Review Rundown: A Special Delivery of The-Ah-Tah

Know what feels GREAT? A Rundown that’s ALL KILLER NO FILLER. And the three options this week are all Pick of the Week contenders. When it rains, it pours as they say.

There’s digital work from Swamp Motel, deliveries from Chicago’s Birch House Immersive, and the co-creator of Blackout — Josh Randall — returns to acting in an intimate site-responsive production of a Pulitzer Prize finalist play in Los Angeles.

That’s how we do here at NoPro. All over the blessed map in every sense of the word.

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The Alter — Swamp Motel
PWYC — £5; Online; Through May 10

Swamp Motel keeps casually dropping best-in-show immersive like it’s no big deal. One day they’re making transmedia interactive mysteries, the next they’re blowing our minds with in-person escape rooms. The Alter — like Isklander and The Drop — is an extremely tight experience that invites audience members to engage with stories on their own terms.

Unlike Swamp Motel’s earlier offerings, The Alter does not ask you to become a character. Instead, you observe four friends as they escape city life for something a little more pastoral. Viewers toggle between “the night of” and “the morning after” in this interactive film as they try to piece together a strange narrative of hope, concern, and uncertainty. There’s no right or wrong way to enjoy The Alter, but I was shell-shocked enough after my first viewing that I went back and rewatched each section straight through to get a better sense of what exactly went down. And then I watched it again, toggling a little more intentionally this time. Guys. There are layers. The score, the shot-for-shot parallels between night and day, the tension between what we choose to see and what we put aside; it’s all delicious.

Maybe that’s why Swamp Motel innovates so consistently and so well; they don’t tie themselves to any particular medium. Instead, they ask which medium best fits the story they want to tell. I have to believe that’s true, because everything about The Alter, right down to its format, left me wondering what we give up when we choose one path over another; whether or not we can anticipate regret, and if it even matters. That’s a heavy lift for 24 collective minutes.

One final note (more of an asterisk, really) about immersive’s place in mainstream media: there have been a few experimental interactive films shown at festivals over the past couple of years. And while I’m sure this isn’t the first widely available interactive film, it’s the first one that’s come across my desk organically. It feels like we’re standing on a precipice of change. Swamp Motel and others like them are leading the way, creating inroads to a new world of immersion.

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— Leah Davis, New England Correspondent

Lonely Hearts: Special Delivery — Birch House Immersive
$40 — $75; Remote (At Home Box); Run Concluded

Unfortunately, many small businesses went out of business because of the pandemic — possibly including Rigby’s Tavern. Its doors remain closed, with the ever-welcoming Mr. Rigby having not been seen recently. His “employees” Gentlewoman Giles Henry and the Gin-savant Beatrix Von Hopper are worried, hoping someone would check in on Mr. Rigby and the bar.

Now in its fifth year, Birch House Immersive’s latest iteration of Lonely Hearts is a major departure from previous ones. Instead of a live performance element, audiences receive either one or five packages in the mail. Each delivery is packed with letters, ephemera, and artifacts from both the tavern’s staff along with previous and current patrons.

Special Delivery is a welcome and invigorating change of pace, the well-worn formula of being shuffled from between performers on a track unable to be duplicated for mail delivery. Each package is filled to the brim, seemingly never-ending with how intricately it’s been prepared. Audience interaction and usage has been carefully planned out, maximizing both discovery and dramatics. There are notes and objects wrapped within letters, allowing the audience to make connections instinctively. Also, each item is incredibly detailed and clearly carefully constructed.

Audiences expecting active involvement will be disappointed with Special Delivery, labeling it as being too passive, a novel chopped up into parts. A fair criticism, if only a surface level one. Like all Lonely Hearts’ experiences, Special Delivery asks deeply thought-provoking, challenging questions to its audience. I’ve been caught unaware by actors’ questions in previous years, with these packages tripping me up equally so. If anything, I mulled these questions in greater intensity and depth than previous live experiences, the arrival of new packages prolonging my pondering to great enjoyment.

While nothing beats an in-person immersive experience, Lonely Hearts: Special Delivery was just as lively, engaging, and emotionally deep thanks to its fantastic, well-tended tactile elements. With ending on a promising note that a Rigby’s Tavern will open to patrons next year, hopefully some of this year’s elements return as well.

– Patrick B. McLean, Chicago Curator

Editor’s Note: Birch House Immersive Company Member Dean Corrin was Patrick McLean’s professor at DePaul University along with previously serving as No Proscenium’s Midwest Curator.

Thom Pain (based on nothing) — Ghost Manor Productions
$35; Los Angeles; Through March 27th

Some things you don’t miss until they’re gone, and some you don’t realize you’ve missed until they are back.

Such is the case with intimately scaled site-adaptive theatre. Or at least such things when they are of great scripts and stages, as well as performed expertly. Even if the place they are staged is a garage of a private home tucked into the urban sprawl LA.

That’s where you can find Josh Randall, the fabled co-creator of Blackout, which put immersive horror on the map back in 2009 in NYC, in a self-produced production of Will Eno’s Pulitzer Prize finalist play Thom Pain (based on nothing), a one-man show whose script calls up Randall to perform a kind of psycho-spiritual exegesis on the titular character. Thus, by extension, doing the same to himself and, in the confines of the the garage that has been transformed into Pain’s room, we in the audience.

As a “normal play,” there is not a terrible amount of agency here for the audience. But it is in the close proximity to his person and the full obliteration of the fourth wall from curtain to close that Randall conjures that special something which suggests that the arcane effect we label “immersive” isn’t quite as bound by rules as it is guided by provocative intent.

By his own reckoning, Randall hasn’t acted in quite a stretch of time, but you wouldn’t know that here. Even the occasional script stumble is played off in a way that leaves you wondering if the vibrant, kinetic text by Will Eno isn’t set up this way. There’s a rawness here, the sense that one is confronting a soul made up of equal parts Eno and Randall that reminds us of why we go to the theatre at all: to both see and be seen. Not in the surface sense of our clout-chasing age but in the manner that began when someone first strove to embody more than themselves.

— Noah Nelson, publisher and host of the NoPro Podcast

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