‘THICKETT’ Weaves a World of Fairytale Mischief Mixed with Office Politics (Review)

After transitioning to grad school (and remote grad school at that), one element of office culture I didn’t expect to miss was the ritual of setting up my workspace for the day. What a joy it’s been working (if only for Saturday afternoons) for my new employer, THICKETT, reclaiming that small bit of corporate ceremony. As I pour myself a cup of strong black coffee and grab a clementine from the fridge to the soundtrack of my “pump-up” playlist, I carefully do the following: arrange my pencils and notepads; review my notes from my last review; and prepare a mini flamethrower for the ceremonial destruction of my true name “Blake” that begins every shift. Admittedly, it’s a bit of an unusual office job, but my manager says I have great shot at promotion if I continue wheeling and double dealing!

THICKETT, the latest production from Cirque du Nuit, skillfully creates a world of warring corporate factions, mysterious CEOs/Monarchs, and storybook whimsy that’s at once familiar enough to sink your teeth into and original enough to keep you coming back from more. It’s the type of mix that makes stories like Welcome to Nightvale and American Gods so much fun. As my employee handbook (received after purchasing a ticket) informs me, the THICKETT corporation is dedicated to pursuing the lost pages of a mystical artifact, The Book of Turns. Each story in the book is one of Grimm’s classic fables (think anything from “Cinderella’’ to lesser known fare like “The Gallant Tailor”). Once in the book, these tales dictate the tropes that govern our reality. Outside the book, though, the stories have become corrupted, and need to be tamed and returned to the book, lest reality spiral out of control. Enter “The Princess” (the book’s original commissioner and enigmatic CEO of the THICKETT corporation) and her trusty army of corporate agents, seeking to recover the pages by hook or by crook.

THICKETT’s basic plot would make an excellent children’s story; it reminds me of the Saturday morning cartoons and manga my 12 year old self consumed in vast quantities. What sets the show apart is the heaping helping of rivalry and corporate espionage added into the storybook world. Each participant is sorted into a different fairytale office department, such as the wise Ravens in the Department of Knowledge, the kind and loving Rabbits in the Department of Relationships, or, my department, the clever and duplicitous Foxes who lead the Department of Confidence. Before each story is returned to the book, edits to the plot can be introduced, and each department’s ideals can be inserted into the fabric of our reality based on how they choose to tell (or retell) the story.

On paper, the experience sounds exceedingly high concept. But in practice, the audience has a ball treating these fantastical stakes as just another day of corporate skulduggery. While there is some continuity between sessions, each THICKETT episode repeats twice and can be enjoyed on its own or as part of a full season. Each episode, covering a different fable to be tamed, takes place in three acts.

Our “workday” begins with a corporate onboarding via Zoom, with that episode’s fairytale recapped for all to hear, and then each department having a team meeting. This smaller convening introduces the personality and strategy of your assigned department, in addition to each one’s unique goals within the world of the story. Then, the action switches from Zoom to the Topia platform. Topia consists of a top-down 2D interactive map where participants use illustrated avatars (think the meeple from classic board games) to walk around an open world like a video game; this is the world of the story, and illustrated as such. If participants get into close proximity, then they can then see each other’s faces and hear each other’s voices through video chat. Littered around the THICKETT map are various useful items, many of which have a simple puzzle attached to them that needs to be solved in order to claim them. After interacting with non-player characters and teammates to accomplish the day’s tasks, the departments reconvene via Zoom, assess their team’s performance, and based on that performance, introduce whatever edits they can into the final story, with the final cut going to the mysterious Princess. Although a loss for your department can feel frustrating, editor’s notes from the Princess make the decision feel transparent and competition feel fair.

I’ll admit I was initially skeptical about how well this experience would work on a 2D interactive platform like Topia. Web interfaces like Gather and Topia can often be cumbersome or immersion-shattering, assuming they even work in the first place given technical constraints. I’m happy to report that during my THICKETT sessions, Topia worked incredibly smoothly, and the charm of seeing hand drawn fairytale landscapes on the map contrasted nicely with the slick corporate sheen of the “real” world. It’s also far more robust than the competing Gather platform; embedded video and linked rooms work fairly seamlessly and I found the Topia interface to be far more intuitive. As the onboarding instructions warn, the program can struggle should too many participants congregate in the same area, filling your screen with countless video feeds. This problem is, for the most part in THICKETT, deftly avoided by giving each team strongly dissimilar goals. When the Foxes are scrambling to confer with demons about legal loopholes, the Ravens are hunting for riddles and secrets, and the Rabbits are just trying to teach a poor soldier how to dance. The map is a flurry of activity, but technology issues are avoided and there isn’t the feeling of bottlenecks around non-player characters that sometimes plague similar events.

The specific Grimm’s fables selected as points of origin are refreshingly underexplored. In my two times working a shift for THICKETT, I schemed my way through the worlds of “Godfather Death” and “The Devil and His Grandmother” (gender-swapped for a delightful female Satan, in THICKETT’s case). The characters are diverse, with a lovely emphasis on color- and gender-blind casting rarely seen in interpretations of European folklore. The audience re-writing these folktales at the end of each episode stands tall as a highlight of each session — the morals of each story have been twisted through the modern corporate lens, be it the Rabbits’ winning retelling of “Godfather Death” in extolling the virtues of universal healthcare, or my attempted rewrite of “The Devil and His Grandmother” in urging children to pursue high-powered legal careers.

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I’ve also delighted in crafting and honing my corporate persona in the storyworld. While in real life, Blake Weil left the corporate world to pursue dreams of working in medicine, “FX045,” my avatar, is a smarmy schemer who plants knives firmly in the backs of corporate rivals with a gentle smile. (You’ll note the corporate ID, lest anyone learn my real name and have power over me, or even worse, my timesheets and accomplishments not be considered on the departmental leaderboards.) The audience gets well into the spirit of the event, with each THICKETT team enthusiastically embracing their departmental values; even my most cynical friends in the Rabbits had a blast rabidly preaching for peace and love during the experience.

Corporate politics form a natural bridge to inter-episode activities. Codes and ciphers pop up occasionally within in-universe communications and are detailed enough to necessitate solving in between sessions, such as a fiendish multi-step substitution cipher which flashed on screen briefly at the end of our onboarding. Exchanging coded banter via email with the secretary of THICKETT (inquiring, as instructed, about mundane office supply problems), I’ve begun a series of clandestine communications hunting for the dark secrets at the heart of the world. Even as a lifelong ARG player, I’ve been impressed by how the puzzles draw from a wide range of cryptographic sources. Although solvable, these additional challenges are refreshingly complex for the old hands in the audience. They also support a broader meta-narrative that makes it wildly tempting to grab a season pass to THICKETT.

Veterans of the immersive world know the compulsive itch to return to a world to uncover its mysteries and to revisit the person you get to be within it; it’s what makes Sleep No More so popular for repeat viewings. THICKETT is the first piece of theater in the remote-era that triggers that same kind of impulse in me. THICKETT works as a game, as a piece of theatre, and as a bridge into a larger alternate reality experience (Cirque de Nuit is also producing a podcast tie-in, currently available only to their Patreon subscribers).

So, speaking as FX045, I do hope to see you all at the office holiday party/white elephant exchange/arcane ritual in the coming weeks. As a dedicated employee, won over by the fascinating work and delightful corporate culture of THICKETT, I wouldn’t dream of missing it. Oh, and I would watch my back if I were you; I’ve been hearing whispers of a, shall we say, “corporate restructuring” with some pretty severe possible outcomes. Trust me. That is, of course, if you’re willing to trust a Fox.

P.S. If you do join, tell the front desk we’re out of pods for the Keurig! I can’t believe I have to keep asking for this!

THICKETT continues through January 30, 2021.

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