Punchdrunk Theatre’s “Sleep No More” in Shanghai
Immersive Theatre versus TikTok
Can live theater push back against a digital age?
By Jack Grotenstein
Punchdrunk Theatre’s “Woyzeck” (Photo courtesy of Punchdrunk Theatre)
This article is part of the Stage Raw/Unusual Suspects Youth Journalism Fellowship
Theater is an ever-evolving art that has survived for 2,500 years despite countless wars, bans, famine, and bloodshed. But can it beat TikTok?
The term “Immersive” has been thrown around in relation to theater for thousands of years, mentioned in tandem with Greek theater, commedia dell’arte and the medieval Christian cycle plays. But before the early 2000s, no one in the history of modern theater had imagined a theater experience that was truly and totally immersive for the viewer. Contemporary immersive theater sheds the traditional audience and the actual stage, and typically has viewers moving along with the actors.
That first imagining is often credited to Felix Barrett, who founded Punchdrunk, a British theater company in 2000. Punchdrunk’s first production was their take on Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck. The play, written in the mid -1830s, follows a German soldier whose struggles with poverty, oppression, and jealousy eventually draw him to madness. Barrett staged the play in old military barracks, with the audience moving with the actors throughout the performance. This new style became popularized throughout the world, with immersive productions popping up from Brazil all the way to South Korea.
As immersive theater has been growing, attention spans have been shrinking. Traditional theater often fails to attract younger audiences, which I’ve seen firsthand in reviewing for Stage Raw, often being the youngest person in the house (I’m 16).
I wanted to see how immersive theater stood up to an iPhone, so I consulted a mentor and teacher of mine, Devon Armstrong. He’s the owner and operator of The Downtown Repertory Theater Company. The company has produced many critically acclaimed immersive theater productions, most recently fangs!, witch!, and it’s alive! The Downtown Rep, as it is colloquially known, is praised by The LA Times as being among the “Best in [the] L.A. Immersive Scene.”
First, Devon told me what he feels is most special about this up-and coming art form:
“Theater is, by nature, ephemeral, and lives from the top of a show, when the house lights dim to half, to the end of the show when the lights fade to blackout. Immersive theater compounds the ephemeral nature of theater by providing a heightened sense of immediacy. We don’t need to worry about audience members tuning out or feeling the need to check TikTok as much when they’re engaged and excited to see what we have on offer.”
He also noted that immersive theater provided the possibility for each audience member to “all [have] a unique experience.”
Before seeing one of Devon’s productions last year, immersive theater felt a little gimmicky to me. I felt that it was erroneous to call it “theater,” as it’s closer in my mind to the haunted house we have down the street every Halloween than to any piece of traditional theater.
The thing is, before Devon’s show, I’d never actually seen real immersive theater.
The show I saw was called fangs!, and it told simultaneous stories of love, jealousy, overprotection, and vampires. I walked through the echoey and dimly lit halls of the Mountain View Mausoleum and was separated from the group and taken to a small chapel. There, one of my other teachers (also in the show), delivered a beautiful soliloquy that brought me well to tears. My views on immersive theater swiftly changed.
“Fangs. . .” presented by Downtown Rep at the Mountain View Mausoleum (Photo courtesy of Downtown Rep)
It wasn’t tacky or gaudy or foolish. It was one of the realest, rawest forms of theater I’d ever seen. Where else can you be one-on-one with an actor and have them spill their heart out to you while looking you straight in the eyes? It might be the actor in me, but I felt tempted to play along and truly immerse myself in the scene. It felt like I was in a movie.
Immersive theater offers an experience to the audience that is less “fly-on the wall” and more “fly up an actor’s nose.”
As an art form, it’s brand new. It has yet to be fully explored. With the added integration of technologies like augmented reality, there’s no telling where immersive theater will go.
Immersive theater is a step towards a more honest depiction of humanity. In the past few decades, playwrights and directors alike have shed fears of branching out into the ugly, the unsavory, and the downright disgusting. In other words, the topics covered have become more human and more real.
Where stage theater struggles to get an audience member to be emotionally taken out of their seat, immersive theater can literally and emotionally transport an audience member out of their seat and into another world.
Can that beat TikTok? I don’t know, but it makes me think of one last thing that Devon said:
“When you go to a movie, you can see Meryl Streep give a world-class performance… but no amount of money is going to get Meryl to put her fingers in your mouth.”
