Theatre company presses rewind
Immersive projects include VHS-filled Queen Video storefront Outside the March artistic director Mitchell Cushman says he feels nostalgic about video stores.
To mark its 10th anniversary season, the indie immersive theatre company Outside the March is looking back on a different medium: movies.
A collection of theatre projects under the banner The Popcorn Double Feature will hit Toronto this summer.
Starting in July, Outside the March will take over the former storefront of beloved retailer Queen Video to stage a series of immersive escape room plays called The Tape Escape.
In the fall, the Pulitzer Prizewinning play The Flick by Annie Baker will open the 2019-20 Crow’s Theatre season in a coproduction with Outside the March.
“I think that I feel nostalgic about video stores,” said artistic director Mitchell Cushman from the company’s new office space near Bay and Bloor. “And a certain kind of cinema-going experience, which you get more at independent cinemas, is the virtue of the live experience even though you’re watching something that’s recorded.”
The new office is currently doubling as storage space for 3,000 VHS movies, which will grow to surpass 5,000, to be used as set dressing for The Tape Escape. “We’re reaching a real precipice moment about what people value more: the epic communal experience or is the idea of having to sit in a room with other people more of a drawback? Personally, one of the things that makes me gravitate toward theatre is the communal experience, but I think that can exist in film as well. And both these projects are looking at that.”
Cushman will direct The Flick at Streetcar Crowsnest from Oct. 6 to 27, tickets for which are on sale now. This will be the third play Toronto has seen from Baker, one of the most influential American playwrights of the 2010s. The Flick takes place at a moment of change for an aging independent cinema in small-town Massachusetts and three of its employees, taking place entirely within the rundown movie theatre.
To Cushman, Baker’s hypernaturalistic style fits the company’s mandate to produce immersive experiences in their shows, with the fly-on-the-wall effect her writing has on the audience. To enhance that, Cushman says the lobby of the Streetcar Crowsnest theatre will be outfitted like a cinema, complete with popcorn and snacks, and perhaps even a marquee outside. Only, instead of sitting back and watching a film, the audience will devote close attention to the people behind the scenes.
“Celebrating our10th anniversary I’m thinking a lot about what it means to be an immersive theatre company and that word ‘active’ is something I keep going back to,” Cushman said. “The Flick will be an active experience and The Tape Escape will be very active in a very literal way.”
The Tape Escape, co-created by Cushman, actor and writer Vanessa Smythe and video designer Nick Bottomley, will take up residence inside Queen Video at 480 Bloor St. W. (which sadly announced in March it was closing after 38 years) starting in early July and running through the summer. Small groups will choose one of three tracks designed around a different film genre — romance, sci-fi or family — and perform various tasks to unlock the next part of the story, with each decision having a butterfly effect on the story that unfolds.
Getting inside the storefront, the last of Queen Video’s four locations to close, is instrumental to what The Tape Escape explores for Cushman.
“I think about video stores as an endangered species,” he said. “The active walking through a video store, with a group of friends or alone, stumbling upon something that you didn’t know you were looking for, seeking recommendations from the people who work there, that all feels like something that has real value, that we’ve traded away for something else.”
Tickets for The Tape Escape will be limited and will go on sale later this spring.
More details about the rest of the anniversary season will follow, and Cushman plans to issue another call for immersive works in development from Toronto artists as well as start work on a new play commissioned from U.S. playwright Sean Graney.
“I know it sounds corny, but it’s an awesome time to be in Toronto theatre right now; there’s been so much reinvention in virtually every major institution and I think you can really feel that new energy. I’ve never felt prouder or more excited to live here,” he said.