Looking for More in ‘The Battle of Broken Mirrors’ (Review)

My mother always said that one of the great joys of having children is getting to return to the well of childhood and enjoy its delights once again. This always struck me as odd; perhaps I’m just another Millennial who refuses to grow up, but if you love something, why do you need “permission” to visit it once more? It’s with that attitude I went into The Battle of Broken Mirrors, the newest production presented by The Scattered Players, the same group who brought us Shattered Space a few months ago.

So if I can praise Broken Mirrors at all, it’s because the show made me understand my mother a little more.

(Minor spoilers follow.)

The Battle of Broken Mirrors takes on the same structure of the enjoyable-but-rough Shattered Space (a timed journey through various breakout rooms with your adventuring party to collect items and make friends with the denizens of a strange world, all through a custom web portal), and gives it a fantasy overlay, taking inspiration from the Chinese folktale “The Fauna of Mirrors.” Each Broken Mirrors group also gets an in-character guide to lead them through the fairytale world on the other side of the mirror, Rorrim.

Sadly, my efforts to play along felt continually needless, awkward, and intrusive. To start, our party, composed entirely of No Proscenium writers who are usually game to “play along,” struggled to get a word in when our host, a kitsune named Keko in cosplay chic (one of the better costumes of the evening), seemed to manage most of the interaction without us. Each room was very much “on rails,” and efforts to play along were, from our group, mostly an effort to get the story to go quicker.

One room worked for us only because of a stroke of luck: I happened to have a dragon puppet and be watching the show from my childhood bedroom. Keeping a straight face as I maneuvered the puppet to talk to another man (also with a dragon puppet) may have been the highlight of the evening, but it didn’t come without considerable strain in the blurring of the borders of fantasy. Only here did the production achieve the immersion the piece seemed to intend across the board. Let’s face it: it’s difficult to immerse adults in a fantasy world, especially one with low production values. In other rooms, full immersion felt essentially impossible, especially as a group. I don’t resent my fellow participants for keeping quiet, considering the awkwardness and amount of work the audience needed to do in creating the immersion. NoPro writer Patrick McLeanput it most succinctly: “I was having microphone problems during Mirrors and muted myself. I felt no inclination to unmute myself at any point [after].”

The Broken Mirrors performers tried their best at maintaining suspension of disbelief but this was a Herculean task posed to each of the Scattered Players. Each breakout room felt divorced in time and place from the others and seemed almost entirely conceived and devised by the host, based on what physical items they had access to. This led to a wild variety of tones and quality levels across the experience. Starting in the Hall of the Thearchs (some sort of religious order, we gathered), we met a changeling resplendent in gold lame wings and white robes. We had a nice conversation but he gave an almost completely non-interactive story about his life impersonating the reincarnation of the heroic Huang Di. And a few rooms further, we were consistently shushed as we were shown a barely visible shadow puppet show, one that seemed to be an impenetrable metaphor in which a giant baby represented humanity’s unsustainable pollution. One room presented a hyper-sexual chupacabra, their costume composed of duct tape fingers and splotchy green face paint, in front of a floral bed sheet tacked to the wall but unfortunately not filling the frame of the camera; the next contained a garden of gorgeously crafted fabric sculpture flowers, out of which emerged an actress playing an infant mandrake. The varying levels of production quality in The Battle of Broken Mirrors made me wonder if each actor was responsible for sourcing their own costume and set; it was the only explanation I could imagine for such inconsistency.

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This kind of picaresque worked far better in Shattered Space where the premise was founded on the idea of separation. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the collapse of communication between distant starships in a splintered galaxy felt apt. Here, where the attempt was to make a cohesive world, the results fell flat. The Battle of Broken Mirrors felt a fair deal like children’s theatre or television with the pantomime tradition of shouting at the characters to warn them of danger, or telling Dora the Explorer where to go next, as opposed to the epic it positioned itself as. The Battle of Broken Mirrors might be an excellent children’s show with a few tweaks, but marketed to adults, and taking an almost Wagnerian tone in its framing — overloaded with warring factions, genocidally eradicated species of fantasy creatures, and frightful prophecies — it’s hard to imagine it landing with any age of audience.

Where the production was sparse and lacking attention to detail in some areas, it was overburdened with details in others. Rorrim was bursting with lore; sadly, that lore served primarily to detract, burying the already thinly stretched themes in a whirlwind of factions, rivalries, jargon, and history, all expected to be digested in a scant 90 minutes. As NoPro writer Laura Hess said afterwards, “the show’s messaging was so burdened with strata of in-world details that it was rendered indecipherable.”

In addition to the vast amounts of lore and uneven sets and costumes, our story ended rather abruptly, with what seemed to almost be a “trailer” for the climax. We are told that a dramatic clash is going to come, and then, suddenly, the messaging turned to thank you, exit through the gift shop. After the tedium and awkwardness of earlier scenes, we all burst out laughing in a post-show debrief. In fact, the show’s ending was so abrupt that we at first believed that the custom web portal had crashed before realizing it was intentional.

The cast of the show are obviously having a ton of fun in The Battle of Broken Mirrors, with plenty of freedom to create memorable characters, like the hilarious sponsor-obsessed fairy host of a political radio show we encountered. A majority of them seem to be good friends, and the whole production has a sort of “gee whiz, let’s put on a show!” energy, which perhaps accounts for the large amounts of lore and haphazard nature of the sets and costumes. Unfortunately, with an actor playing a guide in each party, though, that energy turns inward rather than bolstering the rest of the performance. I’m left wondering whether the charming conceit and energy of The Battle of Broken Mirrors would be better served as a simple LARP for a group of friends to enjoy among themselves, rather than a theatrical production for a group of outsiders to feel like they must endure.

The Battle of Broken Mirrors continues through November 1. Tickets are $20.

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