Review Rundown: The One With Gangsters & Death Traps

This week finds us exploring two very different kinds of experiences in LA and getting stuck in Jigsaw’s latest elaborate death trap in London.

Looking for more? Check out last week, when Canada put us all to shame.

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THE COLLECTIVE: A 1920S MAFIA IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE — Last Call Theatre
$35; Los Angeles, CA; Through Saturday June 24th

Last Call Theatre, a company that in this fallow post-pandemic era of LA Immersive has managed to mount four full productions in the span of one calendar year, culminating in their Hollywood Fringe ’23 offering The Collective, has established and refined a unique formula that demands a level of cooperation and coordination between audience and cast that you’d be hard-pressed to find in any experience outside of an actual escape room. With over 20 possible endings waiting at the end of a sprawling, competitive narrative best suited to participants with the dogged tenacity necessary to chase down every lead over the course of its breathless two hours, The Collective is immersive theatre at its most reactive, vibrant, and alive.

Audiences are sorted by a preshow questionnaire into one of four distinct clans within the broader Telletino crime syndicate as they come together for the wake of their recently, and suspiciously, deceased Don. The power vacuum at the heart of this premise sucks the audience into a vortex of conflicting reconnaissance missions, fetch quests, and general larceny at the behest of each character angling to be the new head of the Family. The failure, success, and indeed survival of these characters is dependent entirely on the choices of each audience member as they move freely around the room trying to advance their group’s specific agenda.

Untangling the various threads is aided by several marked improvements on Last Call’s familiar faction system. A greater emphasis on team objectives ensuring no single questline or set of characters becomes too overwhelmed, identifying colors to improve LARPing opportunities throughout, and an unseen point system that quantifies player impact up until the final moment all help to make this the most structurally coherent and equitable show from Last Call to date. It may be impossible to see the entire show, but the variety and complexity of each questline ensures that by the time you reach the end it will feel like you’ve seen your entire show.

Somehow the actors are able to maintain their characters’ blithe, improvisatory wit while deftly juggling the show’s seemingly endless supply of tasks, props, and plots, accessing any of them, in any order, and on demand amidst the harried triage of fielding waves of unpredictable participants eager to engage their way, while a Last Call creative in constant circulation whispers updates and adjustments in real time to loop performers in on the latest developments percolating around the room and suggesting the best way forward. An experience designed to run on the chaos and unpredictability of its audience, The Collective is an exciting evolution for a growing company that specializes in shows designed to surprise even themselves.

— Chris Wollman, LA Correspondent

The Network — Chiharu Shiota
Free; Los Angeles, CA; Closes August 20

Like a thicket of veins.

That was my first thought when entering The Network, a voluminous installation by Japanese multimedia artist Chiharu Shiota. For decades her main material has been thread, at times interwoven with found objects like keys, suitcases, or even a charred piano. Her palette is unwavering: black, white, or red string. The Network’s crimson hue against the Hammer Museum’s white walls was immediately evocative of blood and vasculature.

Shiota has long explored ephemeral states such as memory, dreams, and emotions. Through density and its absence, she weaves a tangible, indescribable universality out of these intangible, personal processes. The result is all visceral response. Although thoughts come in — like the thicket of veins — they wash over and recede like a tide. What remains is a total, base sensation of intense physicality. It’s like smelling a forgotten scent from childhood; an instant, hallucinatory flashback of feeling without any cognitive effort, a complete bypass of thinking.

A site-specific sculpture created for, around, and through the lobby’s shapes, it is Kafkaesque and unlike anything commonly encountered inside a building. Ripe with tension, it’s a comforting cocoon and a nightmarish suffocation. On the heels of the popular video game and subsequent TV series The Last of Us, the threads are reminiscent of creeping fungal growth. It’s a transformational, transportive environment. With other art that can mean being transported away or sometimes it’s being transported within. The Network does both.

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Shiota forages in uncomfortable places, amongst existential themes of mortality and “presence in absence.” In describing a period after her cancer diagnosis she said, “I was on a conveyor belt to death… and I did not know where to put my soul.” In her work spatial meaning isn’t confined to the corporeal. There’s a deep exploration of location within liminal phases and abstract concepts. The Hammer cites her invocation of “psychogeographic spaces.” Generally used in the context of urban landscapes and infrastructure, psychogeography is a kind of decoding, an examination of the “effects of the geographical environment… on emotions and behavior.” Shiota seems to apply this in both directions: geographical, physical constructs impressing on human emotions and emotional states embodied as physical constructs.

She has said, “The moment people enter my works, I want them to understand what it is to live and what it is to die.”

Isn’t this what we want most? To feel — even if it’s through the primal, harrowing acknowledgement of our own eventual death — unutterably alive?

— Laura Hess, Arts Editor

SAW: Escape Experience London — Lions Gate Entertainment
From £29, London, UK; Ongoing

“I want to acknowledge that I admire and support you in this endeavour but also cannot express how much I do not want to participate”- Text message from a friend.

So it falls upon this brave/foolish reporter to take a team into the lair of the Jigsaw Killer.

I have never watched a full Saw movie but have enjoyed the YouTube channel ‘The Kill Count’ which examines the kills in horror films. So I know my Reverse Beartraps from my Shotgun Carousels.

We are invited to 1 American Place for a behind-the-scenes tour of a one-million-pound development project. Yes, the law says we need to build affordable homes in this former abattoir, but we can ignore that. I mean greed in the world of Saw NEVER gets graphically punished, right?

So after watching the murder of the CEO of the company in a trap, it is up to us to solve puzzles and maybe learn a lesson about being such terrible people.

The experience offers two routes ‘Spiral’ and ‘Jigsaw’, with different locations and challenges. (Spiral involves crawling through tight spaces while Jigsaw has a route suitable for wheelchair users). We were put on Spiral so did indeed have to crawl into cages, while flicking switches.

The threats are to a performer (Alex, the PA of the corrupt CEO) rather than one of us. But this threat of possible harm hangs over the experience. My friend bravely climbs into the bathtub in a bloodstained bathroom and we all prepare for it to spin and take her away. There are jump scares, but nothing too strong. No one chases you with a chainsaw. More along the lines of loud noises and flashing lights. At one point everyone screams and I realise a Pig Masked person is standing beside me. “OH HELLO!” I bellow, which changed the mood a bit.

As escape rooms go it is a fun time and the challenges don’t feel cheap, with some recognisable traps and rooms. For one room we escaped with five seconds to spare. While the success in each room is to prevent harm to our PA friend, the other team manages to fail all their challenges, yet not a single wound befalls poor Alex.

There is a decent amount of collaboration between the teams before we are separated. The plot of “you are all rich business people and will be punished for your lack of care for the needy” is a little weak but, to be fair, the Jigsaw Killer has punished people on weaker charges.

At the end, having not chopped off a limb, ‘The Traproom’ offers cocktails and merchandise, with opportunities to buy pictures from the experience.

If you want a moderately spooky time, and have a good band of pals, then this is an enjoyable way to spend 90 minutes together.

— Thomas Jancis, London Correspondent

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