These Immersive Moments—The 2010's in Review

Somehow, I’ve spent nearly a decade following immersive art & entertainment. It began as a tiny spark on the outskirts of Chelsea, a pinpoint of heat that fanned into bigger and bigger flames. I’ve traveled up and down the East Coast, looking for pockets of immersive. I’ve re-routed road trips through St. Louis to see City Museum and Santa Fe to see Meow Wolf. And as a critic, I’m always looking for that indescribable, otherworldly, and transcendent moment: the very thing which makes up what we sometimes call capital “I” immersive. And the pursuit — quite literally — has changed my life.

I don’t know where I’d be right now if I hadn’t found immersive theatre, hadn’t found Zay, hadn’t found NoPro, hadn’t found Noah, hadn’t found this community. For the uninitiated, we may seem like we’re lost souls wandering the desert, chasing a mirage.

But for those of us who have found each other, and realized we all speak the same secret language, it’s like coming home for the first time.

It’s May 2011. It’s my first time at Sleep No More. It’s only been open two months. I know very little about it. And I can’t find my husband. The elevator operator makes sure of that, after he drops me off on the fifth floor and refuses to let any others follow me. His arm blocks the door as he hits the close button. As for me, I am unaware of any of this. So when I turn around to look for my companion, I find only darkness.

Masked, lost, and alone, I wander from room to room, taking in the strange environment and occasionally spotting a dancer or two. I am at odds with what to do next, in this strange show where it’s oh so dark and you must wear a mask and can’t speak and can’t use your phone.

A man in a taxidermy jacket finds me staring at the glass case full of oddities. He takes my hand. He tells me, “It’s time to meet her.” And he leads me through a dark passageway into her ruined, bloody nightclub, with several others following us. He is practically sprinting towards her. Already, the bass is pumping and the witches’ ritual is about to begin. Soon, Macbeth enters with a crowd following him. The woman in the red dress makes a sound that’s the unholy union of a scream and a cackle, piercing through the static; she’s looking right at me as she does so. The taxidermist is still behind me, heaving with excitement. (Of course, you’re all probably familiar with what happens next.)

Me? I feel disoriented but exhilarated. I am winded, sweaty, and my legs ache from climbing flights of stairs and walking in circles. And I can’t wait to return.

I immediately conscript four of my friends to come back with me while also feverishly comparing notes with other fans. Have you gone yet? becomes a familiar refrain among the NYC art cognoscenti. Did you get a private scene? No, what’s that? I check back into the McKittrick Hotel, again and again, until I know the streets of Gallow Green like the back of my hand; I memorize the hotel’s portals and hallways, its nooks and crannies, from the dances in the lost luggage room to the best vantage points in the speakeasy to the secrets of the wildlife in the forest. I take friends to see it; I take family to see it. I meet some of my best friends in the world through our shared love for the show. They go on to make their own art. One night, I am sent on a quest to deliver something from Hecate to the Porter, and I do; she rewards me with a second one-on-one. I am fed candy by the Sexy Witch. I see Nurse Shaw cough up a nail in a tiny room. And I end up on the sixth floor. This all happens within the span of a few hours. My brain feels like it’s melting. I never truly recover.

Eventually, my fever for all things Sleep No More subsides, just a tiny bit, but not my passion for all things immersive.

It’s September 2012. We’re at a dress rehearsal for Then She Fell. I’m seated at a table in the lobby of the former Greenpoint Hospital with one of my best friends; we’re not sure what’s going to happen next, having backed this promising crowdfunding campaign, sight unseen.

We are listening to a speech from a nurse about “liminality.” One by one, we are each whisked away by a nurse, the door quietly opening and shutting behind her. Before I know it, I’m standing in an antiseptic-feeling hallway, watching a woman through a tiny window, as she writhes on the floor of what appears to be locker room showers, clutching a bottle of pills under harsh hospital light. She spills the bright red capsules all over the tile floor, her hair flowing wildly. Ah, she must be the Red Queen, judging from her clothing, I think. I am whisked away by a nurse to another chamber, then another, then another.

I soon lose all track of time. I write a letter with Lewis Carroll. I attend a mad tea party. I drink potions. I find my hospital record somewhere in the set (a perk for Kickstarter backers: I apparently have “gangrene across the back”). I chase the White Rabbit. I end up at the end of the night sitting alone in a room, at a small desk, reading the letter waiting for me during the final scene, as the ghostly voice of the Mad Hatter sings over the loudspeaker.

Afterwards, two of the co-artistic directors of the company come out to ask us what we thought, if we enjoyed that night’s performance. I’m speechless. Already, it feels like I’m leaving a dream. I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole. What they have is already so special even before it opens officially.

I pray for the show to extend past its sold-out 6-week run.

And it does.

It’s September 2015. Rhonda from Woodshed Collective’s Empire Travel Agency tells me to meet at precisely 7:27pm at the phone booth in front of the Apple Bank on the corner of Water Street and Hanover Street in lower Manhattan. It’s very important that I’m not late. I’m a little skeptical that this travel agency is for real.

Four of us stand, idling, in front of the phone booth, nervously checking the time. There’s not a lot of foot traffic in the Financial District at night. We suspect every passerby to be “in” on it. This immersive show already has shades of an alternate reality game….

Then, the phone rings. It’s Rhonda. She gives some instructions to the man who answers the phone, whose demeanor changes to deadly serious in a manner of seconds. He hangs up and turns to me, saying, “Rhonda likes your shirt.” It is a given that we are being watched. Yes, of course, we are.

Rhonda soon sets us off on a “grail quest,” looking for a mysterious substance that powers the vitality of NYC but will soon be auctioned off to the highest bidder at a secret time and place, and, of course, we can’t let it get into the wrong hands. Everyone wants a piece of this coveted ambrosia but we’re not sure who to trust as we talk to a dealer in a public alleyway, trade code words with our contact on the 4 train, and get into strange cars. Which is why I am dubious about entering an SUV driven by someone who appears to be a Russian mobster, doubly dubious when two out of our party of four disappear into a Manhattan Mini Storage, and triply dubious when I receive a text message from an unknown source not to trust our car’s driver.

But all those doubts disappear when we’re forced back out onto the street and a sedan squeals to a stop in front of me. The driver opens the window and yells.

“It’s Betsy! Get in! We don’t have much time!”

I gasp. I’ve always wanted someone to say those words to me.

Thank you, Woodshed Collective, for helping my dreams come true.

It’s September 2017. I’ve just started writing seriously for No Proscenium. I find myself inside a Korean pop music factory in Midtown. We, the audience, are a focus group, brought together by a Korean pop music label and a Korean-American consultant, in New York City. Our mission: to discover exactly why K-pop as a genre just hasn’t been the same force in the United States that it is elsewhere in the world. Oh, and this is KPOP: an immersive musical dark ride created as a collaboration between Ars Nova, Ma-Yi Theater Company, and Woodshed Collective.

Throughout the course of the show, we meet a host of aspiring musicians who challenge us about xenophobia, the unrelenting need to conform, the soullessness of the music industry, unrealistic Western beauty standards, and so much more. I laugh at the Korean skincare jokes. I cringe when one member of the boy band tells another that he’s not “really” Korean because he was born in the United States. I am horrified at a plastic surgeon’s proposal to one woman on how he can make her look more Western. And there’s nothing I can do or say when a performer makes eye contact with me and wordlessly mouths, “Help me.”

I pitch Noah a write-up of my experience the second I get home. It’s clear: I have feelings about the show. The songs get stuck in my head for days at a time. And the production is a hit. The last few weeks are sold out beyond belief; people line up for hours just to get a chance to get in, particularly after Lin-Manuel Miranda tweets his approval.

And of the cast of 18, 17 of the performers are Asian or Asian-American (the lone non-Asian is an African-American woman) but each character feels unique, like a fully-realized person.

As it should be.

I wonder: What else is possible? And what other stories can be told?

It’s June 2018. I’ve lost my husband. Again. We were separated from each other in a basement that wasn’t as cold as it should have been, in a satellite office of the Trans-Temporal Messaging Service (TTMS).

I think it was the fault of the woman dressed in all yellow with yellow nail polish and the yellow cat eye glasses. Or maybe it the woman dressed in all green with the green nail polish and green cat eye glasses.

A woman in a black cocktail dress drops me off in front of an elevator with a complete stranger. He looks as befuddled as I am. She walks away. The elevator doors open. There is that same woman, the one who’d just left, but inside the elevator. She pretends not to know us. She takes us up, wishing us good luck. Soon enough, a different woman — our tour guide — pops out of nowhere. We follow her.

From there, we travel through the streets of Tribeca and Chinatown at night. We receive a fortune from a man on the street who offers us tea. We peer at a dance scene happening a few stories above from the sidewalk; random strangers hold their phones high up in the air to take photos of the duet. I keep seeing the same set of numbers everywhere, the same unfinished phone number, and the same stamp of a bird. I wonder: what is TTMS, where is TTMS, when is TTMS? We follow a woman with a boombox into an office building and draw on a map of Manhattan with her. We attempt to help a man find his lost connection in a hotel lobby bar based upon postcards from the future, postcards that we think his future self might be sending to his past self. But we fail.

And then eventually, we two strangers part. We are each given a set of headphones and a tape player.

I am now alone, following the voice on the cassette. I am walking down the street and waiting on the corner, just like the voice says.

Then I feel a tap on my shoulder. I turn to see my husband, smiling at me, Walkman in hand. The voice in his headphones told him exactly where to find me.

And as I ponder this coincidence, a white stretch limo pulls up. There’s a boombox inside and the soft glow of what looks like a thousand candles.

It’s for you, says a performer, smiling. Get in.

We get in and drive off into the night.

It’s August 2019. I’m in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on my way to a new life in Los Angeles. I’ve quit my job. I’m going to grad school. I’m leaving New York.

We’ve driven 2,000 miles from New York City to get to this very moment: me, standing outside the House of Eternal Return at Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, on a hot summer’s afternoon.

I stand on the front lawn of the house next to the lamp post. I listen to the ethereal music playing quietly in the background. I see the stars twinkling above the roof. I observe two staff members quietly conversing on the front porch. One sits in the rocking chair, like he’s been sitting there, waiting for us his entire life. I see the people entering the House for the first time, and how their eyes light up upon first glimpse of the exterior, particularly the kids’ eyes. I hear excited chatter emanating from the windows as people discover the fireplace or the fridge or the dryer for the first time.

That kind of discovery is magical, no matter where you come from, what language you speak, or what age you are.

I think to myself, This. This is what it’s all about. I want everyone that I have met and known and everyone that I have yet to meet to be able to feel this magic.

And I weep.

There’s a passage in The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders that I love. It’s a story about two young women living on a hostile, tidally locked planet where one half of the world is bathed in perpetual light, and the other half is always in the shadows. But it is this specific passage hits me like a punch in the gut each time I read it.

…To join with others to shape a future is the holiest act. This is hard work, and it never stops being hard, but this collective designing/dreaming is the only way we get to keep surviving, and this practice defines us as a community.

I’ve probably read and re-read these words hundreds of times by now. These sentences still leave me breathless. And it reminds me so much of the work we’re doing together, here, and with HERE. It is hard. Really, really hard. It will likely always be hard, at least for the foreseeable future. There will always be a thousand reasons not to do it. To doubt ourselves. To toss our hands in the air and say, forget it, never mind. But, still, we persist. We write and we dream and we act and we dance and we sing and we make. We build worlds. We share stories. We invite others to come play with us. We invite newcomers into the immersive fold.

We survive. Because we are a community.

So here’s to the 2020’s. And beyond.

NoPro is a labor of love made possible by our generous Patreon backers. Join them today!

In addition to the No Proscenium web site, our podcast, and our newsletters, you can find NoPro on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, in the Facebook community Everything Immersive, and on our Slack forum.

Office facilities provided by Thymele Arts, in Los Angeles, CA.