Hi there, everyone. It’s midsummer now and immersive marches on, so it’s time for a clean-up post. Here are five reviews for things I’ve seen this month as well as a few upcoming pieces and more concerts ahead. As always, reach out of if you hear of anything interesting or want to join me on a immersive dumpster dive. You’ll be surprised what cool things you’ll find in expected places.
Immersive Reviews
Dirt - My longer review is here. The idea of the show is the audience builds a new section of NYC that can be built on the dried up East River by voting on what initiatives they want to pass. While I normally don’t think that voting is an interesting game mechanic, Sour Milk does a good job keeping the audience engaged and talking about what to vote on and the process becomes an interesting commentary on democracy and influence. The city itself is represented by a crude model at the center of the stage on which the performers “build” the improvements you vote for in an improvised way out of graham crackers, broccoli, and other craft objects. That part of the show is quite charming. The issue is there’s no system behind the construction. Building a pool or an industry center or a housing complex has no in-game difference and the plot continues regardless of what the players choose, which means the audience just makes silly decisions to be funny. That carries the show, but I think it would be a much more powerful experience if they forced you to consider actual urban planning at all as you voted. It was an interesting show to see, but I think it needed that last game element to move it from just entertaining into interesting parody.
Murder in La La Land - Again, longer review here. Someone’s been murdered at Summit Pictures and your job as security to interview the potential subjects and find the guilty party. The show is basically a small audience talking to each of the characters in turn, interrogating them to find out what happened. Live in Theater does a terrific job with this piece. The actors are very flexible and present and can keep the story moving whether you’re playing it straight or just making stupid jokes the whole time. The story is light and the characters are played for jokes, but none of it is cheesy or over-the-top. You can solve a mystery or just have fun while the actors react and try to manipulate you. Live in does this as both a live and virtual show, and I would check one of those versions out if you want to see what really fluid audience interaction looks like.
Spyscape - A surprisingly interesting museum/game space. First and foremost, it passed the “does it have a ball pit” Instagram-trap test by not having one, a test which many other similar “museums” sadly fail. The exhibits each have a specific theme around espionage, from surveillance to hacking to cryptography, and each theme has a game connected to it. The games are varied and generally pretty good, the closed circuit camera game being the real winner. And the educational content is interesting, offering some complexity to the ideas of spying by looking at both good actors (journalists) and bad ones (Cold War spies) to show how questions of tracking users and information affect our lives and history. If you want to take your family to something fun and educational, this is kind of at the top of my list of the quasi-museum genre.
Inertia - Inertia is Drew Petersen’s theatrical encounter about creativity and inspiration. Anywhere from a dozen to a hundred audience members sit in a circle around Petersen in a largely unadorned rehersal space as he leads us through a series of call-and-responses and simple clowning moments. It’s an interesting experiment in audience interaction in the spirit of 600 Highwaymen, in that Petersen puts at least half of the performance in the hands of the room as we get called up to trigger sound cues, read lines with him, or walk around the space in particular ways as part of a human machine. It’s extremely intergenerational (I saw it with an audience of about thirty 10-year olds at Park Avenue Armory) and very approachable while still talking about Kandinsky and the creative process. Petersen has made a quite minimal work that’s surprisingly interactive and poetic. If you have a chance to check out Petersen’s work, do it — it’s a real illuminating study of how much you can do with just instructions and a good guide.
Hiker Trash - An interesting but not completely successful immersive experience from Linked Dance Theater. The premise is that you are followers of the blog of a hiker of the Appalachian Trail, getting a chance to meet her as she gets a supply drop while passing through NYC. The company is using this as an experiment with propping and sets. There are parts of the piece that work well. There are a number of different physical elements that are interesting, including miniatures, shadow puppets, and emergent sets, and the performer does a good job juggling acting and singing and dancing during the show. The core idea of trail magic — the moments of euphoria that can happen randomly during the misery of long hikes — is a good theme that has some aesthetic legs. The issue is that the experience is supposed to be a conversation between the actor and the four audience members and that conversation doesn’t really have the power it should. The script doesn’t land properly to create interesting stakes for us, our moments of interaction don’t feel like they really affect the story, and there’s a bit of a reach for profundity in the conclusion that doesn’t land when the audience is asked to give the hiker a final piece of wisdom. I found Linked Dance’s Winter’s Walk a much better version of this idea, but that might be in part because that’s a piece for one viewer and if it’s just me alone there, I don’t hear other audience members and have no barometer for how cheesy I might sound. Hiker Trash is an interesting experiment with some strong elements, but the interactivity here doesn’t live up to the other elements. Linked Dance has done and will do better work.
Upcoming Immersive
This is Theater Season of LARPs - Sinking Ship Creations, veterans of LARPs including Project Ascension, have teamed up with a bunch of great LARP creators to put together a season of live-action roleplaying games spanning into May 2025. The season ticket gets you 6 LARPs for $570; at $95 per LARP, it’s not a bad piece given some of them are longer games. I can vouch for a lot of these games though: designers include Lizzie Stark, Bjarke Petersen, and Jason Morningstar among others — all superstars of LARP design — and I’ve personally played Sacrament and can vouch for it. If the price is high for you, look into the individual games and see if there’s one that’s interesting to you, but if LARP is your jam, this is a good way to lock in a chance to see a lot of interesting work for the next year.
The Story of Lot’s Wife - A short experience of a “performer-less play” organized into stations, the piece tells the biblical story of Lot by having the audience walk through a set of ritual exercises of introspective interaction. It’s only $10 for 15 minutes, so I don’t know why I wouldn’t catch this after work some day. It’s solo though, so if you want to see it with me, let me know and we can coordinate times to connect after. At the Cell Theatre from August 8th to 16th.
Privy privy - An installation piece riffing on public restrooms in queer nightclubs, with a potential moment of ice cream cone licking. This is another short one, so it’s easy to check out, but it’s another one to do some work to coordinate if you want a buddy for it. I think it’s free, 601ARTSPACE, August 22nd to 25th.
The Spirit’s Speakeasy - An immersive soiree of magic and mediumship set around Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the 1920s. The description makes it out to be a party space with specialized drinks and wandering show pieces, so pretty par for the course in terms of light immersive. The quality of this is all going to be in the implementation, which I can’t vouch for, but it’s the kind of thing I’m academically-ethically bound to check out. $79, Sept 19th to Nov 3rd, at Sincerely Ophelia.
Upcoming Concerts
Just a couple more that have come across my radar in case you’re interested:
Cults, Warsaw, July 28th, $38 - Ever wanted to hear 1960’s girl pop about creepy things such as fanaticism, impatience, or self-destructiveness? Now you can, live. A bunch of us are going. Join us.
Slowdive, Brooklyn Paramount, Nov 18th, $64 - This is not a nostaglia show. You might not know this, but this chillwave band of Souvlaki fame has put out two great new albums and so you’re not going for the memory trip. You’re going to want to see the new stuff. You can also catch this on Nov 17th, but if you want to see them with me, it’s the date above.
That’s all for now. More in a few weeks when additional immersive drops and there’s more to explore.