Highbrow, lowbrow in NYC
Immersed in Stranger Things, then strolling to Beckett
BNo amusement genius has yet made a Samuel Beckett pinball machine
efore the pizza parlour, before the arcade games, before the ice cream shop and the merch kiosks (so many merch kiosks!) and the photo op with a fibreglass-and-silicone Demogorgon, Stranger Things: The Experience, at the Navy Yard in Brooklyn, puts on a show.
Sponsored by Netflix, which has created other immersive entertainment based on its Bridgerton and Money Heist properties, this 45-minute experience based on the teen-horror pastiche Stranger Things plunks participants, many of them dressed in 1980s finery, into tens of thousands of square metres of Hawkins, Indiana. Some rooms have an unfinished feel (did the budget not include ceilings?); others suggest a theme-park-quality buildout. The most fully realised ones are nestled inside Hawkins’ cheery state-of-the-art lab.
Ostensibly, ticket holders have signed up for a sleep study. An interdimensional rift soon complicates study protocols. Will these test subjects survive? Of course. They have tote bags to buy afterward.
Stranger Things: The Experience is a piece of fan service that adopts the vocabulary of immersive theatre. While legible, barely, for those unfamiliar with the series, this story has been built for devotees, allowing them to enter into the fictional world. Enterprises like this used to be lower-budget affairs of the do-it-yourself variety, the province of live-action role-players and tabletop gamers. Now for about US$58 (2,000 baht) — less for gutsy under-17s, more if you book on a weekend — Netflix and its partners will do the doing for you.
“We look at live experiences as providing fans another way to see themselves more in the stories they love,” Greg Lombardo, the head of live experiences at Netflix, told me in an interview a couple of days after my visit.
This show, which runs for about 45 minutes, chugs along like a reasonably well-oiled machine. What eldritch fluids comprise that oil? Best not ask. The cast members who circulate are trained improvisers, skilled at eliciting responses, practiced at batting those responses back. At one point I was harangued by a journalist character — sweaty, anxious, overconfident. Ow.
While immersive, The Experience doesn’t really depend on you. The Demogorgons will eventually explode, whether or not you deploy your extrasensory powers.
Which is a letdown. Because there is a fantasy that many of us entertain about the art we love: that we might matter to the art as much as it matters to us. Still, the teenagers and young adults in the room gasped and screamed and unleashed their psychic abilities with apparent delight.
“We’re trying to give fans a chance to be the hero of their stories,” Lombardo said. This is pushing it. Eleven, the psychokinetic phenom played by Millie Bobby Brown, who appears via hologram, is the real hero here. The motivating factors of The Experience owe less to art than to marketing, and its ultimate goal suggests a branding ouroboros: devotion to the show encourages consumption of the experience, consumption of the experience urges re-engagement with the show.
After The Experience, with the rift safely sealed, you can consume without the distractions of a plot — which is when Stranger Things: The Experience achieves its final and ideal form. There is pizza to be eaten and ice cream to be licked and cocktails to be drunk.
Bertolt Brecht used to rail against the culinary theatre, a theatre that delivered only emotion and sensation, rather than intellectual engagement. Brecht probably never had a drink with a stroopwafel as garnish. I didn’t buy a tote bag, but I did play through the Stranger Things-branded pinball game. I think I did pretty well.
No amusement genius has yet made a Samuel Beckett pinball machine — I imagine a gloomy palette, defective flippers and a highscore list that reads GODOT GODOT GODOT. But those eager for a Beckett brand extension can instead arrive at New York University’s Skirball Center for Cascando, an adaptation of a Beckett radio play from the early 1960s. It comes courtesy of Pan Pan Theatre, an Irish company with an insouciant approach to the classics.
Originally created in conjunction with composer Marcel Mihalovici, Cascando is intended as a passive audio experience. But this Cascando, directed by Gavin Quinn and designed by Aedin Cosgrove, adds a participatory element.
Upon arrival, each ticket holder is outfitted in a black-hooded robe and handed a pair of headphones. Loosed onto La Guardia Place, a quiet street adjacent to Washington Square Park in Manhattan, participants begin a single-file walk around and through the neighbouring blocks. As they stroll, they listen to the text, prerecorded by Andrew Bennett and Daniel Reardon.
To wander the Village dressed as a high-fashion druid, a Goth garden gnome, is fun of a kind. But there are no stops along the way, no interactions, no activations. The choreography — a sharp turn here and there — is minimal. At one point, I wondered, with almost breathless excitement, if we would sit. We did not sit.
While it makes sense to encounter Beckett’s text via headphones — there are references throughout to a story existing only in someone’s head — the alone-together walk doesn’t illuminate or galvanise the text, which is, like so much of Beckett’s work, heavy on repetition and ellipses. On the rainy sidewalk, meaning slid away.
In another city, at another moment, a show like Cascando might at least have ornamented the street life. But New York’s typical street life is already a variety of theatre, druids or no. As we re-entered the park, I saw a clump of skateboarders look us up and down. We had become part of their story, I thought for a moment, part of their experience. Then they shrugged and returned to their conversation. Just another Wednesday in the Village, bro.