The Rundown: The One That’s A Little Spicy (Reviews!)
In more than one way. Eight reviews.
Welcome back to The Rundown, the weekly NoPro Review Crew look at what’s happening across the immersive spectrum.
This week we’ve got eight reviews, and in-person is making a big comeback. From a scripted encounter for two from 600 Highwaymen, to a fetish-themed piece in the heart of LA’s Arts District.
For those still taking in immersive by remote, we’ve got a preview of our review of the new version of Eschaton, and a delightful sounding telephone piece from SF’s Neo-Futurists.
Want to dive deeper? The Review Crew AND FRIENDS will gather this Wed at 5PM Pacific, 8PM Eastern in our Discord to talk about some of what you see here and more. It’s shaping up to be an all-time episode. The live recording session is open to all, the evidence? That’s for our Patreon Backers.
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Need more? Check out LAST WEEK’S EDITION of the Rundown.
A Thousand Ways, Part Two: An Encounter — 600 Highwaymen
La Jolla Playhouse, San Diego; $25
Compared to Part One, A Thousand Ways: Part Two creates a different kind of tension within this new framework. We were layered in barriers: the plexiglass, our face masks, and the cards’ insistence to adhere to particular rules. We were also steeped in intimacy: physical proximity, purposefully breathing together and, at times, conveying entire poems of our lives through eye contact and our monosyllabic, yet expressive responses, of “yes” and “no.” Part One harbored space for and even insisted on descriptive reflections; in contrast, Part Two restricts detail. Even though Part Two encourages intimacy through visual layers of gesture and bodily nuance, the verbal constraints are painful, provocative, and freeing.
— Laura Hess, from her forthcoming Full Review
A Wicked Inheritance — Mirror World Creations
Telephone — $15.00
The sun is all but set, my office plunging into total darkness. The phone rings. It’s an unknown number calling out of the blue, yet I answer. The hardened, Eastern-European voice of Mademoiselle D’Ortalon (Julie Hoverson) begins whispering in my ear. My Great-Aunt Mar has passed away, bequeathing several items to me. I’ve never heard of this Mar but my family has never provided proper tending to our family tree.
D’Ortalon starts listing off items, asking what I wish to do with them. Each is strange and outlandish. Mar owning them raises many questions about their moral fortitude. Questions that are now clashing against my own morals. While I hem and haw through our conversation, it’s the final item that leaves me speechless, shocked, and in over my head.
A Wicked Inheritance’s intense plot twist is a doozy. It’s frightening in a grounded manner, a horror only humans can inflict upon each other. Kudos to Hoverson, who masterfully guides our conversation to that moment. There’s a perfect balance of both disarming me and seeding the shocking moment to come, allowing it to bloom through a perfectly executed performance.
While I loved this incredible plot twist, it’s not one everyone will enjoy or, more importantly, rise to when the moment comes. Presumably it wants the audience to provide a horrifically personal response. I couldn’t. Rather than expressing a thought I never would aloud, I defaulted to a response that I would freely tell anyone. Also, the call came “out of the blue” because it came an hour later than expected as I had moved on with my evening.
If you’re looking for a way to test your morals, you’re the ideal beneficiary of A Wicked Inheritance.
— Patrick McLean
Breadths of Listening At Twilight — Gelsey Bell
Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn; $35; Run Completed
Gelsey Bell’s latest collaboration with Green-Wood Cemetery takes audience members on a walking tour of the historical burial grounds with moments of music peppered in between. Ruminating on the idea of distance and its effect on how we see and hear the things that happen around us, musicians in duets pairs are positioned atop the hills of the cemetery, some hundred feet away from each other, leaving the audience to explore the space in between them and the listening experience that occurs in response to each individual audience member’s movement. Juxtaposed with the natural soundscape of the cemetery, we hear highland bagpipes among the twitter of songbirds at dusk, creating a full circle sound experience.
While the concept piqued my interest, the worlds of walking tour and performative moments were very separate where I would have liked to see more thoughtful cohesion; the experience definitely felt like a typical, everyday tour of Green-Wood with the duets spliced in between. I have always loved Green-Wood as a venue and have seen quite a few performance events there, but I feel the space hasn’t tapped into its full immersive potential yet. Bell’s praised soundwalk CAIRNS began to find where immersive work fits into this space, but with such a rich and inspiring environment, I still find myself waiting and wishing for a performance to really dig in and explode Green-Wood Cemetery into the immersive arena.
— Allie Marotta
Eschaton — Chorus Productions
Online; $18–23; Ongoing
Eschaton is a remote immersive performance, using a desktop web interface and a series of Zoom rooms to transport audience members to mysterious rooms of wonder from the comfort of their own home. With the early success of the show at the beginning of the pandemic last year, this experience has become a household name for immersive fans across the country. The new relaunch includes a redesigned web portal with a new all audience chat box, as well as new performers and puzzles.
Excellent additions were made to the cast with a slew of new acts to discover mixed in with fan favorites from past performances. I am a big fan of Jonothon Lyons’ Buddy the Rat and was thrilled to see this act return, and was also excited to see developments made to transition another act that was previously a secret one-on-one into a full Zoom room. One of the new acts that I found absurdly enthralling is the “Juicy” room which spotlights a “fruit dom” as they dominate different fruits BDSM style throughout the night. I never thought I would encounter a fruit dom in my lifetime, but I absolutely could not stop watching once I did!
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The relaunch includes some new lore elements that actually felt a little bit forced. I think Eschaton has room to lean into the narrative more, especially if they want the audience to invest emotionally in it and believe that the stakes are as high as they say they are. Despite the growing pains, Eschaton continues to shine as the desirable, elusive nightclub of the remote immersive world.
— Allie Marotta, from her Full Review
Fétische — Miss Lila Sage
DTLA; $175; Through June 12
Who is Fétische for? The answer is delightfully direct. This production is for the kink Curious, complete with the capital “C.” A seasoned kinkster may very well enjoy what’s going on within the halls of Ivy Manor on these nights, provided they set their expectations accordingly. Immersonauts who have a strong aversion to rougher forms of contact, or who seek out works for the lure of getting wrapped up in a fictional universe wouldn’t find much here that pushes their buttons. This one is for the experience seekers who thrive on novel interactions and don’t have the aforementioned aversions. For that set, Fétische is a dive right back into the deep end.
— Noah Nelson, derived from his Full Review
Keep the Candle Burning — Electric Goldfish
£4.99; online/at home; no end date
Electric Goldfish’s collection of interactive ghost stories is the aural equivalent of staying up too late and pretending not to be freaked out by the “totally real, I swear to God he had a hook for a hand!” story your friend told two hours ago. Is that a tree branch tapping at the window? Probably. I mean. What else could it be, right? It’s not like you’re scared, but maybe you’ll bury yourself a little deeper in your sleeping bag anyway. Just in case.
Keep The Candle Burning is a series of enjoyable, vaguely nostalgic scary stories that beg for the nervous energy of kids grouped tensely around a campfire. The writing is stuffed with predictable jump scares, the score is gorgeous but referential, the narrator has a textbook evil laugh that gets deployed one-too-many times, and none of the themes are especially sophisticated — but I’ll be damned if I wasn’t covered in goosebumps for the full 90 minutes of storytelling. Somehow, Electric Goldfish managed to bend a genre that usually requires group participation into an experience that works beautifully over headphones, at home… alone.
Part of what makes this translation possible is a 360º soundscape that accompanies the listener’s movement through the “safe spaces” of their own home. We’re told up front that the show is an exploration of fear itself, but after hiding in my own closet for 20 minutes I’m pretty sure it’s a masterclass in shifting perspective to make the familiar feel pleasingly foreign.
Not a giant horror buff? Don’t worry about it. Keep the Candle Burning was “designed to give a warm nod and salutation towards classic favorites like The Twilight Zone and Tales of the Unexpected.” Just like these classics, you can expect to be creeped out but not traumatized. If you’re on the fence, read the disclaimers, give yourself a little time to gather up props like red thread and a glass of saltwater, then turn out the lights and take the plunge. I promise that Keep The Candle Burning is a great way to kick off your very own spooky summer of cheeseball chills and throwback thrills.
Mystery Game Show — Murder Mystery Dinner Party
Online; $10; Run Completed
Mystery novels typically revolve around the questions of what, and how. But here, in Mystery Game Show, a virtual show in which a panel of six selected from the audience play games in an attempt to secure clues to a mystery, I ask primarily “why?”
Why did the hosts not know about the thirty second chat delay on live YouTube broadcasts, nor consider how it would make it impossible to do audience interaction? Why wasn’t there more rehearsal, the hosts continually confused as to the rules of their own game? Why did the mystery, central to the evening, get introduced almost halfway through the night, and even then only trickled out at such a slow pace as to be nearly unfollowable? Why did the rules of the game seem to change on the fly, following the whims of the moment? Why were simple events, such as a tie in a mini-game, so unforeseen as to cause a minutes-long hold up as the hosts argued which team should be allowed to go first in the next round? Why were the mini-games seemingly designed to be as uninteresting to an audience at home as possible, largely consisting of scavenger hunts off screen in the handful of contestants’ homes? Why, if we could all just pop into the Mystery Game Show Zoom room on mute when the Youtube platform crashed for the eighth time, were we not in there from the beginning, alleviating the constant irritation and distraction of the game and chat being out of sync?
Why, when the evening began to run over time, did the game seem to slow down, new mechanics introduced? Why was there next to nothing to do for the audience not selected to play? Why were the hosts so unprepared one lost their script halfway through the show, and talked to us about it? Why were things so aimless that one of the contestants ended the evening by going “Wait, was there like, a story, like why this happened?” Why did I stay for the whole thing, unlike the procession of lucky folks that left only four of us at the Mystery Game Show finale from the twenty or so we started with, an homage to And Then There Were None, perhaps?
Ah, even ze great Hercule Poirot. He cannot answer.
— Blake Weil
The Program — SF Neo-Futurists
$25–75; Telephone; through June 13
Press 1 to continue, says the slightly flat, robotic voice on the phone. I sigh and press “1.” Press 1 to continue. I press “1.” Again. Press 6 to continue. I press the button. Press 77 to continue. I press the button. Then: some instructional gibberish crawls into my ears and there’s no way I can keep up. Press what, again? Just kidding! says the robot. I start laughing out loud.
The Program is an “immersive one-on-one theatrical performance” lasting about 45 minutes and conducted entirely over the telephone; it’s a strange, hilarious experience by the San Francisco Neo-Futurists who mine the tropes of an automated voice system for all its worth.
Imagine if a phone tree kept you digging deeper and deeper and you never reached that live operator who was currently helping someone else; also imagine if, say, the interactive voice agent controlling said phone tree was a bit lonely, or jealous, or perhaps even… possessive. I’d say more about The Program but that it would rob potential listeners of the joy of discovering its surreal and twisted telephonic world on their own.
— Kathryn Yu
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