lessons – Immersology

November 14, 2017February 1, 2019

On Reviews and Hosting Reviewers

Strange Bird Immersive has been lucky in our press. We recently had the immense pleasure of hosting Room Escape Artist, and we’ve even lured Houston’s local theatre critics to come out and PLAY a play, you know, instead of just sitting there.

Read the reviews…

Room Escape Artist: “an experience that realized what I’ve hoped to see from the escape room medium.”

Partly Wicked: “the single most memorable escape room I have ever seen.”

Houston Press: “superbly unique… meticulously conceived.”

Houston Theatre Awards 2017: Winner of Best Risk

THE CRITIC IS COMING…

Hosting critics in an immersive is radically unlike hosting critics in traditional theatre. Here are some tips I’ve learned along the way on how to make the most of it.

Schedule wisely. If you’re in an ongoing production, give your show at least 2 months for testing and iteration, so it can settle into its best form before the critic comes. This is true for immersives, but it’s especially true for escape rooms. The show we ran in January is not the show we have now: the puzzles are smoother, the tech is debugged, the actors can handle every interaction. Be patient, and it’ll pay off. If you’re running a short-lived show, try to dissuade critics from opening night/weekend, at least.

Clean. Your critic will be inside the world and potentially free to explore. You do not want to be called out for dust bunnies.

No last-minute changes. As we’ve learned the hard way, a very small change can create new bugs, new audience behaviors you didn’t anticipate. We always try to run a mock-show in real-time whenever we make any technical changes, but physical changes can only be tested with fresh, new minds—a lot of them. What may look like an innocent dogtag to you may be somebody else’s slotted screwdriver.

You may want to perfect things for a critic, but don’t do it the day before, or even a week before. You want to deliver a vetted show.

Conquer self-consciousness. Actors get pretty revved up (usually for the worse) when they know a critic is in the house, but they never have to face that stone-cold gaze. Here? Neither of you gets to stay anonymous. That’s scary. A theatre critic is likely to freak, too, because they’re used to the armor that anonymity gives them.

If I had to guess, they probably didn’t become critics out of an intense love of actor eye-contact.

Immersive work is intimate, it’s close-up, it’s scary. There’s no place for them to hide what they’re thinking: the actor will see it on their very faces. Be ready for both parties to feel even more self-conscious than usual. Hopefully your immersive is already designed to limit feelings of self-consciousness, but be ready to conquer this demon more than usual. Don’t give the critic any more attention than anyone else present. Your Meisner gut may even tell you to back-off from them.

No “red carpet” treatment. You want to be on your A-game, but you don’t want to be on your “suck-up” game. They will notice. The critic is here to experience the same show the public would experience. Otherwise, what use is their review? If you have any special moments or one-on-ones, don’t default to selecting the critic unless you’ve received the usual positive signals from them that you always look for when singling out audience members. Bad one-on-one selections lead to bad one-on-ones, period.

Be professional. Take criticism graciously. Take praise graciously. To be reviewed at all is a privilege not every artist gets. Because of the intimacy, you may feel like you have a relationship now. You don’t. If the critic wants to be friendly afterwards, follow their lead—don’t be the initiator in the relationship. A lot of critics prefer to duck out and never see you again, even if they loved it.

Everyone’s a critic. The only publicity in this business that’s worthwhile is word of mouth. Every guest who crosses your threshold could potentially rave (or rant) to their friends—or on Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, or TripAdvisor. Every guest is someone worth winning, so make the most of every show and make the red carpet standard.

Which really means you’ll be doing a lot of cleaning.

September 11, 2017February 1, 2019

Meditations on Relevance

As everyone knows too well, the city of Houston (and its many neighbors—Fort Bend and Baytown and Port Arthur and Beaumont and…) suffered catastrophic damage from the floods of Hurricane Harvey. The extent of the tragedy is impossible to fathom. People died. Many others lost everything they own, with no quick-fix in sight.

Meanwhile, I’m supposed to go back to business.

The Strange Bird studio faced not one leak, and our creative team suffered no damages either. We cancelled performances, but managed to reschedule all groups but one. Unlike other theatre companies who have a tragically short window of performances to recoup costs, Strange Bird can lose a weekend or two, and be okay. We’ll be okay.

But in the meantime, I’m supposed to go back to business…? Let’s put aside the “survivor’s guilt” we were all feeling, just for being lucky enough to be able to go back to business. There was something even greater unsettling me. It felt silly to turn my energy to entertainment, when that’s so very low on the list of needs right now. Worse: it’s a show about death and STUFF. Like, you know, all that stuff you accumulate in life that countless people just lost? And then there’s my tarot readings, “The Tower” card that reminds us, “We are always subject to higher forces.” Could I handle that fortune showing up for someone? Is The Man From Beyond really what my city needs right now?

A Harvey tarot spread: an act of God/Nature; seeking refuge; heartbreak.

I had a crisis of faith.

I talked about scaling things back. Removing certain tarot cards from my deck. Cutting a few key lines in a few key places. Emphasizing the hard themes less, and trying to play up the fun more. In other words, fundamentally changing our story.

Then Cameron, my husband, co-artistic director, sometimes co-star, and general favorite human being, said, “Well, do you want to be new Disney or old Disney?”

I knew what he meant. Did I want to sanitize my world, present an escapist reality scrubbed of its evils and painted brighter, more beautiful than the real one? Or did I want to “hold the mirror up to nature,” not turn away from darkness, and see if that darkness has something to say?

“Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come. Make her laugh at that.” (Hamlet)

Needless to say, the latter is the Strange Bird way. Theatre companies long to be relevant, selecting scripts and making production decisions that speak to the current moment, and now was our chance to matter more. And here I was, wanting to abdicate my power for fear of coming off as insensitive.

We seem to have forgotten about this lovely little thing called catharsis. It used to be tragedy’s primary goal, and it succinctly expresses the real impact we can have on our audience. Cathartic-shy entertainment leads us to endless cycles of The Foreigner, Arsenic and Old Lace, Noises Off!—feel good, escapist entertainment that never surprises you.

Strange Bird Immersive revels in surprise. We want you to take a few strides outside your comfort zone. There, we will meet and perhaps experience something important together. After Harvey, well, we’re just a few steps closer to that important place—and need its promised catharsis even more.

Let’s look again at “The Tower.” Here’s my full story for that card: we are always subject to higher forces. Things that we don’t will and don’t want fundamentally impact our lives all the time—often for the worse—and we fall. But the real question is: how do we respond? Do we rebuild the Tower? Do we make it lightning-proof?

The darkness definitely has something to say.

I’m a secular-humanist philosopher. I take my readings very seriously.

We doubled-down. Not only did we resume performances as soon as the main roads were safe, we added more showtimes to our usual schedule, offering free benefit tickets this past week with a donation to the Houston Food Bank. People needed to get out, to talk about something else, and we wanted to help in our small way.

And to be fair, The Man From Beyond is far from a downer. It’s fun, funny, full of magic, an escapist delight in two senses of that word—with the potential for catharsis. I am glad I stood by our work. The result of the benefit was our busiest week yet. My “silly little escape room” provided meals for Houstonians most in need and something meaningful for those who could make it out to play.

So perhaps we shouldn’t consider entertainment secondary, irrelevant, a “distraction” from the real meat of life that should dutifully retreat to the shadows when a tragedy takes center stage. Perhaps it is rightfully at the heart of our lives. Perhaps we need it. It gives us a chance to do something different, to be someone different, to expand our experience of ourselves. It is not the how, but the why of life. The laughter, tears, and cheers are real, even if the world that inspired them was imaginary.

And that’s work I’m very proud to resume.

Please consider a monetary donation to those in need after Hurricane Harvey.
Houston Food Bank
JJ Watt’s Houston Flood Relief Fund
…or another charity (or for that matter, hurricane) of your choice.

June 1, 2017February 1, 2019

Answering the Smart-Ass

If an immersive production offers the audience any opportunity to speak, chances are actors are going to get some smart-ass remarks.

Design can do a lot to reduce this problem: invest the story with importance, make the stakes personal, have the actors take the story seriously, deliver a realistic world so the audience isn’t embarrassed to be “caught” playing along. All of these things can help communicate to the audience that it is in their best interest to go along with the world. But there’s inevitably still that person who would rather watch the world burn.

And The Man From Beyond has lots and lots of opportunities for the audience to speak.

Why Be a smart-ass?

While audiences may not be aware when they are disrespecting the actor, smart-asses know full-well what they are doing. A smart-ass wants to assert his/her power, usually at the expense of someone else. There’s a “Gotcha!” edge to these remarks, whether they are pointing out a technicality in your language or just screwing around with you.

The story of The Man From Beyond climaxes with a very hard question. It’s jolting, it requires a deep belief in the world we’ve built to answer, and it’s HARD. (And we know it. We have a complex decision tree for the actor to memorize for this moment.) Some teams sit in silence, barely daring to breathe. Sometimes, a brave soul steps up. And every once in a while, a wild smart-ass appears. Or 2 or 3 at the same time.

The audience has paid good money to enter a new world and to play along. Why would someone want to break it? Some theories…

Believing in the world makes you emotionally vulnerable. A “smart” comment keeps you in control and emotionally distant (= safe).
Your friends are watching: you don’t want to appear foolish in front of them and instead you want to show them how “smart” you are.
You want to see the actor squirm. Treating the performer as an actor instead of as the character also translates to enforcing your emotional safety.

All of these motivations are ultimately about maintaining power. But no worries, smart-ass audience member. I get it. Emotions are scary, powerful things. You don’t have the dark anonymity of a traditional theatre to protect you. You don’t want to betray your “weakness” under the lights of the show or in the eyes of your friends.

Despite its reputation for intimacy, immersive theatre is a profoundly public experience. To be active is to be an actor. Even in a 1-on-1, you are being watched.

It’s okay. Your behavior is totally justified. But you’ll also never be moved.

What happens next?

When smart-asses play “Gotcha!” they are expecting the actor either to:

1) Flinch momentarily, and then keep plowing through the script, or

2) Break character, so that “they win.”

Which means the actor should respond with…

3) Taking what was said as truth and responding to it honestly from the character’s POV as much as possible.

They aren’t expecting that at all. The world is not supposed to be that real. This tactic has the two-fold advantage of not-rewarding the smart-ass (so the behavior won’t continue) and making for a better, more truthful scene. At the end of the day, the smart-ass is my scene partner. I need to take as true whatever text and subtext they give me. For me, even more important than the planned script is the truth of the moment. I follow that truth wherever it takes me. And most often my audience quickly follows in my wake. (And then I can get back on script.)

The mantra to not take it too personally is important here. The goal is not shaming or revenge; it’s honesty. You don’t want to answer your smart-ass with anger. In fact, upping your vulnerability may work best. I advise against aggression and recommend making a positive claim: “I thought we were friends. Please help me,” etc. It’ll depend on the situation. But I do sometimes tell someone who’s obviously lying, “You’re lying.” They guffaw and agree—I’ve just won them with that response.

But this technique does come with a risk of escalating the situation, in a way pretending you didn’t hear them doesn’t. It feels really, really good to the actor and potentially puts down the smart-ass—this is a power-play situation, after all! But 95% of cases I’ve seen won’t fight when they realize I can fight back within the parameters of the world.

But when they smart-ass me again, and again, and perhaps a fourth time, I bow out. They clearly want nothing to do with me.

May 28, 2017February 1, 2019

Respect the Actor: the Unspoken Rule

The most important rule goes unspoken. I have not yet encountered a production—immersive or otherwise—that explicitly told audiences “to respect the actors.”* After all, no one sneaks tomatoes into the theatre anymore.

Theatre creators hope respect happens naturally.

Spoiler: it doesn’t.

Note that I am not defining “disrespect” as talking to the actors (unless there’s a no talking rule). Disrespect in immersive theatre is any audience behavior that blocks the actor from performing the rehearsed scene/interaction. This block may be verbal or physical (refusing to leave a chair, stealing props, not moving out of the way, etc.). Immersive theatre is often a designed experience (rather than an emergent one), and the show is at its best if audiences yield us the space to deliver the experience we designed for them.

*I haven’t witnessed it myself yet, but some immersives like Delusion do deliver rules about actor-audience interaction. Haunts definitely have a long history of rules like “don’t touch the actors,” and immersives could do worse than to borrow a page from the haunt playbook.

When was the last time you saw a play?

It is very, very rare for an audience member to behave badly at traditional theatre. But what if you’ve never attended traditional theatre before? Or maybe the last time was 10 years ago, back in school? The passive-mode that comes naturally to those of us attending shows on a monthly or even weekly basis isn’t an ingrained behavior in such a person.

Immersive theatre reaches out to new audiences. Younger generations who would find The Odd Couple boring (and offensive). People who play video games. Tourists. Sky-divers. Seekers of the new. Runners who think stories are better when you’re running after them. You know, anyone under the age of 60.

When the theatrically-uninitiated encounter an actor on their own plane, they don’t default to respectful-audience-mode. Immersive theatre puts them in active mode; why should they suddenly be passive just because an actor showed up?

We’ve had several teams come through The Man From Beyond that I lovingly deem “assholes” who do not know they are being assholes. Their faces betray no smirk, no smugness, no consciousness of power play. They see nothing inappropriate in their behavior with the performer. Since they seem so ignorant of their disrespect, I can only conclude that they go to the theatre very, very rarely. To such an audience, an actor is just another person; s/he has no privileged status in the group. How can we get mad at such an audience? They believe in the world perhaps more deeply than we do.

Why are you here?

In proscenium theatres, the audience signs a contract: whatever it is the actors are doing is what I’m here for. Even if it’s crap, the story they are telling is what I paid good money to see—so hush up. But immersive theatre offers myriad goals. People can attend to explore environments, to experience a dreamscape, to play a game—or to interact with actors and witness the story. If you’re not attending for the actors, you’ll be less inclined to give them the space they need to proceed with their part of the experience—because you’ve got something more important to do! Sometimes the actor’s goal and the audience’s goal may even be in conflict, say, if you’re exploring a desk, but the actor needs to sit there. There can be only one winner.

Certainly the award for most-likely-to-disrespect in The Man From Beyond are die-hard escape gamers who buy tickets for the pleasure of solving at least three convoluted ciphers (so sorry to disappoint, guys!). While we carefully crafted the show so our actors don’t interrupt game play, these sorts of players will always consider the actor a bit of a nuisance, or sometimes even an obstacle in the way of solving the next puzzle. Which (spoiler!) is not the case.

how to earn respect

Like with all rule-breaking, it is up to the immersive actor to enforce the rules in real-time.

Earning the audience’s respect starts with “presence”—that allusive magic that all actors seek. The performer is on the same plane as the audience, but with physical presence, can establish a privileged status within that group. The actor’s confidence will lead to audience trust. It is perhaps not pure coincidence that when I was most exhausted as an actor, I hosted one of my most disrespectful teams to date. I failed to establish a strong presence, and they caught on to that energy and so ran a few circles around me that afternoon.

The writers must also invest the actor’s role with importance. If the audience sees that what the actor is doing matters and isn’t just a waste of their time, they will give the actor room to work. The actor, too, must take the story seriously—certainly for dramas, but even if it’s a comedy, as all comedies are funnier when they’re deadly serious to the characters. A serious tone leads to respect.

But even with strong presence and a sense of importance, you’ll still get that kid in school who refuses to respect Teacher on principle. When disrespect happens, the actor must immediately address it (verbally or physically). The audience doesn’t always know in immersive theatre what we want from them, so a prompt correction will let them (and anyone around them) know they are crossing the line. Once is usually enough. Performers in the McKittrick correct behavior all the time with glares or physical maneuvering. I like to use words, so the correction is even more public.

But what about the second time? Or the third time? What if correction fails to stick? Well, then…I guess they didn’t want that scene…did they?

We have aborted scenes before in The Man From Beyond. We fight hard and try to win them, but when the audience continuously fails to yield the actor the floor, then we simply retreat. I guess story isn’t why you bought your ticket. And that’s okay.

a word on walls

As stage actors, we want to take everything personally—to have “no wall” with our scene partners. But immersive actors can’t take everything personally. The audience is our scene partner, which could lead to some truly hairy customer service situations when they disrespect us and we take it too personally. Immersive actors need to keep a wall up, but about 20-yards back from the usual wall. When audiences hit that wall? Shut down, retreat, and don’t take it personally. It’s not you, it’s them. You fought valiantly.

April 29, 2017February 1, 2019

Rules in Immersive Theatre

In the “anything’s possible” wide-open frontier of immersive theatre, creators are dreaming up all sorts of ways to make the audience active in the story. Unless you like chaos in your shows—I don’t, but I know some designers may like to set folks loose and “see what happens”—every show needs to start the experience stating very clear rules.

Traditional theatre rules

The rules for audiences of traditional theatre are so ingrained that productions don’t feel the need to remind you beforehand. Nevertheless, there are rules…

No talking (or singing along!)
Stay seated
Turn off cellphones (this one’s less instinctual, so we have to be reminded)
Overall: respect the actors on stage

It’s very passive, intuitive, and easy to learn. People seem to agree on what’s acceptable, although I have encountered audience members who, according to their evil glares, categorize my loud and frequent laugh as a violation of Rule #1. I’m not being passive enough.

Please disregard your feet, hands, voice, and personality for the duration of the performance. Thank you.

But when the audience has no seat to pen in their behavior, all hell can break loose.

Immersive Theatre Rules

Since there is not one structure for immersive theatre, the rules will vary based on the show’s unique structural design. The rules dictate our activity and help guide us to the most fulfilling way to experience the show. You’re inviting the audience to do something; we need to be confident in what we’re doing.

The most common rules will focus on speech (when it’s allowed, if at all) and movement (where I can and cannot go). One thing is clear: breaking the rules will essentially break the show.

Punchdrunk needs you to wear your mask, so a free-roaming audience can differentiate at a glance between actors and audience. Third Rail says only to speak when you’re spoken to—thus opening the door to personal connection with actors that doesn’t get too out of hand. These two leading companies have very, very different rules, and I’ll be posting from personal experience about what happens when you break their rules. (See: Breaking the Rules: Sleep No More and Breaking the Rules: Third Rail Projects)

Productions must take the time to make the rules clear at the start of the experience. Ideally they will make a scene out of it (as opposed to playing a video or posting a list for the audience to read)—both to continue the immersion and because it will be more memorable.

Avoid non-intuitive or complicated rules. The audience can learn only so much so quickly. Immersive theatre can’t be like those board games that take 30 minutes to read the rules; no one will know for certain what to do, and that guarantees a bad audience experience. And if there’s something you really, really don’t want participants to do, design the experience to make that behavior impossible, rather than throwing a non-intuitive rule at your audience.

Rather than say “don’t use the tools to disassemble the furniture,” why don’t you create a game that doesn’t give me a screwdriver? (Real Escape Game’s Escape from the Time Travel Lab)

Rules in THE MAN FROM BEYOND (SPOILER LEVEL 1)

As an immersive escape room, we present the rules for the game as rules for the séance. Our rules address the escape room aspects—do not abuse my room, no cellphone use, work together. We do not provide rules for the actor interaction. NONE.

Madame Daphne guides you through Rules Hall

We expected our players would default into the ingrained “polite audience behavior,” perhaps driven by “awe of the actor”—the kind of audience behavior that Sleep No More expects, even through the 1-on-1s. We were so wrong. Without any rules encouraging audience silence, people were treating our characters as people: contributing to conversations, assuaging fears, even making jokes. After all, the primary mode for the experience is game-play, which requires extreme activity, so audiences applied that same approach to our scene work as well.

With a few tweaks to the script, we were able to adjust for more active engagement. We may not incorporate audience responses as much as I’d like (things do have to keep on a schedule), but we made more space for it. For the moments where we needed to drive home the story and have much less back-and-forth, we made sure that the players were sitting down, thus prompting them to more typical “audience mode” behavior.

Important lesson here is to keep the rules consistent. You can’t have rules for one point in the experience, and then expect a completely different kind of behavior at another point. And if you don’t limit the audience’s behavior, expect real interaction at every point.