Why I Do Immersive Theater

When I tell people that I'm into immersive theater, the response I invariably get is: "What's that?"

"Well, you know, it's like regular theater, except the audience is actually part of the play."

"Like improv?"

"Not exactly, although there is an element of improv to it. But there's no stage."

"So the actors are just out in the audience?"

"No, there's no theater, either."

"How does that work?"

"It's performed in other kinds of buildings. Offices, warehouses, hotel rooms, sometimes people's houses. Anywhere, really."

"Oh."

...

"So, what else are you into?"

Nobody gets it. Least of all my own mother, to whom my "immersions" (that's what she calls immersive theater, as in, "You still doing your immersions?") are, for some reason, completely beyond her powers of comprehension no matter how many times I explain them. ("So ... how do you know what to do?") My closest friends just think it's weird, and the more I regale them with tales from my experiences, the less interested they get. Somehow, when I tell them I was strapped naked to a bed and repeatedly slapped by a man in a koala mask, they don't immediately want to run out and buy a ticket.

(Also, it's hard to describe it without making it sound like a form of BDSM. It's not BDSM, I swear. BDSM is cool too but this is not that, and any nudity or physical aggression or intensity is always completely optional and consensual.)

But it's definitely become my Thing over the past three years (and I can't believe it's only been that long). Everybody has a Thing (or if they don't, maybe they should). For some it's surfing, or motorcyles, or birdwatching, or rock climbing, or roller coasters, or rodeo, or cosplay, or light drugs, or heavy drugs, or nude clown racing (whatever, I don't judge). For me, it's immersive theater. It's my lifestyle, my sub-culture, my community, my social circle, my support system. It's my drug.

It's not for everyone (clearly, since most people don't even know it exists). It's the only art form I can think of that requires a certain amount of courage to experience. Which is not to say that I'm braver than most people -- I still get nervous before every show. In fact, I now live with a chronic nervous condition that I like to call the NF Cycle, named after Nocturnal Fandango, my favorite and (by far) most frequented immersive theater company. I'll buy a ticket to one of their shows (usually a couple months in advance), get really excited, and start literally counting down the weeks until the show date. Then the day actually arrives and suddenly I get nervous and don't want to go. Then I get in my car and drive to the venue, and I get very nervous and start wondering why I'm doing this. Sometimes I have to practically force myself to enter the show. Then, once I do, my nerves immediately dissolve away and I have an amazing time. Then it ends and I start counting down the weeks until the next show and the cycle continues.

To answer the question of why I do immersive theater, I'm going to start by discussing, perhaps counter-intuitively, my most recent experience, which didn't even have a live component and was instead performed entirely over the phone (since, in the age of COVID, that's how immersive theater is done). And in fact I'm not even going to start there; I'm going to start with the aftermath of that show. I was in a Zoom meeting for one of Nocturnal Fandango's talkbacks, in which the cast and the audience got together to discuss the experience we had just shared. In the middle of this talkback, I suddenly felt very sad and depressed for reasons I couldn't identify, a feeling that only got worse as the meeting progressed and increased to an unbearable degree after it ended.

"Why am I feeling this way?" I kept asking myself. I thought about it, thought about it some more, couldn't quite figure it out, but this is the theory I came up with: when you do a Nocturnal Fandango show, you're almost always in there alone, just you and the actors. Everyone is focused on you. It's like stepping into a new world that was created for you and where you are the most important person. (This is literally true in some cases. I've done shows that were tailored specifically for me.) It's like when Zaphod Beeblebrox enters the Total Perspective Vortex near the beginning of Douglas Adams's The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The Total Perspective Vortex, we are told, is the ultimate torture device, in which the victim is confronted with the maddening immensity of the universe and their own miniscule, insignificant place in it; only, in Zaphod's case, he is already inhabiting a small artficial universe created specifically for him, so the Vortex merely shows him that he is the most important being in the universe. That's what an NF show is like.

So, to suddenly be pulled from that back into the real world, where I was just another face in the crowd, just another paying customer, and where the characters I'd gotten to know and love were gone and replaced by actors ... that's a lot to deal with, even if it's only on an unconscious level. Obviously, I already knew on an intellectual level that I wasn't special, but it didn't matter. The experience was ingrained into my nervous system, into the core of my being; my depression was simply an autonomic response to six weeks of Pavlovian conditioning.

(Of course, this theory is rather belied by the fact that A. I'd been in constant communication with the other audience members throughout this experience, and B. I'd previously attended other talkbacks with no ill emotional effects. But, whatever, it provided a good analogy, so I'm sticking with it.)

But perhaps it's time to go back and explain exactly what this experience was. The show was called Dr. Rocket's Doomsday Carnival. It was, as I have said, a six-week long show performed entirely over the phone. It was also a kind of sequel to Dr. Rocket's Twilight Carnival, which was a festival of live one-act shows held last summer (with a reprise in November), each show bearing its own distinctly whimsical and evocative title: Attack of the Lightningseed Monsters; The Museum of Mostly Human Oddities; The Centrifugal Force of Lemon Peel; The Plasma of Paper Airplanes; and many others. These shows initially appeared to be self-contained stories, albeit with a small crossover here and there, but an overarching meta-narrative gradually became apparent, as we learned that these shows were all performed by artificial beings called (and this is very important) "machines" created by the sinister and sadistic Dr. Rocket.

Cut to two months ago, when, as a response to the live theater void created by our current crisis, NF miraculously produced this remote experience, seemingly out of thin air. For six weeks I and a couple dozen other participants received anywhere between two and 10 phone calls every single night (and on the final night I believe I got 14 calls), encompassing 16 different carnival "attractions" (i.e. story lines) plus the Dr. Rocket meta-narrative surrounding them. And what attractions they were! I met and befriended a slightly unhinged woman who was obsessed with a man who lived in a dollhouse in her bedroom. I was re-acquainted with the trio of drug addicts from Attack of the Lightningseed Monsters, who were now trying to put together a taxidermied sperm whale in their apartment. I gave swimming lessons to a cannibalistic child who lived in a box. I "moved" into a strange new apartment complex with a rather unusual set of house rules. I even went on a blind date with a very handsome and charming young man.

But what really interested me more than anything was the meta-narrative. Like the attractions, this story played out via phone calls, but it also played out in a Slack moderated by a pair of unusually self-aware machines with conspicuously self-explanatory names: Hello and Welcome. This is also where we met Barbara, Dr. Rocket's assistant, who if anything was even more sadistic and awful than her employer. Dr. Rocket and Barbara were clearly the villains of the piece, a pair of tyrannical sadists who forced machines to perform in their shows under constant threat of the dreaded Button (the pushing of which being something no machine ever wants). When machines would get even the slightest bit out of line (or even when they weren't), they would receive vague but obviously painful and terrible punishments bearing such ominous names as "blackgum" and "riflelove."

Now, it's important to understand that Hello and Welcome and the other machines weren't just characters for me. I talked to them every day for six weeks. They were my friends. When you watch a movie or a TV show, and a character you love and care about is hurt, tortured, or killed, you can be sad, sure, but it's a different thing altogether when it happens to characters you've actually interacted with and who have become part of your life. And it's still another thing when a character dies because of your inability to save them. This happened about midway through the experience, when we were given a test (by a machine named, naturally, Test) and repeatedly told that something bad would happen if we failed to complete it. The test was a word puzzle, an extremely difficult word puzzle -- NF is known for their difficult puzzles, but this one proved beyond the abilities of even the most seasoned puzzle solvers. In the end, we weren't able to completely solve it, and, as punishment for our failure, Test was brutally killed by Barbara. And that ... hurt. Particularly when Hello gave us the three answers (out of 20) we were missing, mournfully adding that these three simple words were all it would have taken to save Test.

Jesus.

I mean, how do you come back from that? I literally sobbed when I read Hello's words, which speaks to how invested I'd become in this saga and how personally I was taking it. This is when everything changed for me. Up until this point, I treated Barbara the way I would treat any bully: like a joke. But how could I make jokes about her after that? How could I in good conscience continue to patronize the carnival, let alone enjoy it? Part of me wanted to quit the experience altogether. The only way I knew how to continue with it was to fully embrace the narrative given to me, which was that Dr. Rocket's carnival was an evil institution built upon slavery and torture and not a carnival at all. So I had no choice but to stop participating in the attractions, making it clear that I was just there for the Maze, so to speak (to use a Westworld analogy ... an analogy that, for reasons you shall soon see, is very appropriate).

But then something interesting happened. I got a call from an attraction in which a machine playing the role of a lonely insurance salesman momentarily "broke character" to tell me that Wishbone (a very wise and self-aware machine who had become the ringleader for the resistance movement) had a plan, but that he needed me to play along. And just like that, I was back in. That was all it took, really. It was like I had been given permission to enjoy the carnival again ... which was fortunate, as there was a lot of great carnival still to come.

I was particularly intrigued by something called Bright Lights, which we were repeatedly told was not a cult despite it sounding very much like a cult in every respect. Bright Lights was essentially an extended interview process culminating in some sort of ceremony. I ended up being one of the "lucky" audience members to receive an invitation to the ceremony, and attendance, we were told, was not optional. My friend Melissa wrote a post in the Slack pointing out the similarity between the descriptions of the coming ceremony and the stories we were being told of the process by which machines received their roles in the carnival, which they called their Becoming. I had also noticed the similarity but hadn't given it much thought. Seeing it written out like that, though ... that's how it hit me.

"Oh, shit," I thought. "I'm a machine!"

This completely rocked my world. I can't begin to describe the shock this revelation sent through my system, except to say that it was a lot like being Bruce Willis at the end of The Sixth Sense. I kept flashing back to all the hints and clues that had been cleverly planted all along, such as Wishbone telling me that "not all machines know they're machines." He totally Sixth Sensed me, and I hadn't even picked up on it. Suddenly, everything made sense. Everything was right. Everything was pre-ordained. I would be a good machine.

As much as I love movies, television, literature, and traditional theater, this is not something you can ever experience from those forms of storytelling. You can be surprised by [REDACTED FOR WESTWORLD SPOILERS] discovering that he's a host, but when you're the character it's happening to, it's that much more impactful an epiphany. It was also a beautiful and potent way to articulate some of the principal themes of this piece. The show was in many ways an argument: do machines feel pain and emotions? The machines repeatedly insisted that yes, they did; but the counter-argument, advocated by Dr. Rocket and Barbara, was that they were merely programmed to simulate the normal responses to stimuli -- even their claims that they felt pain were merely what they had been programmed to say. I, of course, had always been on the machines' side and had taken their claims at face value; but to have them validated in this way, to finally know for sure how machines felt because I had been one all along ... that's a very powerful device, one that, again, is completely unique to immersive theater and cannot be reproduced by any other medium.

Shortly after this revelation, I received a call from Wishbone that I will never forget. This is what he said to me (and I'm tearing up just thinking about it): "Robert, you don't remember this yet, but you were at my wedding." He went on to paint a vivid picture for me in loving, wistful tones, describing how I danced with a handsome young man, how I got drunk on tequila, etc. What an inexpressibly lovely and bittersweet sentiment that is -- and it came at just the right moment for maximum emotional effect: after I had figured out that I was a machine (so that I understood what it all meant), but before it was officially revealed to me (so that Wishbone couldn't be sure if I believed him). Wishbone's tragedy was that his husband, Mr. Fish, was repeatedly mind wiped by Dr. Rocket and kept apart from him, so that he, Mr. Fish, had no memory of his own husband. My tragedy was that my mind, too, had been wiped and replaced by false memories of a life I never lived (i.e. my actual, real-life life), so that I had no memory of being part of this amazing community of machines (which, let's face it, are better than humans in most ways), of loving them and being loved by them. That's a beautiful, heartbreaking thing to contemplate, and yet another example of the unique power of immersive theater.

Another important theme of the piece was free will, and whether we have it or we're all just machines playing out a program that's already been written for us. I've always been a strong proponent of the existence of free will, mainly because life is cruel and doesn't let us off the hook for our own actions that easily. But for the purposes of this narrative, in which I was a machine who clearly had been programmed, it was hard to argue for it. I felt beaten and defeated; Barbara always seemed to be one step ahead of us, crushing hope every time it sprouted (one machine who managed to escape was quickly found and dismembered and castrated, and even Test was discovered to still be alive, only to be destroyed once again), so I finally had to accept my fate and attend my Becoming as an obedient machine. But then, just when all hope seemed lost, Wishbone, Hello, and Welcome came through and saved the day, freeing the machines and giving Barbara her comeuppance.

But the experience still wasn't done with me. Around midnight, after I'd already gone to bed, I got one final phone call, from a character I'd never heard of before. This character, Benjamin, was a novelist, and he began describing for me the novel he was currently working on, which was entitled Dr. Rocket's Doomsday Carnival and which told the story of a carnival in which human-like machines performed for guests under the thumb of the evil scientist who created them. He told me about some of the supporting characters before describing the heroic protagonist ... Robert. Layers upon layers of reality.

Every Nocturnal Fandango show leaves me with a different feeling, a different emotional state. The best way I can describe how I felt at the end of Dr. Rocket's Doomsday Carnival is that it was like the ending of Angels in America. If you've seen the play, or the mini-series, you know what I'm talking about. The characters (and the audience) have just been through six hours of AIDS and Roy Cohn and general misery, and have now come out the other side, happy and healthy at last, for a final, cleansing catharsis. It's like a fever has broken and we're sweaty and exhausted but feeling good and hopeful for the first time in what feels like a very long time.

This is not art that you can experience and then forget about. This is art that changes you, becomes a part of you, gets into your DNA and stays with you forever. I've just barely scratched the surface in describing this experience (I haven't even gotten into Margie, the God of Machines, for instance), but hopefully I've conveyed a sense of the profound impact it had on me. I paid money for it and it still feels like a tremendous gift bestowed upon me. And this is only one show out of many that I've done over the past few years.

Naturally, when you do a lot of these shows, the creators and actors get to know you. In some cases, they get to know you very well. Some of these actors know me better than some of my friends know me. It's like that song from Next to Normal:

My psychopharmacologist and I.
It's like an odd romance:
Intense and very intimate, we do our dance.

My psychopharmacologist and I.
Call it a lover's game.
He knows my deepest secrets.
I know his ... name!

You can substitute "psychopharmacologist" with "immersive actor" and still have some eerily accurate lyrics on your hands. Immersive theater is not therapy, obviously, but sometimes it feels a lot like therapy. And sure, it comes with emotional risks, like any intimate relationship does. I remember one instance when a character called me an "Eeyore" and told me I was just a "sad person"; which, you know, is no big deal, I've been called much worse, and the character was a sociopath anyway so at the time I just shrugged it off; and yet I admit that I've had a moment or two when I actually was feeling sad or depressed and I couldn't help but think, "Wait, is that how that actor sees me? Am I just a sad person?!" But most of the time it's a rewarding relationship that allows actors and creators to better customize your show and provide a more personal experience. Who better to create art for you than somebody who knows you well? I know I sound like a broken record (broken machine?) at this point, but you just can't get that from other dramatic art forms.

Sadly, when I was in the middle of writing this post, Nocturnal Fandango announced that they are closing up shop for good and canceling all upcoming shows. Obviously, I was heartbroken by this news, and, though I have little doubt that they'll eventually be back in one form or another, this is still a devastating loss to the immersive theater scene as well as for me personally. I began this piece as a kind of self-therapy in order to sort out my own emotions. It then turned into an expository essay. And now it must perforce become a eulogy.

That may sound like an overstatement, but that announcement honestly felt like a death. NF has been such a big part of my life for the last two years that it was difficult to imagine life without them. They had become the reason to save my money (because this is not a cheap hobby), the reason to work harder to earn more money. And they've given me so many memories that I'll carry with me for the rest of my life.

Like the time I was in a room with one actor for 30 minutes, and in that 30 minutes we spoke and sparred and struggled, both physically and emotionally, and by the end of the 30 minutes we were sweating and crying and hugging, and it was the single greatest lesson I've ever received on the incredible power of acting and sharing a scene with someone.

Or the time I spoke with an 80-year-old British woman, played by a young American actress so convincingly and brilliantly that it was almost difficult to enjoy the performance, knowing as I did that nobody would ever give her an Oscar for what she was doing.

Or the time I was a fly-on-the-wall witness to an intense discussion between a man and what appeared to be a woman who had changed her identity and was hiding out, only to have the woman reveal her true name, and I experienced a surreal frisson because it was my name, and I was suddenly pulled into the scene and found myself in the position of having to explain why I wanted to leave my life behind to start a new one.

Or the time I found myself in the blackest of black comedies, one shocking, offensive thing piled on top of another, and then to my delight watched as it turned into a musical (thus combining my two favorite genres) before the scene ended and the actors broke character, revealing it to be immersive theater within immersive theater.

Or the time I was in the middle of a show performed over the course of several hours at four separate locations in the beautiful coastal town of Cambria, and I was driving from one location to another thinking it was the coolest thing I had ever done, scarcely able to believe it was happening.

Or, hell, the beginning of any show, because as far as I'm concerned there is no greater thrill than opening a door and having no idea what awaits you on the other side.

I could go on. The sheer volume of their output is astonishing (close to 100 distinct productions in four years ... crazy), and, even more astonishingly, their quality never suffered from their prolificacy. They're quite simply the best, and they are irreplaceable. For one brief, shining moment, there was Nocturnal Fandango, and, though I feel like I am fit to be neither Arthur nor Tom of Warwick in this analogy, I will not let it be forgot.

I guess there's nothing left to say but "thank you." Thank you, Jason and Kevin Davidson, Chelsea Morgan, Lyric Luedke, and your amazing ensemble of actors. Why do I do immersive theater? Because of you.