Coming Soon: The Double

NoPro has been tracking the work of Witness Immersive since we first stumbled upon them in New York City in the years pre-pandemic, and followed them to Seattle where they brought their curiosity rewarding brand of immersive with Last Days of the Tsars.

Russia is on the menu again as the company adapts Dostoyevsky’s The Double into a modern context with some Severance vibes with a month long run that kicks off June 27th and runs through July 27th in the Emerald City. (Ah, that’s Seattle, not Oz.)

We checked in with Witness’ Artistic Director Michael Bontatibus, who also wrote the play, about the new production.

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

Michael Bontatibus: The Double is a site-specific adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel of the same name, staged in a real abandoned tech office in downtown Seattle. The story is told via dueling monologues which play off monitors around the office floor, accompanied by live performers behind conference room glass. The audience is initially invited in to sit at the desks, but they don’t have to stay there: if they like, they can stand up, walk around, explore the space and rummage through the set. Everyone gets the same story, but they get to experience it in whatever way they please.

NP: What was the inspiration for your upcoming experience?

MB: I’d been chewing on the Dostoyevsky book not too long when the space became available, and it immediately clicked as a very natural marriage of material and site. The original story is about a mid-level office worker in 19th-century Russia whose life is upended by a new hire who happens to be his exact doppelgänger. This genre — psychological workplace horror — seemed to map very well onto contemporary Seattle tech culture, and feels very at home within these sleekly liminal office spaces that are everywhere now.

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

MB: Past Witness shows have taken different forms but have always been exploratory in nature, and are often staged site-specifically in multi-room buildings. The Double is an attempt to take everything we love about the free-roam experience — the physical investigation of a site alongside the cerebral assembly of a story in real-time — and distill it into a single large open-plan space. Thus the show is designed so that you can roam around AND delve into the details AND track the narrative all at once — fluidly switching your attention between different modes of engagement however you like, while still having a cohesive, thrilling experience.

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

MB: There’s a shocking amount of theatricality that can be mined from an office space that is intentionally designed to be as neutral and generic as possible. A conference room is a kind of perfect stage. The sterile nature of a desk or countertop means a very small detail placed there can have an outsized effect. And it’s a terrific canvas for theatrical lighting and sound — it doesn’t take a lot to transform a space meant to be bland and ordinary into something ominous and intriguing.

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

MB: The Double by Dostoyevsky is a good read before or after you see the show, and our adaptation is different enough where you won’t be spoiling much. Severance was certainly on the brain while writing/designing, as was other media that leaned into how bizarre and alienating empty offices can be — the video games The Stanley Parable and Control, for instance — along with loads of plays, including Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz and the West End staging of The Lehman Trilogy, which activate mundane office environs to theatrical effect.

If you want to get advanced, leaf through the archives of a local Seattle paper to get a feel for how the city has been changed and redeveloped by big tech companies. When I was growing up in the area, Seattle had a less corporate feel, but it was rapidly overrun by giant modern office buildings thrown up by Amazon et al — many of which were abandoned even more rapidly after the pandemic when so many companies switched to a work-from-home model. There are so many office spaces sitting empty, feeling new and dead at the same time. The massive changes that have taken place in Seattle industry over the last couple decades is very implicitly present in the show.

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