Review: Abandoned and Stardust, a tale of 2 Immersives…
This past month I had the pleasure of testing out 2 new immersives by interlocked theater troupes in Los Angeles. The first was Stardust by Alterea, an ambitious multi-threaded tale of the dreams we pursue and what we’d sacrifice to gain them. The second was Abandoned by Last Call Theatre, an equally ambitious role-playing experience tale set in a post-apocalyptic world of allegiance and the choices we make to survive. Both involved cast members from this summer’s Signals (also by Last Call) at the Hollywood Fringe (see my review). Both shows directed by Alexander Whitover, the shows expanded what I’ve come to know as the possibility for immersive theater. And in both, I managed to create a dollop or two of delicious chaos (breaking neither, I promise). Hats off to the experience designers for that.
As I try these two experiences, I think I’m learning more about what kind of player I am and what works for me in immersive.
Now, if you don’t know what immersive theater is, think murder mystery dinner theater crossed with role-playing game crossed with a haunted house crossed with theme park characters. And then, you still wouldn’t be that close. Well, it depends on the style. More on that later.
Both of these particular immersive experiences used the following two rules:
- Don’t interrupt characters if they’re playing out a scene.
- Don’t touch (or move) anything unless invited by one of the characters.
This second rule will turn out to be the cause of both great fun and great conflict…)
Stardust
Stardust is what one cast member called a more avant-garde work housed in the Sassafras Saloon, an exotic kitsch-filled saloon in Los Angeles. For the performance, it has been converted, narratively not so much physically, into the Hotel Dion, a place where patrons go to fulfill their pursue their dreams. What better setting than LA? What better troupe than a group made up of mostly recently USC grads since the focus is not the achievement of the dreams, but the price you are willing to pay. Will you give up the thing you want most? (SC students know a bit about paying a price.)
From the show materials:
The bellhop offers you a key…but in exchange, you must tell them the greatest desire of your life.
The frame for the story is a kind of cursed hotel of the Hotel California variety (checking in, easy; checking out, not so much), adorned with almost as many keepsakes as The NEST or The Garage (at LACMA). Early on, we were instructed not to touch anything unless directed, which of course we did and didn’t do, depending on how obedient we felt. Since much of the saloon is already decorated, as a regular novelty space, this rule was helpful, since it wasn’t really clear what was part of the show and what wasn’t. And it would be sad to vandalize such a cool and quirky LA establishment. That said, I’m not entirely obedient to such rules. And, hey, I was a playtester.
Stardust was different from Signals in that rather than a sandbox with missions, this immersive experience had storylines you followed with clusters of 2–3 actors who you’d follow to see a series of flashback scenes that occurred before the characters arrived in the Hotel but which give some sense of the price they paid for their dreams. As the scenes unfolded, the characters enlisted the audience in trying to resolve the conflict if not redress some of the hurt. The scenes were short, and we floated around them like Scrooge and the Ghosts, unseen yet still able to bump into the machinery. I discovered that as I turned on a cuing light at an inopportune time (to only minor scolding). The light and the removal of the actor’s masks signaled the beginning of a flashback. I should note that having these be mostly flashbacks, while adding richness of backstory, made the scenes less engaging to me, since I was very much in the moment. I was delighted to be following actors who I’d seen in Signals, including Haven Schneider and a stand-in stage manager Riley Cole.
Chaos Monkey #1
Two scenes into the story line I was watching, my monkeybrain began to wander and wonder… could I be missing something? Was someone singing in one of the other storyclusters? I spoke with one of the producers about this, and she described the FOMO effect that hits you in this show. And while that might lead you to come back, the steep price ticket (though NOT by immersive standards) meant that most people would probably only go once, at least in a limited run. But it wasn’t just the fact that there were other options. I think the problem/feature/bug comes from design. When you are an immersive but “stuck” on a track, you — or I — become ansy.
Let’s back up.
A few weeks ago, Noah Nelson interviewed Felix Barrett, the director of Punch Drunk theater, who described a project that combined mask-style passive audience immersive storytelling (a la Sleep No More) with a treasure hunt. But when they opened the show, audiences just couldn’t sit still for the passive component once the treasure hunt was introduced, so he had to split the two experiences. This is exactly where I was in Stardust.
A Spoiler follows (meaning me)
So I leapt off my storycluster path into the stream of the hotel only to wash up on another tale. In this one the main framing character, (here’s the avant-garde part) the Architect (played on this day by Demetri Bouzos) was confronting Iris (Naomi Melville), who he claimed was trapping everyone here in the hotel. That was when I backed into a chest covered with chains and pad locks. “My bad!” I said. But soon we learned that chest contained Iris’ soul. And as long as the 3 Keys of Power went undiscovered, the Architect, her father (sort of), had Iris at his mercy. If she had the keys, she’d be be free. Could there be a more obvious QUEST? Doubt it.
So off I went in league with of all people Michael DiNardo also from the cast of Signals. We set off to get the keys. Soon, I had walked off with one and persuaded another actor to give me another power key in exchange for my roomkey. (I might not change my precious loves for fame, but for chaos?! In a heartbeat.)
The problem came when I tried to secure key 3, which I has learned was in the pocket of a character from my original storycluster. The irony! So, after jumping back into that narrative stream and patiently waiting out a final scene, I asked him to check inside his pocket. But as he drew out the key in the middle of curious onlookers, I realized my mistake. Somehow, this character had made himself beholden to another audience member to whom I’d shared nothing of the key plot. She had stayed with one storycluster like a good audience member. So, rather than give the key to me, he asked her what to do.
She seemed torn and decided to take them for herself. ALL SEEMED LOST. But when we exited the room, we bumped into Iris who would NOT take the key. What the what? She just would not take the keys. Thrown by this revelation, the other audience member gave they key back to the actor who had possessed them and he returned them to his pocket.
What a fail! There I was with two keys and no hope of getting a third.
So imagine my surprise when the Architect asked to speak with me separately. Yikes. He demanded to know where the keys were. In the other character’s pocket, I said (honestly). “Are you sure,” he asked. Yep. Go check, I said.
Amd he let me go. Now what? Returning to my cluster, I waited out one more beat until a larger drama drew us back into the bar area. Following the noise, I bumped into Michael and decided to give him the keys, only to see him scurry off. Moments later the Architect emerged on the balcony for a show ending exchange with Iris. After a final decision by the audience (a vote and a choice), we sat down to chat.
“Where did you go with the keys?” I asked Michael.
“Oh, upstairs to give them back,” he explained. “They can’t end the show without them. I found that out the first time I playtested.”
Egads! How could I have known?
And worse yet, if they fixed that glitch, they’d “fix” my favorite part of the show! How could I just follow a story, once I’d been permitted to play!
I discussed this with Michael and the other audience member from the key dilemma, who happened to be Ashley Busenlener, the social media director of Last Call Theatre.
So in search of play, I picked up a ticket for…
Abandoned
Abandoned is a playable immersive experience set in “the darkest period of human existence possible: the end of the world.”
The one-room (more or less) setting of Abandoned matches its strongest suit, its clear focus. Abandoned was staged in the expertly lit post-apocalyptic station in the Sugar Bank. Among the flickering lamps of the interior were the glow of blue lights and wooden slats on one wall lit with fairly lights to excellent end-of-the-world effects. Without having to wonder a building, you also didn’t have to make as many exclusive choices about what you did or did not watch.
Abandoned begins when we, the survivors, are led into the space by an emissary with a delivery. Similar to Signals, a simple online personality quiz at the start of the experience assigned us to a group, that was then directed to the first character with whom we would interact. However, once begun, players have easy freedom to wander as they see fit.
As a chaos monkey, I began by talking to Chris, played by Michael, my co-conspiritor in Stardust. He led me to his puzzles, and then turned his back artfully on his rack of plants, where I discovered a box full of vials of pills. (These will become crucial later.) I do believe I waited for permission to touch these, but soon pocketed them.
Soon, the plot moved to what I would call the end of Act I, when the emissary was killed. Presumably this happens every time no matter what.
** Spoilers follow **
Chaos Monkey #2
After the poisoning, I went to investigate. Soon, I was directed to a bottle of water with a re-usuable straw. (Good thing this post apocalyptic encampment is not going to cause another apocalypse!) It was clear this drink had been poisoned. Who dunnit? Actually, a murder mystery frame was somewhat conforting to me as a general quest because the form is familiar. So, since a character handed it to me, I brought the water bottle to the doctor’s office to see if he could determine what poison had been used. But the Doctor, aka Jude (Mikey Takla), had no success, and his methods were a bit suspect, so I lost interest — which was fine because I was too late. When I brought up my frustration with Charlotte (Kale Hinthorn), she artfully directed me to a scene where the culprit was revealed. This storyline had chugged on ahead of me. In immersive theater, snoozers are losers.
But this is a good place for me to note that because of the one-room setting, these call out scenes felt more organically woven into the fabric of the overall experience than the storyclusters in Stardust for several reasons. One, they happened in a smaller space where it was comparatively easy to tune in and out or junp tracks or streams. (I often do this at conferences and must do it in life.) Also, to a large extent they were missable. Yes, I has the sense that I was missing something in the cult storyline, but not that sense that I had committed myself to a track I couldn’t leave. Strangely, my attention span may have been deformed more by years of channel hopping and multitab browsing than say video game playing. In this way, Abandoned felt like a more coherent version of Signals, coherent in the sense of a simultaneously occuring story space where jumping between flows felt less like moving to a story without context and more like choosing where you wanted to focus your camera in one eventspace.
Oh, and we discovered the poison was a derivitive from one of the plants Chris had been cultivations. But he apologized so sincerely, I forgave him. The other characters seemed to as well.
But remember those pills?
Absent a poisoning mystery to solve, since I had them in my pocket, I could ask the other characters about them. Laputa investigated the pills to no avail. When I showed them to Charlotte, she took them gratefully.
Everything was going well until…
Anton (Jason Pollak) fell over… someone had POISONED him…
And then, something incredible happened. From somewhere in the crowd, someone shouted out “Mark.” For lack of other Marks and since actors were soon looking at me, I realized to my delightful horror that they meant me. The accusation that I had poisoned Anton. I had no idea how that could be possible, not realizing he’d drunk from the bottle.
The play continued towards its finale, the vote for whom should lead. But while that scene was transpiring, something else occurred to me. Hadn’t I given those pills to Charlotte. And… hadn’t Anton been poisoned by an opiate?
But I couldn’t interrupt the scene. That was the rule.
But I had FIGURED OUT this whole thing. So, I waited…. until the characters turned to the audience and said, “What do you say?”
So I said, “I think Charlotte poisoned Anton!” And then she set me up! I had given her the pills, and then she’d used them to poison Anton, pinning the poison on me! Evil genius!
At which point, I was ushered out of the theater. Chris, in a bit of expert audience herding, assured me that he’d be on his guard, but kept guiding me to the door, out into the extradiegetic night.
Outside the story:
“You set me up!” Kale said. Once out of the theater, Kale and Michael came out to chat.
“You set me up!” I replied, vociferously but sincerely.
After quite a bit of farcical clearing things up we realized that neither had set up either but we had, as it turned out, both inadvertently created quite a bit of narrative noise and rationalized it.
And this is why where the true joy came for me a chaos monkey. I had somehow inadvertently created a plot point in Kale the actor’s head, just as she had in mine. Just by making an odd choice, I had been part of creating something that the story would accept. I didn’t de-rail things because the story had responded in ways that West World never could.
And now for my…
Realization:
Play is what is drawing me into these shows, but the bigger draw is not feeling like I have fallen into the rut of a pre-established choice pattern but instead that sense that I can instigate a chain of events not planned or at least no pre-determined. (Not that I follow this principle in all of my projects.) Whether or not those ripples I cause have been created before is part of what I would call the suspension of immersive player disbelief.
During a recent presentation at Celia Pierce’s Playable Theatre Symposium, one of the Star Wars Galactic Cruiser team members said, “Humans are unpredictable ad individuals but quite predictable in aggregate.” (They have a LOT of data of the Cruisers who have flown(?) so far.) But what could be more dreary than to be a predictable chaos monkey? I ask you.
Let’s see what happens in their next show, Showroom, a murder immersive set in an Ikea-like store.
Make your immersive, creators.
I’ll be your monkey.
