Review Rundown: You Gonna Answer That?

This week No Proscenium is brought to you by SEE TICKETS, which has proudly supported thousands of clients across the globe in areas as diverse as historic attractions like Stonehenge, immersive theater like The Burnt City, and important cultural touchstones like LA Pride.

Orbs! They’re so IN right now. This week Ed ponders one in NYC while the rest of the team answers some phone calls that slip them into alternate realities and get chased around an abandoned hospital.

What can I say? We have weird tastes.

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Atomic Hotline — AJ Danna
$35; Remote: Through August 31st

If you’ve ever wanted to be a character in an old-fashioned science fiction radio drama, Atomic Hotline might be the show for you.

The roughly 35-minute experience begins with a phone call, the staticky voice of the Bell Telephone Company operator connecting me to a different time, a different life, where I am all grown up and moved away from my imaginary hometown of Broken Arrow, Nevada. I’m calling into the local radio station — 98 KNV — where I get to listen to a mix of atomic bomb-related commercials and propaganda for the local mayoral race before finding out that there have been reports of alien sightings near the Gas-A-Go-Go.

So, what do I think, are we under surveillance by aliens? The radio show host, Bobby “The Bomb” asks me. It’s plausible, I say. I won’t spoil the show for you, but what ensues is the player getting sucked into a local political plot with massive consequences.

The sound design and voice acting was the highlight of Atomic Hotline for me. The commercials and music from the era were transportative, and the five voice actors struck a delightful balance between appropriately hammy and emotionally believable. The timing of everything was impeccable and met the bar of professionalism set by Candle House Collective and The Telelibrary.

Atomic Hotline’s weakness, in my opinion, was its story, which I found muddled and slightly underwhelming. There are real, serious stakes — but the plot was difficult to follow, with too many characters introduced in such a short time frame to keep track of them all. And — heads up, slight spoilers — the “call” the player must make on the Atomic Hotline is probably not the one you imagine it might be from the show’s advertising materials, leading to some confusion when the show ends rather abruptly.

I think part of the confusion could stem from the fact that the show feels rushed at 35 minutes. A typical radio play is 55 minutes, and I think Atomic Hotline could have benefited from a slightly longer run time.

AJ Danna is clearly a talented immersive creator whose work I will continue to follow. I’d like to see a longer version of Atomic Hotline that offers more opportunities for the player to, well, play. Selecting songs to play on the radio was fun, as was interacting with actors. I’d just like a little more of it!

If you like the Twilight Zone, or H.G. Wells, or even if you’re still just basking in the post-Oppenheimer vibes, check out Atomic Hotline.

–Cheyenne Ligon, NYC Correspondent

Perfect Partner — Phoenix Tears Productions

$20, available anywhere by phone, https://www.phoenixtearsproductions.com/appp

Perfect Partner is a science-fiction thought piece in immersive phone call form. What happens when artificial intelligence becomes good enough to have a real conversation and emulate the hopes and needs of actual people? This piece dramatizes that question in a bite-size way through a 30 minute conversation, and it has all the advantages and issues that duration affords.

The conceit of the piece is that a company has created an artificial intelligence that will question you in order to match you with your perfect partner (either romantic or platonic, by your choice). You have an open-ended conversation with the AI, answering its queries and posing your own, and then the remainder of the call is an introduction to the partner it found for you. During this process, the AI slowly transforms itself until it is identical to your perfect partner, and then it leaves the conversation and switches you over to the real person. This technique is clever in that it allows one actor to seamlessly perform the whole piece and it makes a nice in-fiction moment when you realize your “partner” heard an AI mimic your voice too. All of this works fine — the interactions are good and flexible. You feel like you have some agency with the AI and that you’re talking to an actual person when the switch is made.

The script gets across the point — the AI is behaving weirdly and that it’s more human-like than you expect — but given both the short duration of the encounter and the fact that it’s responding to my input, there’s just not a lot of time to establish any emotional connection. When you do speak to the potential match, you’re at the very end of the experience and everything feels rushed. The theme is clear and it’s an interesting one — what do we do with AI we’ve shaped to fit our needs — but it just doesn’t have the time or detail to be as powerful as it wants to be.

That’s why I consider Perfect Partner a thought piece. The ideas are clear and everything about it is well put-together, but it’s just too quick for any of the story or the reveals to have a real emotional impact. Given the price and time commitment, I’m not upset that I experienced it, but like much of this short immersive phone work, I just felt it didn’t go far enough to give the issues it sketched real weight.

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– Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent

Pennhurst Horror Campout — Pennhurst Asylum
$135-$185; Spring City, PA; Run Concluded

Having been to a number of extreme haunts that failed to arouse their promised terror, I approached the waiver at the Pennhurst Horror Campout with a certain level of cynicism. Yes, yes, I may get wet, I may get injured, I can and will be touched, the same old warnings that mark every haunted house worth its salt.

This was, I thought as I cleaned and bandaged my cut up elbow somewhat caked in filth, probably a foolish dismissal.

This isn’t to say that the event violated any safety protocols or even to say that I didn’t have a good time. I merely slipped in a dark tunnel while panicking a bit and banged it on a rough stone wall. Meanwhile, the filth was from a different scene that invoked that old basic training montage staple of crawling through mud under barbed wire with a rifle.

More than disappointment, this epiphany in the first aid tent was a moment of thrilling discovery. At last, an east coast haunted house that actually has pushed the envelope and actually provided the extreme thrill that the marketing material advertised.

Horror Campout bills itself as a sort of Friday the 13th immersive. From arrival until sundown, enjoy the BBQ and campfire as you set up your tent on the grounds of Pennhurst Asylum. From sundown onwards, everyone is vulnerable to whatever ghosts and goblins haunt the grounds. In practice, this took the form of four hour-long haunted houses strung together by a thin plot. The houses were more demanding than simple walk-throughs, leading small groups of 4–10 through physical challenges, escape room style puzzles, and flag football rules where monsters could snatch lives off of a flag belt. I’ve previously lauded the importance of a mission in elevating horror, and the thought of potentially “surviving” a house made any encounter with simulated danger far more tense.

House standouts include the SCP themed house, whose challenges ranged from the bureaucratic confusion of the SCP archive to the horrifying sequence I banged myself up in, inspired by the game SCP Containment Breach, where we were trapped in a pitch black, fog filled tunnel with scare actors lurching from all directions and only a hand cranked flashlight for guidance. The cult themed house, Friends of the Mouth, also deserves kudos for integrating more immersive theatre elements, and committing to slow burn horror. What began as love-bombing and cult integration ended in a desperate scramble away from an oncoming human sacrifice.

While generally, my experience was positive, I do have to issue two small quibbles. One, with expectations set to a more cohesive experience, the event seemed a bit fragmented at times. While this didn’t diminish fun, it certainly limited immersion outside the houses. Second, the event had some timing issues; for the first time, the event was made open world without each group being guided through each house, which led to delays and bottlenecks that prevented me from completing all four houses. Still, these are easily fixable with some slight adjustments.

Overall, I’m excited to return to Horror Campout with a full group next time. The event is a winner, bringing spectacular chills to the heat of the summer. No one escaped the night unscathed, and for the first time, that included myself. But for those who signed up for this, meaning I left, for once, satisfied.

— Blake Weil, East Coast Editor-At-Large

TMNT Mutant Mayhem Experience
Free; Manhattan, NY; Run Concluded

The boys have made their way back to the sewers of Manhattan, and here is a chance to check out the most famous pizza lair in New York. Setting up in a storefront in Chelsea, a sewer-like maze has been constructed for guests to walk through, as they get to know the famous four a little better. The teens have a new movie coming out, and this was a

While there were no actors or performers present, there certainly were ushers who unfortunately clearly had a very strict through-put quota to meet. I would have loved to have spent more time in each of the activations but was repeatedly yelled at and pushed through to the next section. All in all, we spent less than 8 minutes in the entire experience, spending longer waiting in line to get in. As a free activation I went with little expectations, but even so was shocked and disappointed at the cattle prod hospitality that we were greeted with.

It was truly like the bad guys had taken over, and made the occasional instagramability and interactivity of the activation, totally wasted. It really makes me question what the purpose of this experience really is. While there certainly wasn’t a lot of content, there were some nice props and thoughts put into each section — yellow pizza-scented plastic strip curtains, cut out to look like melted cheese, was one such nice touch in Michaelangelo’s room. But being given no time to enjoy any of the rooms (save for the Amazon “gift shop” at the end of the experience) made this a very un-cowabunga experience indeed.

— Edward Mylechreest, New York City Correspondent

Sonic Sphere — Ed Cooke, Merijn Royaards, and Nicholas Christie
New York, NY; Run Concluded

Walking into a dark warehouse space, it is impossible not to look up in awe at the gigantic alien spacecraft that appears to float in the middle of the air. It truly feels like a scene from Close Encounters as I gradually approach, alongside my fellow audience members, and climb up the tall scaffolding stairs to reach the center of the sphere. Once inside, seating comes in the form of rope hammocks, situated around the entire interior. Once we are all safely on board, the lights dim, and the music takes over.

A choreographed dance of lights takes over the inside of the sphere, and I find myself engrossed in the music of Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony for the entire 45-minute “Tchaikovsky” experience. With multiple concerts available over the run, there have been events for every musical taste, including several live experiments with real-time DJs and musicians. As a classical music aficionado, I knew I would enjoy this “playlist” greatly, and was not disappointed by the great depth of audio that surrounded my entire being. I was surprised however that the symphony was played a) in its entirety and b) out of order (Mvt 1, 3, 4 then 2), which was a strange choice given the deeply personal nature of the music, and the tone and message of the music shifts drastically when presented in this order. No reasoning was given for this choice, and the workers I spoke with seemed to not have known anything about it

Once I was able to put my internal classical musician reservations aside, I stared up at the roof, I found my focus drifting along with the music. What once was negative space, between the fabric paneling, begins to become the focus point for my eyes. I zone in on an individual light node, to see its pattern and shifts, before allowing my gaze to zone out to witness the art display as a whole. Laying flat on my back, the light display is mesmerizing, and accompanied by the (literally) surround sound stereos, the entire experience is a delight for the senses.

In the second session that I went to, a “best of the sphere” compilation, I chose to sit beneath the sphere rather than go inside. Alone on the floor beneath the monolith, I had complete freedom to walk around and enjoy this incredible art piece from my own unique perspective, this time as atmospheric sounds segue into Pink Floyd and back again. While the sound quality isn’t as great beneath the orb, the light display becomes something to behold. The patterns which I had seen previously, are now orbiting around the entire celestial sphere, in a dance I could only have imagined prior.

In both sessions, I was surprised to find audience members leaving early, perhaps a reflection of the expectations set for the experience by its marketing. This is a concert experience through and through, with visual aids provided ala Fantasia, and set in a truly remarkable concert hall. Whether or not this will prove to be the future of concert-going, remains to be seen, but this concert experience was truly unique, and certainly a grand experiment that this musician greatly enjoyed.

— Edward Mylechreest, New York City Correspondent

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