Review: Casting for humanity: an immersive experience of intimacy and alienation

This week closes out a run on a moving and surprisingly intimate piece of immersive theater called Casting, created by Koryn Wicks, written by Sam Alper, and performed by them and a skeleton crew that includes a snake. The intimacy it creates does not refer to its fleeting (20–30 minute) performance or tiny cast or audience (6–12 participants) but instead its ability to throw its audience into a feeling of insecurity and even loneliness and then to offer healing.

Having seen the show ronight with daughter, I would love to share the experience, but I’m loathe to share any plot points. This piece truly needs to be experienced.

Casting is the brain child of Koryn, the winner of the 2019 LA Immersive Invitational. Though the piece was not shown during the pandemic, Koryn brought the piece back now to the bigger space in the Thymele California theater, where I had seen Signals over the summer. (Hear a great review with Koryn on No Proscenium)

When we arrived at the Thymele theater the woman who checked us in asked if we were there for the audition. My daughter was slightly concerned we had gone to audition for immersive theater, when really we had gone to be a part of it.

Once called into the room, we discovered a somewhat distorted audition space. Remeniscent of A Chorus Line, auditioning takes on an existential quality. I do not want to suggest this piece has a primarily realist or even parodic dimension, though it does have a sense of humor. In other words, it’s not sketch comedy, but more like Pintar. We were not waiting for a dumb waiter, but we were in an audition place that was a standin for an internal space, our space in the world.

The set is lit in stark colors. And absurdist elements mix in with some hyper-realistic elements, all of which serve to throw the audience of interactors off balance. We’re given instructions and right away realize we are not in control of where this will go because we are being assessed. But at the end of the day, the audition is not for a part, it feels bigger, more fundamental.

In the ads for the piece, the say the show asks us to explore “the choices we make when we want to standout and the choices we make when we want to connect.

So let’s do themes: loneliness, particularly, as the title suggests, the loneliness of being an actor in Hollywood. But by extension, it’s about the loneliness of being a human and our craving for connection, to be seen.

Dance happens in the piece, and dance is the healer. Dance is the source of connection. Dance makes you aware of what you gave up in the audition.

It’s hard to convey the power of this tiny piece, but it set my daughter and I talking for hours after, feeling like we’d just taken part in a delicious hand-made soup — no, an antidote for that desire that drives us to want to perform for others at the cost of connection.

My daughter and I love theater, and she has been itching to audition for another show. I am not sure this casting session scratched that itch or soured that dram. Instead it fulfilled a desire we both have to collaborate with others on meaningful theater. And as an audience of casting, in the stage lights, we had our chance.