the professional members who will be stationed all around the Rady Shell’s lawn.

Carter explained how this all was going to work at WoW’s press preview and it looks to be a dynamic backend that will create a real -time interplay between what the audience his doing and what the orchestra plays. Its a fascinating experiment, and at least on a conceptual level the perfect melding of WOW and the Symphony, whose home turf the Festival is taking over for the weekend.

Brassroots District: Live In The Lot Summer ’73 — Brassroots District
Immersive Musical

This is a revival of the 2021 show that brightened up an uncertain summer in the Arts District of Los Angeles, inviting audiences to step back in time to 1973. Creators Ari Herstand and Andrew Leib teamed up with director Monica Miklas to make something really special that summer and now they’re getting the band back together.

Imagine if you will a shockingly good funk show (well, shocking if you don’t know the caliber of musicians involved that is) that also doubles as a very 70’s style happening. Audiences are encouraged to don their funkiest threads, and can choose to simply groove to the music or follow the band’s own drama a little closer. Those who don’t know if this “immersive” stuff is for them will find the show just straight up entertaining, while those who like to lose themselves in the fiction will find themselves gettin’ down in 1973.

The Cell Plays — Playwrights Project
Site-specific theatre

A look at incarceration that “provides a glimpse into the hearts and minds of individuals relegated to living inside a cell,” this site-specific play is from the artists in Playwrights Project’s Out of the Yard Program who have themselves been incarcerated.

With the Jail Museum in The Headquarters at Seaport Village as the setting, the play will take place in and around the cells therein, with a talkback at the end of the performance with the formerly incarcerated artists who have created The Cell Plays.

Having seen similarly themed work from LA’s Poverty Department in the past, I’m curious as to whether the staging here will lead to as visceral of an emotional punch as that work from a decade ago. What I can say is that particular experience, which was part of the Radar LA festival, was laser etched into my understanding of our prison-industrial complex.

DRIVE — Sharon Wheatley & Diversionary Theater
Site-specific Theatre

When the pandemic hit Broadway veteran Sharon Wheatley (Come From Away) had to figure out how to get her kids from the East Coast to the West for their summer visitation with their father. So, naturally, she got a 30-foot RV and packed the kids, her wife, and their animals in it and drove cross country, as one does.

That experience became the book Drive: Stories From Somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere, which Wheatley has turned into a site-specific piece of theatre for WOW. Wheatley plays herself while her Come From Away co-star Astrid Van Wieren plays her wife. The pair “navigate their discovery of each other, ultimately learning to work together to find success and adventure in the bizarre summer of 2020.”

The End — Control Group Productions
Immersive Theatre

Denver’s Control Group Productions will transplant their 2022 hit The End to San Diego, wherein a civic bus tour is hijacked and turned into a “a ride through a city transformed by escalating climate catastrophe, inexorably rolling toward the brink of collapse.”

Traveling to multiple sites in an “apocalyptic school bus,” the Denver version of The End was in the planning stages before the the pandemic ground everything to a halt and altered the way the company viewed the project.

“Instead of helping us understand what the apocalypse feels like (the last two years have helped with that), we are setting out to understand what it feels like to move through it, to see beyond The End.” Hop on board for a wild ride that will “change how you see San Diego forever — or until the end, anyway…”

Fair Trade — Jessica Creane & Yannick Trapman-O’Brien
Interactive Experience

As solo artists both Jessica Creane & Yannick Trapman-O’Brien are known in immersive circles for creating some of the most unique productions, whether that is Creane’s TED-talk gone off the rails Chaos Theory or Trapman-O’Brien’s pandemic era remote hit The Telelibrary.

Last year the Philadelphia-based creators teamed up to craft an interactive experience meant to be played out between audience members, centered around bartering and bargaining.

“You’ll choose three things you own as possible offerings and negotiate a trade with a perfect stranger. Who they are and what they’ve brought is a mystery — but with just an hour between you, your decisions will lead the way to discover if a fair trade is in reach, and who you may become if you pursue it.”

GLACIAL INCANTATIONS — The Herakles Project’s Hortense Gerardo
AR Installation — No Reservations Required

This phone based AR/ASMR experience will be anchored on the walkway near The Rady Shell during the run of the festival and is one of two installations from the teams of The Herakles Project.

“The Herakles Project addresses the existential question of the motive behind Herakles’ twelve tasks — were they a form of expiation for the murder of his wife and children, or were they the cause of a form of post-traumatic stress — violence begetting violence?”

GLACIAL INCANTATIONS takes on the ninth labor: getting the belt of Hippolyte, Queen of the Amazons. Here that is reinterpreted as a dying glacier being killed off by a “belt” of warm water.

A mythological meditation on climate change delivered by the state of the art technology is definitely the kind of thing that piques our curiosity. The question being if the sum of the parts will prove out to be greater than the whole. Luckily all it takes is our own phone and finding the QR codes around The Rady Shell to participate.

La Lucha — Optika Moderna
Immersive Theatre
Previews — $39

The latest from David Israel Reynoso’s Optika Moderna is set to be the biggest work yet from the bold San Diego based company. Eight guests at a time will enter Optika Moderna’s offices and have their vision changed, allowing them to see into an alternate universe of luchadores (Mexican wrestlers) where your mask is your face and what lies beneath a mystery.

We were lucky enough to tour the still in construction set twice and can safely say that Reynoso has already topped himself in terms of scope and ambition, with multiple pathways being possible through the world of the show that will doubtlessly invite repeat visits.

Few immersive companies meld storytelling and design with the aplomb that Reynoso and Optika Moderna do. We listed this as one of our most antcipated shows of 2023, full stop. The best news about this show just might be that it will return for a run beginning in mid-May, so if you miss previews you will still have have a chance to catch it.

Las Cuatro Milpas — TuYo Theatre
Interactive Installation

TuYo Theatre’s Las Cuatro Milpas reimagines the corn maze as an “immersive journey… that bridges ancient Aztec mythology with the American dream. Audiences enter a maze modeled on Aztec codices and covered in murals that tell the journey of the Estudillo family from Mexico to California.”

Based on a San Diego’s oldest Mexican restaurant, Petra and Nati’s Las Cuatro Milpas in Barrio Logan, patrons will be able to interact via QR codes to reveal the family’s story “as well as music and recorded dances inspired by the Aztec corn gods.”

The layering of local history, mythology, installation art, and technology is real catnip for us. Just the idea of putting a story inside a corn maze is enough get us to take notice, and the ambition here looks to be much bolder than that.

salty water — Blindspot Collective
Site-Specific Theatre

Blindspot Collective have been a key player in the last few WOW Festivals, and this year is looking to be no different. This year’s offering is “created by a cast of 15 professional performers and 40 local youth” and will explore San Diego’s relationship to the sea through family tales, Kumeyaay creation stories, and with the help of large scale puppets.

Blindspot’s Hall Pass (WOW 2019) took us by surprise, with a smartly woven tale that took part inside the halls of a high school at WOW’s Liberty Station location that year. We’ve been looking forward to the Collective’s next large scale collaboration with community artists, and from all signs salty water is it.

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