the SCIENCE of the STAGE

A theatre troupe from Barrie, Ont. treated its audience to a three-day performance that included a trip across the Atlantic (and an unforgettable lesson on the history of experimental theatre)

The Curious Voyage begins with a series of emails from a fictional character.

Okay, it actually starts with an email from Arkady Spivak, the artistic director of Talk is Free Theatre, telling you to expect to hear from a fictional character (and please check your spam filter in case it ends up there). But the message that’s meant to launch the performance does indeed come from a fictional character, and his correspondence is mostly vague, sometimes requesting information (mobile number, jacket size), sometimes offering hints at the upcoming itinerary (be prepared to be picked up in Toronto around midday on Tuesday, and to be driven to Barrie,).

Talk is Free has been mounting increasingly elaborate, site-specific and immersive theatre experiences over the past several years. In 2016, the company staged a roving production of The Music Man that took its audience all over Barrie, with different scenes set at the train station, the library, city hall and a waterfront park. Playwright Darrel Dennis’s Tales of an Urban Indian has toured cities in Canada and the U.S. over the past few years with a production set entirely on a moving city bus. However, The Curious Voyage tops these other shows in ambition by introducing an entirely new level to its production: international travel.

At a cost of $1,450 (not including flights and meals), the three-day experience begins in Barrie and continues to London, England, where it culminates in a performance of a secret musical in a secret location. Creatively, it’s a collaboration between two directors: Daniele Bartolini, who is primarily responsible for the immersive component, and Mitchell Cushman, who directs the secret musical (which is also an immersive experience, as is Cushman’s wont).

Immersive theatre, site-specific theatre and audience participation have been around for centuries — the “call and response” format is at least as old as any religious tradition. And in the Middle Ages, travelling troupes would show up and turn a local inn, the town square, even a forest clearing into a theatre space.

But theatrical experiences that push the boundaries of both physical location and audience expectations have been on the rise over the past decade with high-profile productions that are both critically and commercially successful, like Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, which has been operating out of The McKittrick Hotel in New York City since 2011. The audience dons masks and explores rooms in an old hotel, happening upon scenes, or sometimes having a one-on-one experience with a performer.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 1:45 P.M.

A young gentleman wearing socks with sandals is pacing around the sidewalk in front of my apartment, smoking. He turns out to be my ride to Barrie. When I approach him, he asks my name, then tells me to follow him to his car, a beatup looking white Kia. I ask if we’re picking up anyone else, he says no, then looks at me sideways: “So you’re going to see, like, a show?”

He doesn’t seem to be in character in any way. Is this part of the show, sorry, the “experience,” or did this guy just pick up a side gig shuttling confused arts patrons to Barrie? After a bit of small talk about traffic, he catches himself. “I’m actually not supposed to talk to you,” he says. It’s at this moment I realize the level of faith I’ve put into a regional theatre company — enough to get into a car with a strange man for an hour-long drive up the 400 highway — might seem odd to a neutral observer. But if a little discomfort isn’t a tenet of experimental theatre, it probably should be.

In Toronto, in the early 2000s, the independent experimental company Bluemouth produced a series of site-specific works that culminated in the Something About a River trilogy in 2004, where the audience travelled in a school bus between sites all along Toronto’s buried Garrison Creek, from the (now defunct) Metro porn cinema to a funeral home near Trinity Bellwoods Park to a secret warehouse in Parkdale. They’re still active and also getting more ambitious with their audience immersions: in 2015, the PANAMANIA arts festival associated with the Pan Am Games commissioned them to create It Comes in Waves, which began every performance with the audience paddling over to the Toronto Islands in 16-person canoes.

3:05 P.M.

We arrive at a Best Western just off the highway, where I check in and watch an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation until the next item on my itinerary: at 3:50 p.m. sharp, my “experience” is meant to start in my hotel room.

In the mid-1930s, Ayn Rand wrote a courtroom drama called The Night of January 16th, in which a jury is selected from the audience at each performance. The 1985 musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood called upon the audience to vote on who they thought the killer was at the end of the show. And then there’s the much maligned interactive dinner theatre like Tony and Tina’s Wedding and its Australian predecessor Dimboola, (not to mention the even more maligned murder mystery dinner theatre that is surely the bane of a working actor’s career). Similarly, an interactive production of the ABBA musical Mamma Mia! involves dinner and sing-alongs.

4:00 P.M.

A knock at the door. A young woman apologizes for technical difficulties and tells me that my experience will begin at 4:30 p.m.

In addition to the obvious logistical challenges presented by such productions, they are costly, and as audience capacity is necessarily limited, they can’t rely on a significant portion of sales revenue. For The Curious Voyage, only four per cent of the production’s $650,000-budget comes from ticket sales, with the rest covered by government grants and private and corporate donations. But the production has obviously been deemed a success — Talk is Free announced this week that they will be remounting The Curious Voyage in Toronto, although many of the details, including the locations, the characters, perhaps even the secret musical, will differ from the Barrie/London journey.

4:30 P.M.

Another knock. At the door is the same young woman as before, but now more obviously in costume and pushing a room service tray. She asks a series of questions that leads to a discussion about the nature of good and evil, themes that will abound throughout the events of the next few days.

Eventually, I’m sent down to the lobby where I get into another car with a stranger and am ferried to a couple of secret locations around Barrie. One is an apartment in a residential complex, eerily lit and full of spooky young people in rabbit masks. The dreamy alternate reality atmosphere is heightened by the fact that a television is visible through the window of an upstairs apartment, watched by someone going on with their normal, nonimmersive theatre life.

Dusk falls during the drive and the car stereo plays a dark, driving soundtrack. This time, the driver really is silent, speaking only to give brief instructions. “Ring the buzzer for J. Perry, and say Alden sent you for the package.”

Talk is Free does a lot of work with youth (2016’s The Music Man had a youth chorus performing alongside the professional cast), and the Barrie portion of The Curious Voyage is performed mostly by teenagers from the company’s mentorship program (although two key roles are played by professional actors). This

SARA SCHWARTZ GELLER