Nia Johnson and Ian Wolf (Photo by Rachel Leigh Lenses)
Reviewed by Dana Martin
After Hours Theatre Company
Through Nov. 1.
RECOMMENDED
Katherine Powers (Photo by Rachel Leigh Lenses)
Dark Library: The Time Machine returns to North Hollywood just in time for spooky season. The machinery is running more smoothly at After Hours Theatre Company, though the machine itself hasn’t changed much from its first incarnation last spring.
The production’s remount finds the imaginative collision of H.G. Wells’s characters and stories more legible, and a few additional illusions tucked into the production’s already abundant supply of theatrical magic. Playwright Blaise Hemingway’s script has undergone some light revision, but the essential experience remains the same.
In a conventional production, audiences watch a story unfold with relative anonymity, whereas Immersive theater invites them into the world of the story itself. Each audience member encounters a different version of the production, gathering fragments of the story through conversations, asides, overheard exchanges, and the small bits of information the performers drop along the way, giving the fictional world a life of its own. At the Dark Library, we aren’t merely watching a Victorian scientific gathering unfold; we’re fellow scientists and intellectuals, inducted into the proceedings with just enough information to understand our place in this peculiar universe.
The performance space is where the story lives, and this world is brought to life through Parker Sela’s detailed set design, Robert Ramirez’s illusion design, and Clayton Williams’s mechanical effects. Cooper Baldwin’s wonderful composition is the evening’s most magical and otherworldly element. Also noteworthy is Jasiri Booker’s fight choreography.
The performers continue to infuse the story with imagination, impressive improvisational instincts, and good humor. They draw us into conversation, entrust us with secrets, and occasionally invite us to participate in the unfolding action. The production never makes the mistake of confusing audience involvement with audience obligation, a balance that is harder to achieve than it appears.
One curious feature of the evening was the presence of influencers documenting the performance for social media. There’s an inherent tension in trying to capture an experience whose particular magic depends on being present, in the room and among other people, with no guarantee that the same thing will happen twice. The impulse to document the experience is an intriguing subplot to an evening devoted to the pleasures of imaginative escape.
For all the evidence gathering, machinery, and magic, Dark Library: A Time Machine’s greatest illusion may be its simplest: making a roomful of strangers feel, for an evening, that they belong to the same story.
After Hours Theatre Company, 5628 Vineland Ave, North Hollywood. Fri. & Sat., 7:30pm & 9:30pm; Sun., 4pm & 6pm. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dark-library-the-time-machine-tickets-1998260666445. Running time: 75-90 minutes with no intermission. Through Nov. 1st.
