‘The Creator’ Flips the Script for Remote Immersive Participants (Guest Review)

(Disclosure: Allison Darcy has worked alongside the creators of this production as a writer for a different company.)

These are the character directions you must portray during today’s sessions.

Story 1: You are a stoner in your mid-30s at your famous friend’s mansion. Your archetype is: The Jester.

Story 2: You are an average, healthy citizen just trying to do what you can to survive. Your archetype is: The Explorer.

Story 3: You are the creator. You know what you must do.

So read my mailbox on the first day of The Creator, a Discord-based event by Kris Smith and Melody Magyor-Phillips that flips the script of immersive theatre, empowering audience members to turn stories of their own into roleplaying experiences for other participants.

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In The Creator, individuals took turns narrating their stories over three 30- to 60-minute segments while the other participants as their ensemble cast, participating through text-based live roleplay. All of this was wrapped in a metafiction, where we were placed under the watchful eye of the Paracletes, supernatural entities who introduced us to our new roles as storytellers. Each person temporarily became “the creator,” reacting to participant choices in real-time as they unfold the story they developed in the month leading up to the event. Things are kept somewhat unpredictable as each participant is assigned a different archetype for each story, ensuring everyone spends some time out of their comfort zone. (Descriptions and examples of these archetypes — Lover, Jester, Magician, Outlaw, Explorer, Sage, Innocent, Ruler, or Caregiver — are accessible to participants in a “Library of Creations” at any time.) Meanwhile, brief interludes in “Our Boring Reality” tell a frame story that gives context to why these stories must be told at all.

I love a good meta-narrative, and it doesn’t get more meta than this. The Creator was, in a sense, an inversion, with the participants all playing the roles the cast of a production would. Watching this experiment play out was fascinating, a trial-by-fire for “creators” who ranged from the experienced to the complete first timers and told stories from nearly every possible genre. And while I don’t know what happened behind-the-scenes for all the other participants, it seems to me the experiment was a successful one: each story felt told in full by the end of the week, every narrator progressively becoming more confident and interactive with their temporary audiences.

The duo behind The Creator seems to have come up with an effective coaching model: Smith seamlessly takes on the protagonist role each participant-creator decides he will play, helping to steer plot beats from the inside without ever seeming contrived. Magyor-Phillips lends wisdom as a backstage presence by cheerleading narration, pointing out potential pitfalls, and keeping stories on pace. As mentors, the two take on a responsive approach, providing extra challenges for those who might need them and stepping back when stories are falling into place as planned. Along the way, they add to the atmosphere — and the magic of watching an idea come to life — by providing a constant audio channel of ambient sounds and music that changes to fit each individual’s story.

While my own experience of their guidance (and perception of how it worked for others) was that it was nothing short of ingenious, the creators of The Creator fell into what I see as a classic immersive theatre trap: the desire to simply do too much.

Obstacles and directions given to participant-creators served well to limit a sandbox that could otherwise easily cause decision overload, but The Creator itself could have benefited from the same sort of restraint. A good many of the devices and options given to audience members at the beginning of the experience were never once utilized. This was, I believe, for the best — better for participants to put their energy toward their own creations and those of the other audience members — but I felt the staff getting frustrated at times that much of what they set up wasn’t taken advantage of. The wider metafiction’s storyworlds were as enjoyable as any participant’s creation, but could be confusing and difficult to fully invest in, with audience members getting bogged down in attempts to clarify instructions and overarching storylines that were, quite frankly, unnecessary. In future runs, the framing story will change and build on itself. Still, despite a pitch-perfect ending, I could have done without this layer of the experience.

Participating in nine other audience stories along with the overarching narrative — on top of running my own — was exhausting, and I found myself consequently unable to immerse myself in any of the story cycles fully. This seemed the case for most of my fellow participants and quickly made it clear why Smith played the hero in each and every plotline… it’s difficult to tell a story starring a paying member of the audience who might want to take a break to eat dinner during your show. All the same, while it may have been frustrating for “creators” not to have everyone fully present for their time behind the driver’s seat, I suppose this, too, is a lesson in what it means to make art. One first-time creator told me that watching their concept play out in real-time was an overwhelming but inspiring honor. Another said she’ll be happy to just experience other people’s narratives going forward.

By removing the minutiae of marketing, tech, and rule-enforcement, The Creator lets audience members fully invest themselves in the magic of immersive storytelling. What The Creator proved to me over and over again is why I love this medium in the first place: we learn, imagine, and come to know ourselves best not by consuming, but by experiencing.

The Creator, by Kris Smith and Melody Magyor-Phillips, ran from February 28th to March 6th. There are plans for it to be remounted. Tickets for the initial run were $70.