7/23/2023 0 Comments Sleep no more san francisco![]() It was co-produced with Tenderloin Museum. Last year, with transgender legends Collette LeGrande and Donna Personna, we created an immersive play based on the historical Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, entitled – you guessed it - The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot. Small enough, that you can borrow the money from your cousin with a real job. ![]() The superb thing about immersive theatre is that it can also be produced effectively on a small budget. It had a three-year run with new incarnations in the works. Audiences were all-in, dressing in 1920’s attire. It was an upscale endeavor, costing a few million to produce. But as an actor, it was a dream to live in that kind of fantasy. Try figuring the timing of entrances and exits in a labyrinth. ![]() It was a drama that ran in seven different rooms with seven different full-length plays in each of them with a story that interconnected room to room.Īs an actor on the project, playing the owner of the speakeasy, it was one of the most challenging rehearsal experiences of my life. The production built a vintage 10,000 square foot underground Prohibition-Era Speakeasy ( virtual tour). Take the immersive hit The Speakeasy for instance. The last few years in San Francisco have given me first-hand experience with both ends of that budget spectrum. These are more in line with John Krizanc’s, Tamara, circa 1981, where audiences were voyeurs in an Italian villa. Today, immersive artists and producers are going upscale, budget-wise, to create expensive and elaborate productions like Sleep no More. When performed properly without caricature, it’s a very trippy experience for audience and actor. On one end you have the Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding style: improv driven, low-budget interactive party plays that audiences, for decades, have loved being a part of. And there are an infinite range of styles and budgets within the genre. As much as any other factor, this is what attracts audiences, especially young audiences to immersive experiences. Even in an abstract immersive piece like the juggernaut, Sleep no More, the audience experiences intimacy and inclusion, as they live inside a world that feels very real. Like children, we create a world and play pretend. The actors don’t see rows of audience members – no fourth wall, no cameras, no sightline issues, etc. How can we make it easier for audiences to enter a world and actually live in the moment without distraction? In an immersive world the audience doesn’t see a stage. ![]() In the immersive sphere we constantly conjure up ideas on how to make a theater experience as intimate and realistic as possible for the audience AND the actor. Let me share the advantages of immersive theater in general and then get more specific about ideas that might work for future projects, soon after cities and towns re-open. Theater artists, who create outside the orthodox platforms, have an edge, untethered as they are, from a particular infrastructure. I’ll stay in my corner and talk theater, immersive theater in particular, where I can make an informed guess. Our fair city might not allow gatherings of over 20 people at the start of reopening. How are cities going to open up? Here in first-to-close, last-to-open, San Francisco, we predict we’ll emerge in a very methodical way.
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