Review Rundown: Plays Within Plays and Other Assorted Joys

This week finds the crew firing on all cylinders, with theatre blooming all over the United States. Why it’s such an eclectic mix that finding a thread to tie it all together would be silly. Suffice it to say: the summer is just heating up!

Want even more? Our Tribeca Immersive festival diary for 2022 is live.

Missed last week’s Rundown? We got you.

And the Review Crew dives into the two Hollywood Fringe shows in this week’s Rundown on last week’s episode.

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An Evening at Gatsby’s — Audacious Theatre
$30-$40; Denver, CO; through June 18th

Performances by Audacious Theatre are consistently humorous, accessible (both in content and in price) and unwaveringly immersive. Their latest production, An Evening at Gatsby’s, was no different.

The event took place inside a homey dive bar that was open to the public while the show was in progress, which created an authentic party ambiance that would be hard to recreate in a private space. As the evening commenced, we were treated to song and dance on stage in a back room, the party at Gatsby’s already well underway.

It took some wandering around to get a feel for where scenes would play out, as well as who was a character to interact with vs. a guest that came in costume, but it soon became clear that the story was progressing in multiple places at once. This furthered the realness of the experience, and encouraged interactivity by asking around to find out what had just happened while in the other room.

Standing amongst the crowd at the party, I watched a loud conversation unfold a few feet away between a reporter and party-goer. Exiting the back room, I noticed a small crowd on the patio outside, gathered around a bothered young man. Sitting in a booth in the corner of the bar, a beautiful young woman was flirting with a wealthy man while chatting with onlookers. With these types of sets unfolding across the bar for 90 minutes, I got to choose who to visit, how to interact, and for how long. And once I was fully onboarded into the world, it was fun to roam around and take it all in.

Even with the familiarity of the story, this was an inventive way to experience it, and another testament to Audacious Theatre’s daring and original approach to immersive art.

— Danielle Look, Denver Correspondent

i cut myself shaving and it bled so much — Candlehouse Collective
$90 — $135; Remote (Telephone); Through June 24

As with many Candlehouse Collective pieces, it’s best to go in cold and learn what kind of world you’re playing in as the piece unfolds. If you’re purely looking for a recommendation: i cut myself shaving and it bled so much is a thoughtful, engaging experience that is very worth your time. Though, make sure you do have time set aside for it, as it will take up most of three hours.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

If you’re looking for a little bit more info, the show starts with a survey call from American National that ends with a peculiar question and spins out from there. Over the course of three hours, you’ll chat with a few characters via phone, text, and video (plus actual mail with the premium ticket option). My second interaction was fairly lengthy and ended up being critical to i cut myself shaving’s success. During that wide-ranging conversation, I talked to the character about everything from film to their dating life and due to the length of the chat, developed a good rapport.

By the end, the show reveals the twisted moral game you may not have realized you were playing as it ties together its themes of class, unions, and solidarity into a moment of choice. That moment crystallizes the show, and pulls together some of the random-seeming elements into clear focus. It also speaks to the strong performances during the show to build a relationship with the audience that makes the choice difficult.

If claws is an accessible point to Candlehouse Collective’s work, i cut myself shaving feels like the logical next step as it builds on some of what the former is playing with, while adding even more interactivity.

— Kevin Gossett, LA Reviews Editor

Not Another Midsummer — The Queen’s Fools
$20; Hollywood Fringe; Through June 22

What do you get when you mix an immersive semi-sandbox and an abridged version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream? You get The Queen’s Fools Not Another Midsummer, of course.

The Queen’s Fools is a new troupe made up of some of LA’s long-time immersive performers. And at this year’s Hollywood Fringe, they’ve used their considerable talents to put on the Bard’s most famous comedy. Mostly.

The frame for Not Another Midsummer is that some members of The Queen’s Fools and their entire set have been left behind somewhere in California, but, as they say, the show must go on. During the first 20 minutes or so of the show, you’ll learn all this and more from the Fools as they chat with you in the bar space at the Three Clubs during the immersive sandbox sequence. You’ll also learn about their various dysfunctions and interpersonal conflicts as they pull people aside or rope them into helping get the show going.

Once they’re ready to go, the show just turns into an extremely fun, if slightly abridged performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Many of those conflicts from the opening are mirrored in the show-within-a-show’s performance, and add new wrinkles to what’s happening. This Midsummer performance isn’t immersive at all, except for a few audience members for whom it is very immersive. (No, you won’t just be dragged up and asked to perform Shakespeare at Fringe. Who they pull in is cleverly handled in the opening sequence.)

Not Another Midsummer is remarkably polished for a first-run Fringe show and has something to offer for theatre-goers, whether your tastes are immersive or proscenium-focused.

— Kevin Gossett, LA Reviews Editor

Signals — Last Call Theatre
$20–35; Hollywood Fringe; Through June 26th

As a first draft/proof of concept Signals has some fun things going for it.

For starters the creative team has decided to base of the work on the internet’s own SCP Foundation mythos, a crowdsourced fiction project that is a mix of Reddit creepypasta and The X-Files. The foundation is such fertile ground that the 2019 video game Control, which topped many a list that year, was clearly inspired by the writings and there are multiple gaming projects which have directly spun out of the SCP community.

In many a way this can be seen as that. Signals is, in essence, an MMO-style game translated into a theatrical space. Not quite a full LARP, as players are given character classes — one of four badge types that determine your starting area — but not full characters. This limits the depth of play. While you can come up with your own backstory and motivations, the game world isn’t set up to respond to roleplaying levels of ingenuity. There are tasks to be performed and a sandbox to perform them in with young actors who are game to play out melodramatic little vignettes.

The main issues with Signals are the scale: there are too many people involved on both the cast and audience side of things for a good flow to happen. We saw this kind of issue at Secret Cinema’s Arcane last year, but at least the production value of the sets offset the queuing time. Here there isn’t the budget for such things. Not that I’d recommend the team spend money on set pieces. In fact Signals would be a better experience at half scale. This is the kind of thing that would thrive as a chamber LARP but as is feels crowded and threadbare thanks to the attempt to serve more players at once.

— Noah Nelson, publisher and podcast host

Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow — Takashi Murakami
Free — $18; Los Angeles, CA; Through Sept. 25

If you’re itching for art that is both adorable and grotesque, head to The Broad museum for Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow. Murakami is a master in dichotomy. His art straddles a surreal space that is colorful and delightful while also unsettling and even horrifying; his technique embodies the restraint of precision while depicting explorations of excess. Hayao Miyazaki, another Japanese artist and multi-hyphenate (Spirited Away; My Neighbor Totoro) shares this aptitude for the darling and disarming.

Murakami’s self-described “superflat” aesthetic references the two-dimensional Neo-Pop style commonly seen in manga, and also the flattening of global culture, artistic distinctions of “high” vs. “low,” and societal class hierarchies. His commentary seems to do so without judgment; the artwork’s perspectives — such as representations of atomic warfare — don’t arise from a moral high ground. His work is a lamination of serious narratives and cheeky humor which aren’t in conflict with one another. Instead, there’s a distinct harmony between these extremes, a knowing deconstruction and an inclusive celebration at the same time. The exhibition’s immersive spaces and augmented reality (AR) components amplify this messaging and the nature of his art. Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow feels like Murakami’s wonderful and strange dinner party that we’re all invited to.

— Laura Hess, Arts Editor

We The People (Not The Bots) — En Garde Arts
$20; Manhattan, NY; through June 25

We The People (Not The Bots), written and performed by Eric Lockley, is a new solo work which guides its audience through hidden spots around Lower Manhattan. Lockley plays Javel Washington, a time-traveler from a dystopian future where “Bots” are set on world annihilation. At each location Javel inhabits different ancestors and activists dotted through history, learning from their stories how survival in his time might still be possible–if “We The People” can stand together.

The location choices are wonderful, hitting a nice balance between the bustling chaos of Downtown and some quieter corners I’d never before seen. Lockley is a charming and involving leader, brimming with infectious energy.

While an excellent walking tour, Lockley’s text feels thin and less confident. The sci-fi elements are fun but vague, while many of the historical New Yorkers he embodies come across as well-worn clichés. It is also difficult to reconcile the piece’s insistent optimism about human resilience with the hopeless sounding future Javel is visiting us from. The bright and peppy tone comes to feel very forced by the show’s close.

Still, there is one incredible moment when we enter, right from bustling Broadway, a vast and unused space hidden within an unassuming office building. Lockley briefly sings to us, his voice bouncing off the walls of the cavernous room. It’s the kind of serene and magical moment that only site-specific work can offer.

– Joey Sims, New York City Correspondent

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