COMING SOON: Escape From Godot

Mister & Mischief have been delighting audiences in Southern California for years with their highly inventive immersive creations like 40 Watts From Nowhere and The Apple Avenue Detective Agency, both of which were Without Walls Festival selections.

Yet the legend of Mister & Mischief begins at a different festival — The Hollywood Fringe — when they took over a theater for a day with Escape From Godot. Here’s what we had to say about it in “NoPro’s 10 Most Anticipated New Immersive Works of 2024 (Part II)”:

The premise is simple: you’ve been invited a performance of THAT SHOW by one of your friends. Only the Beckett Estate has caught wind and is on the way to shut it down and sue everyone in the building. There’s just an hour left to run the show, and the stage manager has quit. It’s up to you and the other members of the audience to piece together the clues and call the show. It’s hilarious. It’s brilliant. It’s not to be missed.

We caught up with Jeff & Andy Crocker of Mister & Mischief to get more on the upcoming remount of Escape From Godot, which is popping up this August in Atwater Village in LA from the 9th through the 25th. Tickets are on sale now.

Follow Mister & Mischief on Instagram: @misterandmischief & Facebook: misterandmischief.

This is No Proscenium’s COMING SOON, a look at ongoing immersive experiences & events. To learn more about how your event could be considered for the feature check out How To Get Covered By NoPro.

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NO PROSCENIUM: Tell us a little bit about your experience! What’s it about? What makes it immersive?

JEFF CROCKER: It’s iconic existentialism infused with escape room energy. If you are not familiar with Samuel Beckett’s work, it will still feel familiar as a “very important play,” but you have 60 minutes to get out.

ANDY CROCKER: You’ll hear us say this if you come to the show– It’s a show that’s a game and a game that’s a show– you do them both at the same time the whole time.

JEFF: It’s like the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of mid-century absurdist theater.

NP: What was the inspiration for your upcoming experience?

JEFF: We’ve told the story of the inspiration of Escape From Godot before, including on Episode 233 of the No Proscenium podcast, but here’s a quick recap: I was riffing with a friend about odd escape room concepts and made a joke about a Waiting for Godot escape room. When I told Andy, her eyes grew wide and she said, we have to do that. The timing was right to mount a show for the Hollywood Fringe Festival even though we didn’t quite know how we were going to do it– just that it needed to happen.

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ANDY: I’m a traditional theater director on my college degree, but was always moonlighting as an experimental weirdo– this was the first time I knew I was going to get to use all my superpowers at once.

NP: What do you think fans of immersive will find most interesting about this latest experience?

ANDY: If you’re a fan of immersive experiences and you’ve got friends who haven’t gotten into it, this is a great introduction. We’ve been describing our work as “fun forward” and for all the joking we do about existential dread, it really is meant to be a good time.

JEFF: It’s a perfect thing to do with strangers and pals.

NP: Once you started designing and testing what did you discover about this experience that was unexpected?

JEFF: Waiting for Godot is purposely sparse–

ANDY: — Some might say “bleak.”

JEFF: But specifically in designing our show, we discovered there are so many characters and things and elements of the theater to utilize for interactivity.

ANDY: And the way in which audiences will interact with the show– in hopes of escaping– brings out a serious playfulness in people.

JEFF: Or playful seriousness.

NP: What can fans who are coming to this, or thinking about coming to this, do to get into the mood of the experience?

JEFF: Gaze sullenly out a window and contemplate the years you have yet to live.

ANDY: Pour a glass of whiskey and ponder the futility of choice.

JEFF: Eat a raw turnip.

ANDY: Think about all of the “very important art” from which you’ve wanted to escape.

JEFF: In all honesty, we always prepare our audience that you don’t need to know the source material or even that there is source material. In that sense, arrive on time and be ready to have fun at the theater.

Discover the latest immersive events, festivals, workshops, and more at our new site EVERYTHING IMMERSIVE, home of NoPro’s show listings.

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In addition to the No Proscenium website and our podcast, and you can find NoPro on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and in the Facebook community also named Everything Immersive.