Immersed in theater
Performance genre is like a dark cousin to pop-up clubs.
No one knew anything about the red house. Its location was secret, its contents unknown. There were whispers it might contain a new kind of immersive experience in early spring, when scant invitations were sent out to some Houston people and a release started circulating in the local press. But it didn’t say much more than this: “Beneath a veneer of piety and domestic normalcy lurk secrets to be unlocked. Only the boldest are fortunate enough to uncover all the truths buried within.”
Was it a performance-art piece? Theater? A themed party? Something altogether different? The creators, entertainment company Dinolion, were hush about details, so only a lucky few would find out, and the rest would have to learn by hearsay.
“Red House” opened for four nights during the last weekend in April. Each night, two small groups of people would enter the Museum District residence for about 70 minutes each, the first group in the evening and the second close to midnight. Then, as quickly and as silently as “Red House” opened, it closed. Ephemeral and exclusive, it was like the dark cousin to one of those celebrity pop-up clubs during the Super Bowl.
A gated two-story home, it would have been inconspicuous if it weren’t for the pink and orange lights emanating from within, lighting up the windows as if the house were on fire, or alive.
And then you see her — the silhouette of a girl on the second story, looking down on the audiences lingering in the backyard. Wave and she will not wave back, and soon she disappears, supposedly because she’s been beckoned. Strange people live here.
“Red House” marked the arrival of modern immersive theater in Houston, one that has continued with two such shows this summer.
That term, “immersive theater,” can be tricky since sometimes it misleads one to think of a cheesy interactive murder mystery or a traditional play set in a warehouse. You could say “Red House” is the progeny of “Sleep No More,” the megahit immersive show by London theater company Punchdrunk that made a cover story in Vanity Fair and has been essentially sold out in Manhattan since its opening in 2011.
Though immersive theater has existed for hundreds of years — New York University professor Erin Mee says in a HowlRound blog post that “Most theatre in the Middle Ages was sitespecific, immersive and participatory” — the most recent incarnation of immersive theater has been slowly catching fire.
Here are the main ingredients of a show like “Sleep No More,” beyond imbuing a classic text such as “Macbeth” with the gothic sexuality of “Eyes Wide Shut”: a fully designed, 360-degree environment in which an audience, typically wearing masks, moves around at their own pace, engaging with actors who either play out a scripted scene or interact with the audience one on one.
The trick to immersive theater isn’t necessarily set-up. On Broadway, “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812” allows some audience members to sit onstage, where they can chat with performers and even eat pierogies as the show happens all around them. That is not immersive theater. The audience doesn’t do anything but sit and observe, and immersive theater practitioners say the audience must have some form of agency.
Horse Head Theatre Co.’s “Church,” which is being staged at the 1891 St. John Church through Aug. 20, is somewhere in between “1821” and “Sleep No More,” with a freeroam portion followed by a play that takes place in a church and involves some audience participation. Participation, however, is not the same as agency. According to Jeromy Barber, who helped create “Red House,” immersive theater should make audience members feel like they’re inside a world, the same way they feel playing an open-world video game such as “Fallout 4.” Transported to the nonvirtual realm, an attendee should feel like he or she is walking in Westworld.
In “Red House,” attendees are asked never to speak unless spoken to and to split up with anyone they came with. Then they walk around the domicile of a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Sometimes, actors will pull you aside for a distinct interaction. For instance, when two hosts held out their hands on the first floor, I accepted them. They pulled me close, whispering creepy biblical omens in each ear while I lit a candle above the fireplace. What was the meaning of this ritual?
Later, I saw the father of the family pull an attendee into a previously locked room, slam the door and, from what I could hear, admonish him loudly. Then the father stormed out, revealing a closet filled with pornographic photographs.
Something wasn’t right. The protagonist seemed to be Vicki, one of the daughters, who rebelled against her family by practicing pagan rituals. It turned out that Vicki wasn’t just acting like a teenager — she was being abused by her father and used dark magic as an escape. That trauma, based on a story by Houston musician Vicki Lynn Tippit’s own life, forms the central disturbance of “Red House.”
There’s a lot more to show, though, including an integrated live concert featuring Tippit and dance performed by Houston Ballet principal Connor Walsh and others.
Immersive shows have proliferated following the success of “Sleep No More.” In New York recently, there was Third Rail Projects’ “Alice in Wonderland”-inspired “Then She Fell,” the World War II-era “Seeing You” in the Meatpacking District and “Ghost Light” at Lincoln Center, also by Third Rail Projects.
In Los Angeles, an increasingly weird and creative haunted-house scene has given birth to immersive theater, which this year was exemplified by “The Willows,” an eerie experience that begins with a blindfolded audience being driven in an unmarked white van to a mansion in Country Club Park.
So perhaps it wasn’t so surprising to see another immersive show emerge in Houston just months after Dinolion’s “Red House.”
“The Man From Beyond,” by Strange Bird Immersive, takes the “Sleep No More” aesthetic and applies it to a traditional escape room, creating perhaps one of the first successful immersive escape rooms in the Bayou City. The piece, available by appointment in the Silos at Sawyer Yards, involves a mysterious woman named Madame Daphne, supposedly here to conduct a séance. Spirits cause her to flee. Your party of up to eight is then trapped in the room, conveniently populated with photographs and letters that point toward the way out.
The story is based on Harry Houdini and his wife, and “The Man From Beyond” challenges audiences to unlock safes, open cabinets and solve word puzzles in an effort to get to the bottom of why Daphne is really here.
“Red House” and “The Man From Beyond” suggest an early, experimental awakening of a new kind of theater in this city. Haley E.R. Cooper, one of the creators of “The Man From Beyond” and the actor who plays Daphne, says her show comes at a perfect moment for immersive theater.
“There’s a real hunger for it,” she says. “Everything’s so virtual these days.”
Cooper points to the popularity of live action role-playing and to the fact that many theater artists are leaving traditional theater behind. Cooper is married to J. Cameron Cooper, also a co-creator of “The Man From Beyond.” The Coopers met as Shakespearean actors, but when they saw “Sleep No More,” “it just blew my mind,” Haley says. “I almost didn’t want to talk about it because it was so intensely personal. I went back and went back.” That meant also never returning to a proscenium-based definition of theater.
The Coopers, along with co-producer Nathan Walton, spent more than a year designing and building their show, later bringing on Bradley Winkler as an actor and marketer. Though technically an escape room, the piece contains actors and plot, making “The Man From Beyond” a narrative show like “Red House.”
The Coopers say they’re interested in keeping the show running while they brainstorm ways to expand the immersive theater scene in Houston. Their show is profitable week to week and is expected to be able to recoup its production cost.
Dinolion, meanwhile, has a different model. The company produces videos for large clients such as Houston Ballet while creating what it calls unique experiences.
The company has created alternate reality games in the style of lonelygirl15, an early-YouTube-era performance piece involving the story of a supposed real-life video blogger. Dinolion has also staged a fake pop-up market that was, in fact, a narrative scavenger hunt. And it has hosted interactive film screenings.
In other words, Dinolion’s projects consistently use technology and immersion to challenge the notion of traditional entertainment, and there are plans to create more works beyond “Red House” that play with the idea of what theater or performance is supposed to be.
“I want to step into a place where I can be active, where I feel like I’m in another place, trying to discover another universe,” Barber says. “I don’t think there’s work like this happening in Houston.”
But with “Church,” “Red House” and “The Man From Beyond,” all taking place within the span of several months, immersive theater could be here to stay. “Red House” had too short a run to have made the same cultural splash as “Sleep No More,” but audiences who experienced Dinolion’s project said they felt a similar thrill.
When I saw “Red House,” I noticed a redhaired woman lingering in the kitchen. I interpreted her as a ghostly manifestation of Vicki’s sexuality and suffering. She was tall and gallant, swaying to the piano music echoing from the foyer while nobody was there to watch. I walked in. I started to dance. We looked at each other, as if acknowledging that we were the only ones there. She strolled toward me, and through the tiny eyeholes of my mask it looked like she was floating across the kitchen.
She laid one hand on my waist and held my hand with the other. We danced. Then she put her face against my mask, our bodies pressed together while everyone else was apparently somewhere else, watching some other scene play out.
Only later would I find out she had kissed my mask. After returning home, I hung that mask in my living room, the woman’s dark-red lipstick still emblazoned on the cheek. I kept it not because I wanted something to remember her by but because no one else had one like it. The mask, like the experience of immersive theater, was uniquely mine.