Review Rundown: Of Lonely Hearts & Irresponsibly Armed Cupids

Valentine’s Day. In the States its unavoidable. For some it is just THE BEST. For others, a chance to prove where your priorities lie by getting a jump on the Easter candy before anyone else. Oh, Reese’s Eggs, how can I deny you?

This week’s set is bookmarked by two V-Day experiences that have long legacies. Okay, long-ish in one case but anything that bowed before the pandemic started counts.

It’s not all hearts & roses, there’s also the debut of our new NYC Art Correspondent Alec Zbornak, who explores Pipilotti Rist’s Prickling Goosebumps & a Humming Horizon and two more non-Valentine reviews from New York City where renegade Mayor Eric Adams has declared romance illegal.

Sorry. Sorry. I probably shouldn’t give him any ideas.

But NoPro! I need more!!!!

We got you, fam: last week’s Rundown is right here and it has a link to the one before that. And start planning your travel for the year with “NoPro’s 10 Most Anticipated New Immersive Works of 2024 (Part I).”

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Lonely Hearts: The Haunting — Birch House Immersive
$50 — $75; Chicago, IL; Through Feb. 18th

After three years of venue hopping throughout Chicago, Mr. Rigby (Dean Corrin) has picked a location to reopen his tavern. But work to reopen for Valentine’s Day has slowed down as Mr. Rigby is nowhere to be found, concerning many of his eclectic regulars. Believing the issue to be a mystical, spiritual problem, psychic tarot reader Jubilus (Quinn Leary) leads a seance which unintentionally summons lonely spirits who like the regular barflies crave compassion and companionship.

Back again for its seventh year, Lonely Hearts: The Haunting is a return to formula with a tonal twist. Lonely Hearts is an interactive clockwork experience, with audiences engaging with performers in either intimate groups or in a one-on-one. Sandwiching these interactions is an opening and ending scene delving into Mr. Rigby’s devastating hesitancy to reopen his tavern. It’s an evening filled with tales of love and loss, with a heavy emphasis on the latter. This darker, tragic flavoring is presumably the influence of co-writer and director Justin Brink from Miasma, an extreme haunt company though The Haunting has none of those elements present.

As always, my interactions with the radiant characters of the Lonely Hearts universe remain utterly delightful and profoundly moving. A private dance with a young spirit performed by Christina Renee Jones broke my heart, appreciating the complex importance of saying “I love you” more often to people. And while this year’s tarot reading from Jubilus didn’t bring me to tears, Leary’s ability to create a safe place among strangers is extraordinary. But the highlight was finally interacting with Gentlewoman Giles Henry, performed by Birch House co-founder Janie Killips, after all these years. Stationed behind a piano, playing little ditties as we spoke in a group, Henry’s bombastic nature faded into shocking vulnerability, a surprising versatility from Killips that left me pondering the nature of public personas.

But as enjoyable as my interactions were in The Haunting, each feels disconnected from the other. Each interaction revolves around “a haunting” but they’re wildly different interpretations on the theme. The tone swings from gory and horrific to whimsical and charming depending on the character’s tale. This emotional whiplash is underscored by how little overlap any interaction has with the overall narrative of Mr. Rigby’s (tragically compelling) reasons for delaying the tavern’s opening. The Haunting doesn’t come together as a cohesive piece, the sum of its parts simply in misalignment with each other, ultimately being an evening of (incredibly fantastic) vignettes.

While narratively disjointed, my interactions and conversations among the new and old regulars in Lonely Hearts: The Haunting remains as dynamic and thought provoking as ever.

– Patrick B. McLean, Chicago Curator & Remote Experiences Editor

Editor’s Note: Dean Corrin, a Birch House Immersive company member, was the reviewer’s professor at DePaul University and previously served as NoPro’s Midwest Curator.

The Nose — Madison Wetzell & Dustin Freeman
$40-$95; Manhattan; Run concluded

The Nose is an immersive production based on the absurdist short story of the same name by Nikolai Gogol. Telling the tale of a man who suddenly lost his nose, creative team Madison Wetzell (adaptation) and Dustin Freeman (direction) transformed the nineteenth-century story into an immersive playland of both serious storytelling and just pure silliness. Taking place throughout the new immersive venue, The Lower Case, The Nose leads audience members on a journey through madness and mayhem across the various rooms of the space.

While the production’s incredibly talented cast and clever use of the space set the stage for success, the production relies a bit too heavily on the idea of absurdity for the full potential to be achieved. While the story is definitively absurdist, the production used the audience in a way that felt superficial. And perhaps that is the point, at least in some parts of the piece, considering theatre of the absurd calls for the treatment of the human experience as meaningless. This “meaningless” absurdist style is present in the inclusion of the audience in various moments of the piece — an unprompted bathroom rave, imaginary shots at the bar, non-palm readings, and checks written for nothing all provided a sense of levity and the quirkiness that feels at home in an absurdist piece. However, the audience was also often left waiting with nothing to do during scene changes which felt a bit less intentional.

The real struggle here is whether absurdist theatre and immersive theatre can work together. Immersive theatre calls for careful and thoughtful treatment and inclusion of the spectator that is distinctly different from and more intimate than traditional proscenium or playwright’s theatre. Is it possible to achieve the feeling of specialness and nuance that is so hallmark to immersive work in a genre that dispels all necessity for meaning? I think in the case of The Nose, the answer is no: the genre and form end up at odds with each other in a palpable way. While quite a few laughs were had, I left the experience still searching for the recognition and resonance of being seen and recognized that I yearn for in immersive work.

— Allie Marotta, New York City Curator

Poison and Pearls — Thistle Dance
From $15; Manhattan NYC; Monthly Residency

A late-night show, in a secret speakeasy bar, by an up-and-coming Immersive Theatre company with some great shows under their belts, giving an adult twist on the familiar story of Alice in Wonderland — I was ready to dive head first into this rabbit hole!

Unfortunately, with all this great promise, I’m afraid to say the rabbit hole turned out to be far shallower than I would have liked. Poison and Pearl ends up being a very PG-friendly cabaret show in an amazing venue, with a very talented cast of dancers, but lacks all of the immersive qualities that I was so excited to experience. There was the occasional moment of eye contact with an audience member, or a flirtatious shoulder touch, but nothing more (and actually far less) than what one would expect at a late-night cabaret show in NYC.

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The choreography is lovely, with some great moments of unison movement between the quartet of performers, and the 1920s-inspired costuming fit very nicely within the confines of this delightful hideaway. With a great selection of delicious cocktails (alcoholic and non-alcoholic), there are plenty of things to enjoy in this performance, but I just felt disappointed to not get to experience a truly immersive production from this company which I have heard such great things about.

I wish this production well, and this residency/collaboration I hope will be very successful for all parties involved (currently scheduled to run monthly), but I would just hope that those of us working in the immersive sphere would be more cautious about using this term in our advertising if we know this isn’t the intention of the work we are making.

— Edward Mylechreest, East Coast Correspondent

Prickling Goosebumps & a Humming Horizon — Pipilotti Rist
Free; New York, NY; Through 13 April, 2024

Swiss artist Pipilotto Rist explores the great outdoors (and the great indoors) through a maximalist, multi-media installation across two art galleries combining music, sculpture, set design, and projection at Hauser & Wirth’s 22nd Street location and at Luhrig Augustine’s 24th Street location.

I highly recommend starting at the Hauser & Wirth gallery, which primarily depicts inside spaces, yet finds a way to make them feel infinitely expansive through projection art both on specific objects and on entire living room vignettes.

The back room invites visitors to take off their shoes and sit (or lie) on cozy, mid-century modern furniture, while kaleidoscopic colors wash over them to the hum of rhythmic music in what I overheard a visitor describe as “one of the more comfortable art exhibits I’ve been to.”

The projection art is dynamic, trippy, and cosmic — joining Turrell-esque color swatches with scenes of nature and outer space, while mirroring a series of fluid “Metal Flake Milk Tooth” sculptures in the gallery’s first room.

There’s a certain ritual in having visitors take off their shoes before interacting with the art. Though it may very well just be to keep the pieces clean, this act simultaneously serves as a transition moment, preparing the viewers to enter into this colorful, otherworldly space.

I slightly preferred the Luhrig Augustine, however, which focussed more on outside spaces. Rist transformed one room into a massive backyard, complete with plants, lawn chairs, a park bench, floor-to-ceiling projection pieces of nature, and a theme-park-esque facade of open windows revealing even more projections of (you guessed it) even more nature.

The room is meditative, all-encompassing, and transportative. I couldn’t help but slow down and soak up all the in-world details, like a particularly interesting bird-house sculpture humming a melodic, chimeric chant, very reminiscent of the animal homes in Disneyland’s old Splash Mountain.

Perhaps most notably, a dark back room features yet another moment for reclined reflection with a series of pillows scattered on the floor beneath three large-scale, organic leaf sculptures colorfully projected upon.

Whether visitors hope to explore themes of nature and interiority in the middle of the city or are looking for a quiet place to watch projection art interact with sculpture and sound, Rist’s Prickling Goosebumps & a Humming Horizon serves as arguably the most “comfortable” gallery in Chelsea to do so.

— Alec Zbornak, New York Art Correspondent

Temp Cupid — Spectacular Disaster Factory
$65–85, Los Angeles, through Feb 18

If you’re more interested in chaos than you are in romance this season then do I have show for you.

Temp Cupid is about what happens when the God of Love turns to seasonal workers in order to meet the demand around Valentine’s Day. The temp workers? You and your fellow ticket holders. The job? Help lonely hearts find their match. Your tools?

Why bows and arrows of course!

This is a repeat engagement of Spectacular Disaster Factory’s 2020 show, which in an alternate timeline is a perennial seasonal favorite. Like their Halloween piece Give Up The Ghost, the creative team has found a clever way of giving the audience a whole lot of control over the story while still keeping an invisible veil between actors and audience. It’s pretty much Spectacular Disaster Factory’s signature move at this point, an alchemical distillation of improvised theatre and LARP, and I want to see them create even more work in this vein.

If there’s an issue with the current format for Temp Cupid its that it favors chaos over conscious story crafting. You could take a measured approach to trying to guide your assigned “lonely heart” in their journey of love, or your could just go in blasting with the arrows that attract and repel the various characters.

Most attendees the night I went chose the later.

This isn’t a bad thing! It’s wild fun. In the same breath: it would be totally possible to create a more measured, story focused experience with just a few tweaks. I’d love to see that. I also want the chaos version to stick around.

What I’m saying is: the Disaster Factory has a chance to iterate. Franchise. Package this thing up and ship it off to other markets. Create a premium model. I am not being facetious. The core mechanic is strong enough to shoulder a lot.

For right now, at Valentine’s Day 2024? This is a great show for couples or if you’re going stag. It works best if you know some of the other players, as these things usually do, but watching actors adjust their performances as they get pelted with foam arrows is never going to get old.

Go so they make more, ‘kay?

— Noah J. Nelson, Founder & Publisher

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