The time is now

TomorrowLove offers audiences a different show each time

“We’re trying to rehearse 15 plays at once,” Mitchell Cushman tells me after our tour through a former funeral home is interrupted by an urgent chat about scheduling. Cushman’s theatre company, Outside the March, is known for their ambitious, immersive theatrical productions, and Tomorrow Love might just be the most ambitious yet.

With almost seven hours of material and scenes that are performed by different actors every night, one can attend Tomorrow-Love on several occasions and see a different show each time, following a different performer through the labyrinthine former funeral home that Outside the March has transformed into “The Aorta.” Cushman and playwright Rosamund Small set out to create a play that is like a collection of short stories – thematically linked, but each existing in its own universe.

“Each play is set in a different possible future where a piece of technology has changed the way people interact in some way,” explains Cushman. In one play, a widow uses a video- conferencing software to speak with her dead partner. Another is about a love triangle ( or square) between two sets of clones. In another, a fridge with infinite storage space leads a character to an existential crisis about her partner’s grotesque consumerism.

“In most of the pieces what we’ve sort of arrived at is that the technology doesn’ t fundamentally change anything about the humans that are in the plays ,” says Cushman .“But it uncovers something, or accelerates something that they might have done anyway.”

Technology is also something Cushman likes experimenting with on the production side. “A lot of our work has ranged between the really high tech and the really low tech,” says Cushman. “And this is a piece about technology in which the technology will ultimately never be shown. The goal is that the technology happens in the audience’s imagination. Because I think that hopefully will go further than we ever could.”

Cushman says that immersive theatre experiences give audiences something they might be particularly craving right now. “It feels to me like when... our lives are heavily mediatized, to have something that’s really truly live is actually gaining in power and cache,” he says. “There’s a hunger to be really present with a group of people in a space doing something.”