Review Rundown: Farewell Spooky Season 2023

It’s an ultra-rare Rundown hitting on actual Halloween, so what better time to clear out the inventory of our 2023 Spooky Season adventures?

This time out we’ve got three from the NYC team and two from Kat in Toronto, including a piece that will be popping up in Vancouver this Jan. So look out Van City.

Speaking of NYC…

No Proscenium is seeking to add writers to our NYC team!

Send a CV, cover letter, and writing sample (ideally of a theatrical review) to NYC Curator Allie Marotta at alliemarotta@gmail.com

Experience with immersive work is required, however professional theatre criticism experience is NOT required. In your cover letter, please provide an overview of you experience with both areas as well as what your journalistic “beat” would be (ex. I am very connected to and well versed in interactive theatre). We are keenly seeking to fill gaps in beats our current writer roster including but not limited to: installation art, immersive visual art, VR, games, novels, non-traditional media forms

Please note, No Proscenium is a labor of love and is currently a volunteer driven operation. This position is not paid at this time, but exclusive access to complimentary press tickets is included as a part of this work.

This call will remain active until the position(s) are filled. Writers will be invited to join the team on an as needed, rolling basis.

Looking for more reviews to know what you missed? (Or maybe you’re a time traveler who wants to understand this immersive thing.) How does 11 reviews from two weeks ago sound?

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Asylum: A Love Story — Dread Night Team
$140, Sands Point, NY; Through October 31, Sold Out

There’s an overwhelming temptation when designing a show about an asylum to fall into bad taste. Either you make your depictions of the mentally ill offensive caricatures, or you make a meal out of the memory of real abuses long passed. When I first told my friends I was to review Asylum: A Love Story, there came the eye rolls. “Is this one of those awful Harley/Joker things? Is it the scary patient? The abusive doctor?”

Well, perhaps some degree bad taste is unavoidable, but in this case, I’m thrilled I’m talking about the schlocky highs of John Waters. The titular Asylum audiences tour is a magical mystery tour through every narrative trope of the asylum more so than any of our perceptions of mental illness or its treatment. From the giggly discomfort of Freudian psychosexual theory, to 60’s tinged “holistic wellness”, and even a brief digression into “The Silence of the Lambs”, we’re firmly exploring media landscapes surrounding the theme of the asylum, rather than any reality or history. This meta separation makes the show feel far more comfortable and removed from any memories of exploitation.

The titular Love Story follows a doctor (Emma Rathborn) as she attempts to infiltrate the devious Googenhelm Institute to rescue her disappeared love (Julian Everett), but alas, he’s fallen in love with a patient (Audrey Wilson), who is in turn the possessed love of the evil Dr. Googenhelm himself (Kevin Clyne). Each actor in the love chain is game, but Clyne steals the show as Dr. Googenhelm, alternating between psychobabble and maniacal laughter. His performance takes clear influence from Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, mixed with crayon doodle of Sigmund Freud, and the results are menacing and hilarious. All the patients are equally charming, but my mind keeps drifting back to Barfinkle the Squirrel Boy (Sevrin Willinder) and Norma Swanson (Jill Linden). Their charm and warmth made them the heart of the patients in treatment, and give the show a pathos that carries it even through both comedy and horror.

The audience is led between scenes interviewing staff and patients, including some large group scenes. Per usual, Dread Night Team uses the architecture of Hempstead House, a beautiful gilded age mansion on Long Island, to create spectacular tableaus. One nightmarish sequence in a drawing room converted into a puppet theatre glows in my memory. While the show’s pacing is mostly superb, a slightly abrupt and more comedic ending somewhat lets the air out of the event. Nevertheless, the romp is delightful from start to finish, if maybe not to the same giddy heights as prior years.

At this point, Dread Night Team’s partnership with Sand’s Point Preserve has become an annual highlight of the New York immersive theatre calendar. It’s no wonder their shows tend to sell out immediately, and that they can keep upping the scope of the production. I look forward to whatever debauched lunacy they have on offer next year, and suspect I will continue to anticipate their productions for years and years to come.

— Blake Weil, East Coast Editor At Large

asses.masses — Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim
$15 — $60; Toronto, Canada; Run Concluded

Upcoming Run: Vancouver, Canada; Jan 20 — Feb 3

A 7-hour participatory video game can be a tough sell — something I realized for myself as I tried, and failed, to convince a friend to join me for a “participatory performance that follows the epic journey of unemployed asses as they navigate the perils of a post-Industrial society in which they’ve been made redundant.” But, for those willing to take the leap, asses.masses is a delightful and thought-provoking adventure in which the experience of the characters onscreen becomes mirrored by the audience.

At its core, asses.masses is a custom-made video game. However, whereas a video game is typically a solitary activity played in the comfort of one’s living room, the show transforms it into a communal playthrough experience. One by one, we stepped on stage to “seize the means of production” (aka a video game controller) and control the game. Throughout, our playthrough, decisions were determined through a democratic poll of the audience’s collective wisdom… or if the player in charge was so inclined, based purely on their individual whims.

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Our story centers around a group of donkeys (or asses), and their fantastical journey to reclaim their life’s meaning in a world that is keen to leave them behind. The video game itself is charming, with old-school graphics, tongue-in-cheek humor, and a cast of memorable characters. At first, gameplay, visuals, and tone align most closely with a Stardew Valley style RPG. However, as the night progressed, a diverse range of gaming experiences was presented. Very early on, it became evident that despite asses.masses’ inherent playfulness, it is not a lighthearted adventure. Characters meet gruesome and heartbreaking fates, and themes of obsolescence, tradition vs. progress, and capitalism are explored.

— Katrina Lat, Toronto Curator

Nightmare Dollhouse — Psycho Clan & ETR Ventures
$40–$60; NYC; end Nov 1st

Doing a lot of horror makes you immune to simple scares, but it leads you to realize there’s lots of kinds of Halloween fun: silly, cerebral, visually compelling, disturbing, etc. Nightmare Dollhouse made me add “charming” to that list. A lot of your reaction to this piece is going to depend on your feeling about the content, but I had a good time with it, just not a scary one.

Nightmare Dollhouse is a short (maybe 25 minute) haunt experience running at Teatro Sea. It’s essentially a set of ad hoc rooms, delineated by curtains. Each room features 1–2 performers doing a scene for a group of up to four about the horror of dolls, all based around a (very) loose narrative of getting trapped in a haunted museum. There are jump scares and nasty costumes, but it’s mostly structured around these short interactions.

My take on it is that it was an earnest, heartfelt attempt that didn’t quite work because of the constraints it was under. All of the actors gave it their all and some scenes were quite clever — in particular, an interactive voodoo doll scene that had a great ending. But given how small the space was and the fact that only curtains separated the rooms, the bleed of sound was cacophonous and made it challenging to isolate anything in your room. It’s hard to be immersed when you realize you need to lean into the actor to hear them threaten you. Everything from room size to lighting had to be compromised with other scenes and it just meant individual scenes were weaker. It was hard to see performers working that hard against purely architectural issues.

As a horror piece, though, it just didn’t work for me. I don’t find dolls scary, and mostly the piece assumes if you think a doll is possessed or you see a mutilated teddy bear, they’ve got you. I walked through it unfazed, but your mileage may vary here because I saw a lot of people screaming and smiling as they exited. Still, I found fun moments in it. Psycho Clan tried hard with something new. It’s not my kind of scary, but I can appreciate other charms and efforts during spooky season.

– Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent

The Poetry Brothel: Coven, a Halloween Soiree —
The Poetry Society of New York
From $30; New York, NY; Run concluded

The Poetry Brothel is a really cool idea — as the name would imply, it sort of feels like hanging out in a brothel, except instead of a brothel’s traditional fare, poetry is what is being sold. The Halloween edition — Poetry Brothel: Coven — was like other traditional Poetry Brothel events, but spookier and with guest costumes encouraged.

The event began with a quick showcase of the dozen or so poets on offer, after which they began roaming through the crowd drumming up business, taking their customers (or poetry Johns) to private booths for a one-on-one reading, in exchange for a $10 token.

While the poets were busy attending to their customers, other art and entertainment — burlesque, a band, and assorted variety acts — kept the crowd busy. Acts on the main stage were free, while other, more personal entertainment (tarot readings, sketches) could be had for 1–2 tokens apiece.

Like any variety show, your mileage may vary, depending on whose services you choose to purchase. The highlight of my night was a reading by the poet January Blue, whose tapestried booth featured a binaural microphone and headphones that made the noise of the crowd disappear as they read me a haunting sea shanty.

My friend, on the other hand, was less enthusiastic about the tarot reading and sketch she spent her tokens on, and I heard varying degrees of satisfaction as people left the poets’ private booths.

But that’s the thing about poetry, or any art — when it works, it’s a magical experience. And when it doesn’t, it’s still a fine way to spend a rainy Sunday evening.

— Cheyenne Ligon, New York Correspondent

work.txt — Nathan Ellis & The Theatre Centre
$15 — $60 CAD ; Toronto, Canada; Run Concluded

The stage is set… and it’s devoid of anything of interest save for an out-of-place looking printer, a pile of wooden blocks, and a large black screen with white text. It’s quickly apparent that there are no actors in the room. Instead, through this projected text, us audience members are transformed into the cast and crew: creating the set design, acting out the parts, and — in my case — becoming unwittingly written into the show itself.

As the show starts, the words on screen ease us into a participatory mindset, beckoning everyone to play a role — and I mean everyone. One by one, groups of people are encouraged to read parts written specifically for them, whether they’re arts lovers, night owls, enthusiastic people, people who are bored, people who make more than $80k a year, people who jog in the mornings, or even the ushers and front of house staff… the list gets humorously specific.

Over the course of the 60 minute show, us audience members build a miniature metropolis out of wooden blocks, play the roles of theater curator or holidaying parent via a freshly printed script or from lines shared through a pair of headphones, and finally — the role I found myself fulfilling — lie on the floor enacting a fully scripted and choreographed mental breakdown.

Work.txt is a parable about the “gig economy, financial instability and bullshit jobs,”… in which the audience becomes the labor. It’s a story about the power of independent thinking and sticking-it-to-the-man… in which the audience parrots words fed to them by an unknown entity. The story is a little loose — of an office worker (in our retelling, named “Katrina” after yours truly) who inexplicably decides to lie down in the middle of their large corporate building and refuses to work. It’s a vehicle for unconventional storytelling methods rather than a full fledged narrative, but in having it be enacted by the audience, it’s full of such delicious moments of poignant discomfort and irony.

Some people will see this play as a silly experiment in participatory theater, others as a humorous and self aware critique of capitalism. Regardless of how much you choose to read into it, work.txt is a playful, thoughtful, and thoroughly enjoyable piece.

— Katrina Lat, Toronto Curator

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