Talking About ‘The Stupidest, Scariest Time’ With Swim Pony’s Adrienne Mackey

Adrienne Mackey first created Swim Pony in 2009 in Philadelphia. The company’s first production, Survive! was a choose-your-own adventure piece spread across a 22,000 sq. ft space, and it explored our understanding of man’s place within the universe. Since then, Swim Pony has focused on game design/theater hybrids to create new forms of interactive performance, with Mackey working with a broad range of multidisciplinary artists.

Having relocated to Seattle during the pandemic, Mackey is now an assistant professor of Acting, Directing, and Devising at the University of Washington, as well as the director of Swim Pony’s first Seattle production, The Stupidest, Scariest Time, which debuts October 29th at 12th Ave Arts.

We sat down with Mackey in Seattle to chat about the show.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

DARYLE CONNERS: Was there a specific show or theater company that really inspired you to go into immersive?

ADRIENNE MACKEY: [Mary Zimmerman’s] Metamorphoses was definitely life-changing, and I know it’s such an omnipresent cultural touchstone that it’s almost not cool to say, but it’s just true. I also saw a lot of early Pig Iron work and ended up working with them a little bit when I was young and at the time, in the early aughts, Philly was like one of these big post-industrial cities that had tons of warehouses and basements and strange unused spaces. One of the first shows I did was at Eastern State Penitentiary, which is this historic prison that is like a city block wide.

DC: What inspired and motivated you to start Swim Pony?

AM: My background is in theater. I’ve always been really interested in site-specific work and immersive work, so I went back to graduate school for a self-designed degree, looking at how to apply game design techniques to theater. About 5 or 6 years ago, the company turned from kind of doing works that were like just big spectacles, mostly with the audience passive, to really trying to make the audience experience the center of the theatrical event.

Then, during the pandemic, I was super conscious of the way that we were going through this cultural moment of reexamining our relationship to work — so many people leaving jobs to embrace slower, more intentional ways of living. And then I read this book called 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. And it’s an ex-productivity journalist basically writing a book about why all of these productivity hacks are really the antithesis to living a happy life. The central thesis of that book was humans are finite. We just have to deal with that, and by pretending that you can fit everything into life, you actually just make yourself really miserable.

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DC: And all of that culminated into your new show, The Stupidest, Scariest Time?

AM: Yes. So, we’re in a large space and the seating is all conference tables. The audience is going to get these folders with worksheets. At the beginning of the show we move you through actually using the content of your own life to think about what are the ways that you engage with this? And what are the goals that you feel like you should be achieving? Like you build a timeline for your entire life made of all the things you want to do, but it basically results in whipping up a lot of the actual anxieties that come up for people. In parallel with this workshop that’s happening,

So the workshop begins in a relatively naturalistic space, but it gets progressively more bizarre. And then there is this pagan-like ritual that’s happening unexpectedly, and you don’t really know at first how it all fits together. The language starts to become more absurd, and then the workshop starts to take these ideas to the illogical conclusion. Like what if you plan literally everything you’re going to do from now until you die? And this is where the absurdism starts to come in. It starts to speed up and go faster and faster and faster. You’re very busy, but are you actually doing things that are meaningful and matter?

That reflection piece… what I’m really interested in is people having a visceral experience and then having time within the show experience for reflection.

DC: How do you deal with the expectations of audience members who have come to be “entertained” and suddenly find themselves in a more profound and reflective experience than they had anticipated?

AM: Well, there’s a lot of comedy in the show, and I find that comedy is a way to really keep people on the hook: comedy and spectacle. And so I think there are functional things like, if you look at our Eventbrite, I made sure we said, “This is a participatory show. There is no offstage option. If you are buying this ticket for somebody else, you promise to tell them.”

I think that in the piece itself, it’s important that all of the actors are really skilled improvisers. This is their wheelhouse. There are things that theater is really good at, right? You have to find performers who can live in the precision of theater, but also the interplay of games. I think a lot of it has to do with directorial rhythm, too.

DC: What excites you about bringing Swim Pony to the burgeoning Seattle immersive scene?

AM: Mainly I think that interactive theater seems relatively new to the area. While some theaters are bringing in 4th wall-breaking elements or audience participation, these are still largely in the context of traditional theatrical storytelling and structures. This play is created from scratch to place audience in the CENTER of the experience, almost like a ride they got on, rather than being a show they watch interactively. It shifts the audience from participant to lead character in a way that hopefully provokes them to bring their real-world experience into the themes of the play.

Swim Pony is also a company known for super design-intensive creation processes, meaning that the world audiences walk into has been a part of its storytelling conception from the start. It’s a very unusual performance set up and, without giving away spoilers, the space itself is as much a character that interacts with the audience as the actors.

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