As an immersive theater enthusiast, I often field questions from friends and family about why I’m so into immersive, and what it even is. This 4-part series is my attempt to answer those questions, at least a little bit. This is part 1, “What is Immersive Theater, Anyway?” Look for part 2 (“Why Do I Love Immersive Theater So Much?”), part 3 (“Immersive vs. Other Interactive Theater”), and part 4 (“Immersive vs. Traditional Theater”) in the next few weeks.
Many people have attempted to define immersive theater, with varying degrees of specificity. For example, there’s an excellent glossary at NoPro. I don’t want to rehash too much of what’s been said, but I will give my definition, along with some illustrative examples of what does and does not feel immersive to me.
As I see it, immersive theater is theater which casts the audience in its world. It blurs the line between audience member and performer and allows the audience to interact with either the performers or the world around them (or both). The level of interaction can vary, but at its core, immersive theater allows/encourages you to forget that you are on the outside. In the well-known NYC show Sleep No More, audience members rarely interact with performers, with the exception of the coveted 1:1s and a few random moments. However, they have near total freedom to interact with the environment itself. One can wander around the rooms, open drawers and read letters and books, examine objects, even eat candy from a candy shop. In contrast, the entirety of the lovely and haunting Waking La Llorona (which had a sadly short run in San Diego in 2017) is an interaction between the sole audience member and the performers. It’s one long 1:1, with the performers gently guiding you, the audience member, from scene to scene and role to role. Another slightly different approach is that of Counting Sheep, which started out in NYC and then toured several locations, including the San Francisco Bay Area. In that show, audience members and performers were in one large-ish space for the whole show, and had the option to participate in various activities taking place – making signs, dancing, having a meal. People could also choose to just sit and watch, but most of us ran around with the actors in the thick of things. All three shows feel extremely immersive, though they accomplished this in different ways.
Generally, shows feel less immersive to me when I am acutely aware of being an audience member, an observer, rather than a participant. It means that the show wasn’t able to make me part of its world sufficiently, for whatever reason. That doesn’t mean the show is bad, just that it isn’t immersive as such. I sometimes label these shows “immersive-ish,” because I can see the attempt but it just doesn’t quite get there. One such show was The Mariner, in San Francisco. It did cast the audience as characters – attendees at a wake. However, since attendees at a wake are, essentially, audience members, the experience of the show was not particularly immersive. There weren’t enough cues to make me feel like I was actually attending a wake, rather than seeing a performance about one. Another show that had a similar effect was In Event of Moon Disaster, also in San Francisco. The audience members were, as far as I could tell, passengers on a space ship, and the show was the opposite of ‘in the round’ – the audience was in the middle and the performers walked around on the outside. Still, despite having a nominal role, we were mostly observers, with no real action. The show was enjoyable, to be clear, but not quite immersive by my definitions.
Essentially, when I go to an immersive show, I expect a certain level of, well, immersion. I want to be so much a part of the world that I forget, albeit briefly, that I don’t actually exist in it. I want to have interactions that feel genuine, even when I know that the people on the other end are actors. I want to be caught up in the action to such a degree that I feel like I’m coming up from underwater when I emerge back into the real world. The more a show can do that, the more immersive it will feel to me.