Immersive Review Rundown: Worlds Beyond, Worlds Within

There’s some really interesting work this week, and no single piece really looks at all like the others: which is how we like it here at NoPro.

Katrina brings us word of a D&D event gearing up for a tour in Canada while Alec heads to Grand Central Station not once but twice to catch the Severance pop-up and observe the crowds observing it.

Meanwhile, Nicholas is the MVP this time out, with three reviews from the edge of the NYC experimental world: one from the Prototype festival and two from Under the Radar.

It’s a fine mix. Let’s get into it!

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Bardo + Black Lodge — Sandra Powers and David Little
$80; NYC, BRIC Media Arts; Run concluded

For me, opera means grand scale and grand scale is what Black Lodge brought. An opera performed simultaneously with a 70 minute abstract film from this year’s Prototype Festival, Black Lodge is meant to be a visceral sensory explosion. Bardo, the immersive gallery staged for the opera’s opening night, did a wonderful job of framing and introducing it.

The BRIC Media Arts lobby contained five different immersive features including a demonic emcee riffing on the desires and regrets of the audience; a slow dance performance with string quarter accompaniment reminiscent of Silent Hill 2; and a hellishly-red writers’ room where two typing authors are verbally assaulted by an embodiment of their self-loathing. Despite some DIY staging (probably due to a last-minute venue shift), the level of commitment to the immersive component was impressive. For about 90 minutes, the performers kept up their small vignettes without cessation, varying them just enough to keep them compelling. The aforementioned dancers were creepy and beautiful and in particular the emcee Jeremy Damnit and the writer’s room ringleader Marykate Glenn were terrific actors, keeping their simple patterns captivating, on theme, and fresh for as long as you engaged them.

Black Lodge itself was also awesome in scope if not fully successful. The music was fascinating — an intriguing combination of opera and death metal that swung from serene to terrifying as it provided the live score of the film. The movie itself was impressive in terms of scope and execution — it’s essentially a 70 minute music video. That said, the film was trying so hard that it distracted from the plot (a loose story examining a handful of symbolic objects of the protagonist’s life) and musicians. There are inexplicable and regrettable moments when the audio comes from the film rather than the live artists, and there are so many times when the film is showing a stunning landscape or radical animation technique when all I wanted to do was look at the singer’s emoting and movement. It’s an incredible execution, but I wish the film had tried to do less and give more space to the compelling performance that’s in front of us.

Nonetheless, Bardo and Black Lodge worked so well together that it’s impossible for me to imagine seeing the opera without the immersive intro. Black Lodge could use some edits, but bravo to the terrific composition and a powerful immersive expression of the story.

— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent

Dungeons & Dragons: The Immersive Quest
$39 — $80 CAD; Mississauga, Canada; Until March 16, 2025

Dungeons & Dragons: The Immersive Quest is an official Wizards of the Coast sanctioned experience. It premiered just outside of Toronto in late 2024, and is slated to eventually tour.

At our adventure’s start, we were introduced to a delightful cast of characters — our wonderfully cheeky Dungeon Master who invited us to choose a character class (rogue, druid, fighter, wizard), and the personable regulars of the Yawning Portal Tavern. A dramatically staged scene revealed our quest — to recover the “Crystal Heart” from a thieving dragon so that its protective magic might once more shield the village from harm.

From there, the actor-led portion made way for a non-linear experience which comprised the bulk of our 60-minute adventure. Roughly a dozen NFC-wristband triggered mini-games, featuring a variety of familiar D&D creatures, were scattered throughout the room. We raced to locate the correct lock and key to reveal a Mimic, dodged the laser-like visage of a Beholder, and outsmarted a few Memory Devourers in a pattern memorization activity. Though the games featured beautiful props, many lacked a clear feedback loop, resulting in unsatisfying gameplay. In several instances, we were unsure if endgame sound cues were victory or failure states. In addition, the choices we made at the start — character class and game difficulty — made minimal, often indistinguishable, differences.

The finale, a showdown with our antagonist dragon, was plagued by technical shortcomings — the sensors barely registered our battle movements and any theatrical elements were marred by too quiet audio. At the end, we were once again left unclear if we had achieved a win state, and only informed of our victory when an attendee found our confused selves in the hallway.

Overall, Dungeons & Dragons: The Immersive Experience feels like two separate experiences: a polished, actor-led introduction featuring beautifully designed sets, impactful lighting cues and sound design, and a wonderfully performed cast of characters… followed by a series of themed games that fell flat. The opening sequence was exceptional, and I hope they continue to polish the gamified portion of the experience for subsequent stops in their tour.

— Katrina Lat, Toronto Curator

Nothing Doing, Alex Tatarsky
$25; NYC, Chemistry Creative; Run concluded

Nothing Doing is Alex Tatarsky’s chaotic and reckless dadaist clowning show, dadaist in the sense that there’s no clear theme or throughline. Shown as part of Under the Radar’s Under Construction program and Nothing Doing was very much under construction. Tatarsky had some fascinating moments in this show that demonstrate their skill as a comedian and clown, but as a complete piece it still has work to go.

Where Tatarsky really shined was in their stage presence and connection to the audience. During the piece, Tatarsky jumps from concept to concept, constructing brief scenes from the props scattered on stage as set-ups for bits of absurdist humor. These moments were mixed in quality; certainly there were some that meandered or missed the mark. But when Tatarsky hit, they hit brilliantly. The best work played with the conventions of narrative, setting up traditional theatrical beats and then undercutting them in bizarre and hilarious ways. There was a dark sequence about physical acting and imagination that I can’t bring myself to spoil, but it was so rich it could have been a whole show by itself. But despite this unevenness, Tatarsky never lost the audience. Even as the work got uncomfortable or awkward, Tatarsky could recalibrate and catch us again with a phrase or smile or off-color comment. As random as the work was, I left impressed, having laughed a lot and seen 2 or 3 moments of true genius.

It’s hard to critique works-in-progress, given that the artist tells you in the program that you’re seeing something incomplete. What you’re really judging as a critic is the potential of the work, whether you think the concept and the performer could be a real show in the future. Some of Nothing Doing deserves to be left behind, but Alex Tatarsky is a talent to see and they have some really good pieces of nothing to bring to something fully constructed in the future.

— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent

The Search for Power — Tania El Khoury and Ziad Abu-Rish
$20; NYC, The Invisible Dog; Run concluded

The Search for Power is an interactive documentary performance/installation about Lebanon’s power cuts, exploring the 70+ year history of colonialism, greed, and callousness that led to the country’s continued problems with electricity. The piece has some strong and moving elements, but in many ways The Search for Power still feels like a work-in-progress.

The piece takes place around a banquet table with closed boxes at every seating. While you drink wine and eat dates, Tania El Khoury and Ziad Abu-Rish invite you to look through bureaucratic records and diplomatic messages that detail the reverse history of how the power infrastructure of Lebanon was created. El Khoury and Abu-Rish narrate the story of their investigation as you read, showing slides of the places they visited, describing their archival search, and discussing their relationship. In the end, they reveal that their interest in this started on their wedding day when an unscheduled blackout caused the dinner and party to take place without power. You have been sitting at a replica of that wedding table the whole show and the piece ends as they invite you to celebrate their union by dancing with them in the dark.

Many elements of the piece are strong. The wedding table and the set in general are beautiful. The history is surprising and horrifying; it is incredible that a modern country has so much trouble with infrastructure but so clear by the end of the piece how much colonial intrigue and local greed betrayed the Lebanese people. And the wedding revelation is terrific. It is no trivial thing to get an audience to dance at the end of an immersive show.

That said, it just wasn’t tight. The writing didn’t land the beats well enough. While it’s interesting to look at the original documents, many are in French or Arabic and are several pages long each. The narration should have framed the documents for us, but the connections between the text and the artifacts were loose so I often didn’t know what I was looking at. And unfortunately El Khoury’s performance was halting at times and undermined some of her moments.

There’s a lot that’s great about The Search for Power. I really think the topic and the core structure of the piece is powerful and relevant. The show just needs a couple more edits and rehearsals to shine as bright as it should.

— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent

Severance Pop-up @ Grand Central
Free; New York, NY; Run concluded

Leading up to the release of Severance season two, Apple TV+ took over a nook in Grand Central with an experiential pop-up inside of a glass box.

The team (as is the case with all these activations, it’s not always clear which agency produced this or if it was in-house; though I suspect Giant Spoon, MKG, or Superfly had something to do with it) recreated the show’s iconic cubicles, complete with green carpeting, vintage computers, and custom desk decorations specific to each character. [UPDATE Ed. Note — The agency of record is Kamp Grizzly. H/T to Steve Coulson for that.]

To activate the space, four actors portraying the cast silently moved through the set, going about their average work day, while audience members looked on. Other than the occasional group huddle or possible easter egg — one actor used his Lumon monitor to spell “Help”! — the performers’ behavior was mundane and methodical.

But that seemed to be the point.

It’s only fitting that Severance’s activation be as patient, eerily routine, and Kafka-esque (sorry) as the show itself.

I went the second day; and from an anthropological standpoint, it was fascinating to watch how the audience interacted with the installation. Hoards of people, many of whom had surely seen on social media that Adam Scott and the rest of the cast performed in the installation the day prior, hovered around the installation, either in hopes of seeing the celebrities, in an attempt to immerse themselves in the world of the show, or maybe just to check out what weird thing was going on in Grand Central that day.

Given how devoutly the 360-degree crowds transfixed themselves to this central cube, I couldn’t help but think of images I’d seen of the Kaaba, the box-shaped, Islamic holy site in Mecca that pilgrims flock to for worship. Insert vague, metaphoric critique about Western religiosity towards media and fame.

Perhaps most interestingly to me, the audience naturally left a roughly five-foot gap between themselves and the installation, which some members used to circle around the performance space, creating an almost whirlpool effect that let them take full advantage of this mini experimental theatre in the round.

Stated most simply, the Severance pop-up gave New York a solid piece of surreally corporate performance art that earned the eyes of thousands. And in the wake of Sleep No More’s closing, it’s comforting to see that weird, experimental theatre can still break into the mainstream.

Here’s to more.

— Alec Zbornak, New York Correspondent

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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