Filament Theatre’s ‘FORTS’ is Playtime for Adults (Review)

I was rarely allowed to build forts as a child. My mother has excellent taste in fine, well-crafted furniture, meaning that couches and chairs were strictly meant for sitting on and nothing else. To this day, I feel panic when even thinking of putting my feet up on any couch or coffee table, fearing there’ll be hell to pay if I’m caught. But my mother’s grandparents, who lived out in steel-country Pennsylvania, were a different story.

Summers spent at my grandparents’ house were the time of building massive forts. My brother and I would stretch blankets across chairs, moving the furniture around. Other times we would use the seat cushions to create narrow, tight mazes. No two forts were ever alike. As each afternoon stretched into evening, the true character and purpose of our forts would reveal itself naturally. When we were young, the forts were used to watch sitcom reruns on Nick-At-Night, but as I got older, I’d use them to escape into my own imaginative wonderland. It’s this moment of childhood magic that the Filament Theatre brings to life in FORTS: Adult’s Night, allowing adults to have fun like they did when kids.

When arriving at Filament Theatre’s performance space in Old Irving Park on a Saturday night, my party is instantly drawn to the coloring stations set up for audience members arriving early. Their cleverness in prompting us to draw on blank cardboard rather than paper doesn’t go unnoticed as we quickly get to work. I dump the entire container of crayons out on the table, allowing quicker access to that color desperately needed next when drawing. Looking at the drawings made by the others in my party, I noticed their work reflects “who” they are. As a child, you don’t think, you just draw what you want to draw, making it up as you go along. But when drawing as an adult, I realize that our drawings are windows into our desires and wants. For me, serene comfort and happiness bubbles up from within as I create a magical landscape with a massive dragon flying above.

As the rest of the audience arrives, our adventure guides Allison Sword and Mark Maxwell greet everyone, instructing us how to “play nice” this evening. While some people might interpret their tone as condescending, I see it as a subtle way to instruct adults on “how to play” as children do, stripping away any conventions of what “play” means to us. Or their tone could take the qualities it does because Allison, Mark, and the other guides of FORTS run the same experience for children other times throughout the weekend, using the same script for the adult playtime on Saturday nights. I choose to believe it’s the former; without complaint, everyone happily takes off their shoes and lines up in an orderly manner, growing giddy with excitement to get started.

With the curtained entrance to the main space now pulled open, we rush forward to find several stacks of cardboard boxes along with several couches scattered throughout the space. The stacks of boxes are at least 10 feet high. Per Allison and Mark’s directions, we’re allowed to knock over the stacks (while making sure those standing near the boxes are out of the way), sending boxes clattering across the floor, along with the last of my adult-minded preconceptions on how to “play” in FORTS.

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Within seconds, the floor is transformed into a sea of cardboard, rustling against our legs as the audience moves about, picking out boxes that will become the foundations of our forts. My party quickly gets to work, building what soon becomes a massive house complete with chimney, garage, and bay windows in the back. I’m amazed at how organically and effortlessly we build upon each other’s ideas, with nary a “no” to be spoken against any particular idea, our fort being assembled with everyone’s personal aesthetics included in every layer. There’s even collaboration among audience members at large as strangers provide helping hands and appreciated suggestions as my party builds our fort. And when returning the favor to help the other audience members, we’re invited to explore their forts to see what they’ve built. I cannot convey strongly enough how freeing it was just to play without care and consequence. As an adult with a mortgage and 401K, I find myself spending any spare time de-stressing from the happenings of my day job, which, in turn, forces me to be reactionary and selective in which of my creative pursuits I’ll work on each day. With FORTS, the carefree feeling fostered long ago in my grandparents’ living room returns. I remember just how easy it is to create joy with nothing but a few boxes, blankets, and our minds. Additionally, it’s freeing to break away from our highly charged world and the headlines it produces, participating in an activity that requires strangers to connect “offline” and communicate experiences and thoughts along with helping each other out with their problems.

A great deal of the childlike joy I experienced in FORTS also stems from how well-crafted and paced the experience. During our playtime, Allison and Mark slowly and casually dispensed new items and tools, allowing the forts to evolve in new and exciting ways. Allison and Mark also took the position of play leaders during the experience, coaxing to those too nervous to play initially. When someone in my group built a mailbox for our house fort, Allison and Mark were the first to leave handwritten letters there, written using crayons on pieces of cardboard. Between our guides and a soundtrack of ambient noise and “I Don’t Care” from Ed Sheeen and Justin Bieber playing during FORTS, the Filament Theatre crafts a rich place to play and be creative.

My only issue with FORTS is the offboarding process. The experience ends with an announcement that playtime is over and we need to put the boxes back in their stacks. I imagine that once the children are done stacking boxes, the task of herding them towards the exit is a difficult time. But for the adults, once we finished stacking boxes, it became clear that none of us wanted to leave, electing instead to hang out in the theatre space. We left only because as adults we recognized that it was “time to go,” not because FORTS guided us back out into the adult world.

I’m thrilled that Filament Theatre has opened up the FORTS experience to adults. Forgetting all of my worries and allowing myself to have unbridled fun, FORTS is the perfect immersive experience to start off 2020, reminding me that it’s still possible to escape into the joy of fort-making all these years later.

FORTS: Adult Night runs through February 22 in Chicago. Tickets are $15.

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