Okay, here's an admission: I've never been able to take Broadway musicals seriously. In fact, I've barely been able to take them at all. I did watch the Tonys last night with an actress friend who's in from LA, and I have to admit there were some transcendent moments—Cyndi Lauper performing her '80s hit "True Colors"; almost any time Neil Patrick Harris was onstage; Kinky Boots sweeping the awards and capping it off with best musical. (Drag queens, I've found, can salvage just about anything.) But the good news from my perspective is that conventional, proscenium-arch theater, musical and otherwise, has been getting serious competition recently from the immersive variety—from productions that break down the fourth wall, and with it the barrier between audience and performance.
Photo: Dariel Sneed
Rachel I. Berman as Alice in Third Rail Projects' "Then She Fell."
One of the standouts is Then She Fell, an intimately scaled, highly idiosyncratic look at the Lewis Carroll-Alice Liddell relationship. Staged (so to speak) in a grim, featureless structure in Williamsburg that was built a century ago as a parochial school, the performances are limited to an audience of 15—small enough that everyone gets an individualized experience. The three-story building, cramped and institutional, has been re-imagined as Kingsland Ward, a dubious facility that's home to all manner of feverish behavior involving a Mad Hatter, a White Queen, a Red Queen, two Alices, and Carroll himself. As strange and dreamlike as the Alice books themselves, Then She Fell invites you to explore the fantastical world that Carroll created—and with it, the mystery of the Oxford mathematician and the little girl he liked to take rowing, until for unexplained reasons her mother cut off the relationship one day in 1863.
One of the many fascinating things about Then She Fell is the way it resonates with the digital world we live in. An entirely no-tech production, it nonetheless manages to feel utterly contemporary in a time of video games and online media. I wanted to know how this worked, so I emailed some questions to Tom Pearson, co-founder of Third Rail Projects, the New York theater company that produces it. Here's what he had to say:
First off, why Alice?
We decided to work with the two Alice stories and the life of Lewis Carroll for all its rich psychological terrain as well as its amazing structural components — but also because there is already a cultural cachet to these works which provides a really palpable entry point for audiences. Most folks are familiar with the stories to some extent, whether it's certain images or story lines that they remember from the books, film versions, or general cultural saturation. It gives us an opportunity to really take these images and themes into more abstract territory. This is a very good thing for immersive storytelling, where the narrative is inherently fragmented. Giving audiences something familiar allows them to enter the world with some sort of grounding, and then also allows us to quickly subvert those expectations . . . much like the Alice stories themselves.
What makes an experience immersive? Clearly it doesn't have to depend on technology.
It's immersive because when you enter it, the world engulfs you and you no longer see its edges. You are implicated as opposed to removed. There is no fourth wall at all in our experience, though sometimes you view scenes through carefully composed apertures, which gives you the feeling of being inside of a film. You are at times completely surrounded or directly engaged with the performers, and also in our case, engaged with the tastes, smells and textures that we provide. Immersive theater can exist anywhere on the spectrum in terms of the way it deals with audience participation, audience agency, or how the fourth wall is dealt with. In Then She Fell, we chose to meticulously guide our audiences through the world, so each performance/audience experience is carefully crafted for each individual.
Forbes called this "theater for the video game generation." Is that something you set out to do?