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Honors Theses The Division of Undergraduate Studies

2016

Sam Shepard and Objects: Site-Specific Immersive Theatre Jennifer Kellett

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Abstract

The move towards a more experimental theatre has taken many forms over the past one

hundred years. With the rise of television, the theatre community has been forced to ask the

question, what makes us different? I, and many others, would argue that the singular difference is

the presence and experience of being in the same space at the same time with the performers.

This project explores this experience of presence by incorporating the audience into the story. It

has three components: site-specific theatre, immersive theatre, and theatre of objects. The project

addresses the intersectionality of these three forms and evaluates their effect on the audience. In

the experiment stage, we grappled with questions of how to create in an already existing space

and how to act for immersive work. We spent a month on character work and creation of space

before moving on to the text. Once there, we worked with a loose form script that would allow

for audience input and interaction. This work culminated in a weekend of performance in a house

in Tallahassee, where the audience would enter the house as if they were dinner guests at a party.

They could walk, talk, smell, feel, and generally interact with all aspects of the environment.

After this performance I sent participants a survey from which I have drawn the conclusions that

follow.

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF VISUAL ARTS, THEATRE, AND DANCE

SAM SHEPARD AND OBJECTS: SITE-SPECIFIC IMMERSIVE THEATRE

By

JENNIFER KELLETT

A Thesis submitted to the

Department of Theatre

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with

Honors in the Major

Degree Awarded: Summer, 2016

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The members of the Defense Committee approve the thesis of Jennifer Kellett defended on April 7, 2016.

______________________________Dr. Elizabeth Osborne

Thesis Director

______________________________Dr. Marlo Ransdell

Outside Committee Member

______________________________Dale Jordan

Committee Member

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Table of Contents

Introduction................................................................................8

The Rediscovery of Place........................................................14

Acting for Immersive Theatre................................................19

Objects in Performance...........................................................25

Audience Immersion................................................................29

Structuring an Immersive Event............................................33

The Senses in Performance.....................................................38

Conclusion................................................................................45

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Photographs

Figure 1- Proposal……………………………………………..19

Figure 2- Bailey’s Birthday…………...………………………21

Figure 3- Family Outside……………...……………………....24

Figure 4- Shrine to Ansel……………...………………………25

Figure 5- Invitation…………………...……………………….30

Figure 6- Analysis of Survey………...………………………..39

Figure 7- Family Refrigerator…………………………………41

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The only thing which still remains and still persists as the single most important idea is the idea

of consciousness. How does this idea become applicable to the theatre? For some time now it’s

become generally accepted that the other art forms are dealing with this idea to one degree or

another. That the subject of painting is seeing. That the subject of music is hearing. That the

subject of sculpture is space. But what is the subject of theatre which includes all of these and

more? It may be that the territory available to a theatrical event is so vast that it has to be

narrowed down to ingredients like plot, character, set, costume, lights, etc. in order to fit into

our idea of what we know. Consequently, anything outside these domains is called

“experimental.”

~Sam Shepard1

1 Sam Shepard, "American Experimental Theatre," in American Dreams, edited by Bonnie Marranca (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981): 212-13.

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Introduction

The Poor Theatre movement, popularized by Polish director and innovator Jerzy

Grotowski, focused on the idea that theatre is nothing but the actor and the audience, stripping

out all the ostentation and supporting elements. Respectfully, I would have to add a caveat to this

concept that the core of the theatrical relationship is between an actor, an audience, and a space.

As humans living in physical space, it is impossible to separate one’s self from the physical

world; therefore it is impossible to separate a performance from the space in which it is

performed.

The current popularity of “site-specific” theatre speaks to this reality and the necessity of

the integration of physical surroundings to the theatrical experience. Site-Specific Theatre is

generally accepted as theatre that takes place outside of a traditional theatre setting. Often set in

places chosen specifically for their relevance to the plot or significance of the show. The “site-

specific” movement defines itself by consciously thinking about how the space interacts with the

actors, the audience, and the story.

Arguably the most famous of the site-specific companies, Punch Drunk has been wildly

successful with the immersive, interactive Sleep No More (2011). Sleep No More sets the story

of Macbeth in a hotel where the audience can follow different characters.2 The audience is given

masks and then separated from the people they arrived with in order to encourage them to engage

with the story. By forcing the audience members into this immersive, unknown location with

complete strangers and without any sort of safety blanket, the production transforms from a

theatrical entertainment into an experience. As one reviewer puts it: “Sleep No More is a

2 “Sleep No More,” Punchdrunk, accessed September 27, 2015, http://punchdrunk.com/past-shows/article/sleep-no-more-2009.

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voyeur’s delight, with all the creepy, shameful pleasures that entails.”3 Sleep No More engages

with an audience’s curiosity, with the desire for discovery that is often deemed as unacceptable

or voyeuristic. While small regional theatres are fumbling to fill seats, Punch Drunk sells out

every show because they speak to something primal: the need to touch, smell, examine, and

become of part of the physical space of the story.

How does an object change based on its context: location, placement, state, color, etc.?

How does the audience’s experience of the story change when it becomes tactile and the

audience members interact intentionally with the physical objects of the space? In Gay

McAuley’s book, Space in Performance, he dedicates a chapter to objects and notes, “The object

has become an important means whereby theatre artists can go beyond the visual, extend the

auditory beyond the spoken word, and engage the spectator in a bodily experience.”4

With this in mind, my project will examine the relationship between a theatre audience

and the objects that surround it. For this experiment of the interaction of the audience with

physical objects, I will begin with Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Buried Child

(1978). Buried Child follows three generations of a family, parents Dodge and Halie, sons

Bradley and Tilden, and Halie and Dodge’s grandson Vince and his girlfriend Shelley. As the

play begins, Dodge has devolved into endless alcoholism and Halie into nostalgia and adultery.

Bradley is physically handicapped after losing his leg in a work accident and Tilden is almost

certainly mentally disabled. The play begins as Vince and Shelley return to the family home to

find that Vince’s family no longer recognizes him. During the awkward visit, Tilden reveals the

family’s terrible secret: there was once another child, presumably the offspring of an incestuous

3 Ben Brantley,“Shakespeare Slept Here, Albeit Fitfully,” New York Times, April 13, 2011, accessed September 20, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/theater/reviews/sleep-no-more-is-a-macbeth-in-a-hotel-review.html?_r=0.4 Gay McAuley, “Objects in Performance,” in Space in Performance, (University of Michigan Press, 2000).

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relationship between Halie and Tilden, but Dodge murdered it to preserve the family’s

reputation. Eventually Vince is recognized as the rightful heir to the family, Dodge dies, and the

family shows signs of a new start as the sins of the oldest generation come to light.

In contrast to many of his contemporaries, Sam Shepard’s works are specifically rural

and obsessed with the nature of physical space, objects, and geographic location. As Laura

Graham notes:

No one in the theatrical community of the ‘Intellectual East’ wrote about cowboys and

the American West past and present. Shepard wrote and writes about non-urban people

[. . .] while most playwrights of the time dealt with urban characters in urban settings and

atmospheres.5

Graham describes Shepard as an American Romantic. He possesses an “emphasis on man’s

connection with the land and with Nature and the strong feeling that if this connection is lost

man will suffer until it is somehow regained.”6 Buried Child is an ideal vehicle for this particular

experiment because of its embodiment of this sort of romantic relationship between person and

space. Throughout the text, the playwright grapples with this question of the environment, and

whether or not the natural world has an impact on the action of a scene. It bookends the play,

opening with a discussion of the rain and its effect on Dodge’s health and ending with the sun

and its effect on the crops. In our rehearsal process I have found this to hold true. For example

when rehearsing, we could not rehearse during the daylight as it completely changed the tone of

the final scene. Buried Child’s intrinsic interest in the relationship between environment and

story is clear when reading the stage directions describing the house. The house is an active

agent in the demise and disintegration of the family. Shepard introduces the house, speaking very

5 Laura J. Graham, “Sam Shepard: The Traditional and the Avant-Garde,” in Sam Shepard: Theme, Image and the Director, edited by Graham (New York: Peter Lang, 1995): [2]6 Ibid. 5.

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specifically of its appearance. It has an “old wooden staircase, [. . .] pale frayed carpet, [. . .] dark

green sofa with the stuffing coming out in spots, [. . . and] an upright lamp with a faded yellow

shade.”7 Before the story even begins, the house tells us a story of the family and its regression

into decay.

Following the interest in environment is Shepard’s openness to improvisation and

improvement, in terms of reasons why this play was the best choice for this experiment. In his

own words, “nothing communicates emotions better than music, not even the greatest play in the

world.”8 During his time in San Francisco in the 1970s, Shepard was heavily influenced by jazz

music and the Magic Theatre. In 1977, only two years before writing Buried Child, Shepard

worked on a show called Inacoma, “a company of fifteen actors and musicians, who worked

together intensively for six weeks to devise a loosely structured work-in-progress presentation.”9

This show is one of many examples of Shepard taking cues from jazz music as a source of

inspiration, and his own writing and directing styles show this malleability of form. Buried Child

in particular was rewritten after it won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize, to the annoyance of many critics,

indicating the Shepard has no real allegiance to an original, only to the process. His approach to

the theatre is reminiscent of Wagner’s gesamtkunstwerk, in that it places equal importance on all

aspects of performance, where text is equally as important as music or space.

My project reimagines Buried Child in a local house in Tallahassee approximately twenty

years before the events of Shepard’s play. The audience participates in the experience as guests

at a dinner party hosted by the family from Buried Child. The audience is encouraged to talk to

the actors, touch items in the house, and altogether push the story along. There will be no

7 Sam Shepard, Buried Child, in Seven Plays, with an introduction by Richard Gilman (The Dial Press, 2005): 63.8 Graham, “Sam Shepard: The Traditional and the Avant-Garde,” 4.9 Stephen J. Bottoms, in The Theatre of Sam Shepard, (Cambridge University Press, 1998): 126.

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detailed physical script; instead the actors will rehearse through loose improvisations of their

characters and relationships as they fit into the overall arc of the story. Buried Child is an

excellent case study for this project because it already relies on an intense back-story that can be

hinted at in objects throughout the house. The scandal and the plot are relatively simple, which

allows for an audience to piece it together through nothing but the family’s belongings.

Shepard’s play relies on the physical environment as a metaphor for the decay of this specific

family and of the American family as a whole. And finally, the text is an excellent piece of

theatre. Buried Child is a Pulitzer Prize-winning play written by one of the great, twentieth-

century U.S. playwrights. The characters are well developed and the plot is gripping. It speaks to

timeless themes such as age, family, opportunity, and hope. But it is Shepard’s interest in the

physical environment that I will focus on here.

In order to create an immersive environment, I will be following Catherine Bouko’s

tenets on theatrical immersion as detailed in her essay on the subject:

1. Physical integration vs. breaking down frontality

2. Sensory and dramaturgical immersion

a. Placing the immersant at the center of the environment…

b. The immersant’s dramaturgical integration, first person dramaturgy

3. Immersion and spaciotemporal indeterminacy10

I will use this methodology in my production by first physically placing the audience in the

space. There will be no division between “audience” and “performer” in this space. Next I will

immerse the audience through sensory information: the smell of dinner cooking, the sound of

10 Catherine Bouko, “Dramaturgy and the immersive theatre experience,” in The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, edited by Magda Romanska (New York: Routledge, 2015): 459.

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Tilden’s favorite CD, the feel of a crocheted baby afghan. My goal will be to reach the third step,

where audience members suddenly realize an hour has passed and it’s felt like ten minutes. The

immersion is so intense the audience member cannot accurately measure space or time. The third

level is very difficult to achieve, however it is the ultimate goal in immersing the audience

completely through use of environment.

In practice, by setting this show in an actual house the artifice of theatricality is removed,

leaving no barrier between the audience and the story. The audience can explore, touch, talk—all

the things that they would normally do in someone’s house. I suggest that this immersion will

elicit a state in which the audience forgets momentarily that this environment is constructed.

Because Buried Child is so focused on the physical setting, the act of engaging with the physical

objects with bring new meaning to the way these manifest as themes and motifs of the show. In

light of recent developments in site-specific theatre, including Punchdrunk’s Macbeth, it

naturally follows that an immersive experience offers a new way of thinking about and relating

to the “classics.”

In short, this performance takes a loosely scripted show based on Buried Child and places

it in a real house where the audience can interact with both the actors and the space. My goal is

to explore a level of “Ultra-Realism” that pushes beyond the “slice-of-life” approach to theatre

that emerged in the late-nineteenth century and gained prominence during the twentieth century.

Firstly, this performance is site-specific, occurring in a home rather than in a theatre. Secondly, it

is immersive in that the audience members are active players in the show rather than passive

observers. Thirdly, the piece is interested in objects in performance and how they can tell a story

better than words. Shepard’s attention to the influence of the natural environment on the events

of the play and to the objects within that environment make it an ideal choice for this project.

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Shepard is also famous for his use of objects in performance. One need not look farther

than the toaster theft in True West to see that Shepard puts great emphasis on physical objects.

The same is true of Buried Child. From the ritualistic burial of Dodge by corn husks to the

brandishing of Bradley’s prosthetic leg, objects play a critical role in the action of this

production. It has often been noted that the degradation of the house, as described in the stage

directions, is an obvious metaphor for the state of the family. Since I could not show that sort of

degradation in the physical house that I used for this performance (it was in good condition

pending a real estate sale), I focused instead on the objects in the house. Pieces such as the

collage of photographs on the fridge or collection of stuffed animals in Tilden’s room give a new

dimension to the characters and tell a story of a family on the verge of destruction. Through my

work I have found that props and scenery can tell a story that words cannot, and that

environment plays a critical role in the production of an immersive experience.

With these things in mind, I will briefly theorize how I think about objects in

performance, site-specific theatre, and immersive theatre, and then shift to a focused discussion

of my first-hand experience working on A Dinner Party At the Shepard’s.

The Rediscovery of Place

So often in the theatre the text comes first. People frequently see plays as literature, rather

than experiences. Disembodied words go from mind to page to stage without a concern for actual

space. Space becomes an afterthought, a necessary—or perhaps unnecessary—addition to the

text. The “reality” that audiences see onstage in traditional proscenium theatres is beautiful, but

artificial. This artifice is then reinforced by the idea of a fourth wall as a physical separation

between the audience and the “reality” onstage. Moreover, the audience continues to be

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sectioned off by rows and aisles and armrests until each audience member is sitting in his or her

own respective box watching a show in a different box. But all these walls we impose upon the

audience are imaginary and unnecessary. In Shakespeare’s time there were no “fourth walls” and

the audience interacted directly with the actor. I would argue that contemporary theatre, due in

no small part to the proscenium arch, has created a set of audience rules, which prevent them

from escaping these sectioned off spaces. Nothing stops an audience member from standing up

and walking onstage to talk to an actor except for these arbitrary rules created for the sake of

order and aesthetic distance. Therefore, my question is: what happens when we remove these

rules and let the audience exist in space?

Claes Oldenburg, an American sculptor famous for his public installations, argues, “The

place in which the piece occurs, this large object is part of the effect, and usually the first and

most important factor determining the event (the materials at hand being second, and the players

third).”11 If this assertion is viable and the most crucial factor determining the show is space, why

are the actors and the text always lauded as the most important? My thesis project focuses on

bringing the primacy of space and environment to the forefront of the production and the

audience experience. In the case of Buried Child, if the play is supposed to be set in a house, why

not set it in a real house?

By placing the show in a house, you change the whole experience of the audience goer. It

is not simply another night of theatre, stopping off for dinner before the show, then heading

home. Instead the process is completely different. The performance takes place in a home—in a

regular, unknown neighborhood setting. Most audience members were not sure that they were in

the right place. Upon arrival there were no ticket takers and no physical or mental transition into

11 Roselee Goldberg, “Living Art c. 1933 to the 1970s,” in Performance Art From Futurism to the Present, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), [134]

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the performance experience. The show had no intermission, no bar, no concessions. Afterwards,

there was no clapping, no talkback, no meet and greet with the actors. There was only the lonely

drive home from a very strange dinner party. In this way, there is no escape to the immersion; the

performance extends beyond the boundaries of the performance space and into the lives of the

audience members. Nothing is lost through the artifice and the rituals of traditional theatre.

Since the audience experience was so vital to my thesis project, I sent attendees a

voluntary survey after the performance, making clear in the invitation that their responses would

appear anonymously in my thesis. When asked for a specific moment in which they believed the

performance was “real,” one respondent explained, “The play felt the most real a few minuets

[sic] after entering the house. It took a while to follow the lead that I was actually in a play,

meaning it took a while for me to start interacting with the characters, but after that I was into

it.”12 This respondent’s focus on the entry to the house as the “most real” moment suggests that

the physical environment was vital to the immersive experience. In fact, this was the

predominant attitude of the participants in the experience. Many noted the entrance to the house

as key to their experience. Yet location proved problematic as well. Perhaps one of the failures of

this production was that in its search for the perfect house, we neglected the geographic location

of the space itself in Tallahassee, Florida. Buried Child takes place in Galesburg, Illinois. When

most people were asked where they were from and replied “Tallahassee,” the characters found it

difficult to situate them stopping by for a dinner party halfway across the country. Although

audience members seemed to get it after a minute or two, we may have asked too much of people

to suspend their disbelief that we were in Illinois, and not Florida.

One moment that pulled the audience out of the immersed experience was connected to

the time period. My original concept was to make the show timeless, adding elements from many

12 Respondent 2, survey response to Jennifer Kellett, February 27, 2016.

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different time periods to coincide so that there was no real year, so that it could be all times and

no time at once. The reason for this being that if an audience member pulled out a cell phone, but

we were supposed to be in the 1970s, this would break the immersion. However, respondents

reported feeling disoriented in terms of time. As Respondent #6 noted, “I couldn't figure out

what year we were in. The TV was playing a game from what seemed like the 80s but the

calendar on the wall said 2013 and characters used cell phones.”13 This response reminds that,

when setting the place, we must also speak in terms of time. Overwhelmingly, the primary

concern respondents cited was in trying to determine what year it was. While some people did

not care what year it was, others spent a significant portion of the show trying to figure out this

key piece of information. While I certainly feel that the antique and period elements of the show

added to the mystique and mythos of the family, I worry that it bogged audience members down

unnecessarily. If we were to do this over, I would remove the timeless quality of the show and

place it in the present so as to eliminate these questions of time. Another reason for doing so

being that audience members bring the present into the show with them, through their own

histories and experiences. Without making a making an immersive piece present day, you run the

risk of them adding a piece of information contrary to the performance. Ultimately, this piece of

information became distracting for audience members, and the goal of any immersive piece

should be to eliminate distractions to the experience.

One other challenge inherent in this type of immersive production is audience training.

Once the audience was sitting it was hard to move them from one room to another. To remedy

this audience inertia, characters instructed audience members around the space, directing them to

other rooms and other characters. If audience inertia was strong in a particular room, actors were

directed to suggest audience members check on the kids, or take their question to Mom instead,

13 Respondent 6, survey response to Jennifer Kellett, February 27, 2016.

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so as not to break character while promoting audience movement. While I think this practice

encouraged audience movement, unfortunately it resulted in what I will henceforth call

“immersion fallout.” This is a trigger that reminds audience members that they are in a show.

Immersion fallout consistently happened to audience members who said they felt forced to move

from room to room or when they were encouraged to look at particular objects. In forcing the

audience to move, we were also forcing them to remember the show. As Respondent #3

explained, “The moments that we had to be told to follow characters to a room sometimes felt

unreal only because that’s when I realized it was a still a show that we needed to watch.”14 While

there may have been a more organic way to move audience members around the space, I believe

that since the show was so short and the audience so uncomfortable, we would have needed to

add significant time to the duration of the performance to get the audience confident enough to

move around the space independently. Another potential solution to this issue would be to find

ways to leave the audience alone in the space. Audience members reported that they moved most

freely when actors were out of the room because it gave them more opportunity to snoop around

and look at objects. At the talkback after our preview, one of the audience members remarked to

me that because it was supposed to be a dinner party, he didn’t feel he had permission to

investigate, but as soon as he was out of a character’s sight, he immediately began going through

drawers. With this knowledge, the actors were encouraged to find reasons to leave the audience

alone, for example, Dodge would go outside to smoke, giving the audience the ability to

investigate more thoroughly.

In order to combat this “audience training,” in which audience members sat in specific

audience seating or remained separate from the environment, I resisted placing audience seating

in the performance space. This forced the audience to share the space with the actors and

14 Respondent 3, survey response to Jennifer Kellett, February 27, 2016.

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dispelled the notion of “audience space” and “actor space.” It also, however, led to some

confusion. Audience members were unclear on the rules of the show. As one respondent noted,

“I laughed a lot and felt uncomfortable at times because I wasn't sure what to do. I wanted to

push some boundaries, but I didn't know how.”15 While I now wish I had taken more time to

figure out how I was going to make this clear to participants, at the same time I also relish this

confusion. The confusion results from this break in audience norms and expectations, a goal that

I am thrilled to see enacted in this production.

Acting for Immersive Theatre

The overall objective of this piece—to remove artifice so as to leave nothing between the

audience and the experience—is

most difficult in the realm of

acting. When approaching this

sort of hyper-realism, characters

must exist in fully fleshed out

lives outside of the text.

Characters get thirsty and

hungry and go to the bathroom

sometimes. So when the actors

are preparing to be (not play)

these characters, it is necessary to invent the whole of their world. For example, it is not enough

to accept that Dodge and Halie are married; they had a first date, fell in love, married, had

15 Respondent 17, survey response to Jennifer Kellett, February 29, 2016.

Figure 1 Dodge proposing to Halie in a cemetery

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children together, and watched their marriage disintegrate. It is not enough to imagine how these

events happened; one must actively engage in them. As part of the rehearsal process for this

production, Halie and Dodge went on the date where he proposed to her. (See Figure 1). Pivotal

moments like this must be experienced and fleshed out in order to deeply understand character.

Although most of these moments did not make it into the show, the important thing is that the

actors have a real, known history of these characters’ lives, particularly in a show like this where

such a memory might be interrogated. The closest acting style that this can be likened to is that

of the “Living History Museum”. Certain museums employ actors to dress up as historical

figures to add a measure of interactivity to certain exhibits. For example, a woman playing

Amelia Earhart must know everything about the pilot in order to field questions from the public.

Another acting comparison is that of Disney and the characters of the meet and greets. The actor

must react in character to the actions of the public in order to maintain the illusion.

In rehearsals, I employed a “backwards” method. By starting with characters first and

text second, actors grew to create their characters first-hand. We went through a month of

character work before doing our first read-through of the play. Our first rehearsal was a dinner

where the family simply sat down and ate together. Ellen Boener, fellow immersive theatre

creator and student in the School of Theatre, has established a two-fold system for approaching

these character work rehearsals: practical guided improvisations and interview improvisations.

My process focused on the use of practical guided improvisations, which are essentially events

or actions for the actors to complete in character with certain parameters and goals attached to

them. For example, we threw a birthday party for Bailey in which each actor gave her a present

as their character. (See Figure 2). This practical guided improvisation had a clear structure that

everyone knew how to follow even as it established character and relationships.

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In terms of the actual

script itself, the actors were

assigned the reading of the

original Buried Child text,

but we never had a read

through with the actors. Our

script was created through the

process of dissecting that

script and rearranging the

lines in order to create new

subtext. Some of Tilden’s lines were given to Bailey, and some of Halie’s lines were given to

Tilden for example. Lines from Act 3 were paired with lines from Act 1. In the end of the

process, most of the words were still Shepard’s, but the new order made it hard to recognize the

original script outside of longer speeches. This created an interesting conversation between the

original and the rearranged script. It is in some ways a reflection of the circular nature of the play

and its interest in the resurrection of certain themes from one generation to next. While this

implication is likely not picked up by audience members unfamiliar with Buried Child, but it is

interesting to note from a scholarly perspective.

Not to sound disrespectful to Shepard’s writing, but in this particular performance it was

stressed to the actors that the text was not as important as the experience itself. Lines were free to

be jettisoned should they no longer be relevant. For example, several of the scripted lines of the

performance were to be directed at female members of the audience, however, at one

performance there were no women in the audience. It would have been ridiculous to stick to the

Figure 2 A guided practical improvisation of Bailey's birthday party

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script in such a situation, so those lines were skipped without a second thought. Shepard’s

inspiration from improvisation in jazz leads me to believe that he would understand this

necessity of improvisation. In addition to this malleability of text, Buried Child has a distinct

disregard for answers. James Crank makes note of the many unanswered questions in Buried

Child in his book Understand Sam Shepard, saying: “What happened to Tilden in New Mexico?

Why does Dodge refuse to acknowledge that Vince is his grandson? [...] All these questions

remain unanswered despite the audience’s confrontation with the child’s corpse. Nothing is

resolved and there is no tidy ending.”16 For an immersive production these sort of unanswerable

questions are ideal for the sort of “Nancy Drew” mystery atmosphere. Each question presents the

production crew with an opportunity for clues. Every question has an object to bring light to that

subplot—a subplot where the answers are less important than the actions we take as audience

members to uncover it. So many open-ended questions force the audience to satisfy their

curiosity by interrogating the actors and placing themselves within the story.

A small number of actors for these productions is ideal.17 This small cast size allows the

director to engage on a deeper and more consistent level with each of the actors as they develop

their characters. Site-specific spaces also tend to be quite limited in size so cast size is a practical

matter. The more actors you have, the less audience members can fit in the space. In my

production, only twelve people could fit at the table, and with four actors that meant only eight

audience members could attend each performance. Limited size audiences are also effective in

building intimacy between the actors and the audience members. It is rare for an audience

member to feel a part of the production when there are 300 other people watching it. The size of

the cast and the audience are dependent on the location and nature of your performance. If you

16 James A. Crank, Understand Sam Shepard, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012): [59].17 Unless you are Punchdrunk, which uses an immense amount of actors in their shows.

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are doing Picnic outside at a real picnic, you could accommodate more people to your

performance. But you would also want to balance the number of people you could accommodate

with the number of people you should accommodate, so that individual audience members are

not lost in the crowd.

One of the downfalls of this mode of acting is that it is impossible to prepare for

everything without actually living the life of the character. For example, the actor playing Tilden

has lived in Florida his whole life, so when asked about winter in Illinois he responded, “Its has

been raining for three months and it’s February.”18 Without that life experience of snow, it was

difficult for him to fully embody the character of Tilden. Some audience members tried to

exploit this production weakness by comparing and contrasting answers to different questions

they asked the characters. In a real family, most of these answers would be uniform, such as how

old are the children or how long have Dodge and Halie been married, but because our actors

were making up the answers on the spot, there was no way to assure answers would match up.

Simple questions we anticipated and prepared for, but many questions that the audience asked

were outside the realm of anticipation. Preparation in this sort of style is key, and without

extensive background discussion of character, eliminating non-matching answers would be

nearly impossible. On the other hand, however, this type of action on the part of the audience

was interesting because in a very active and sometimes aggressive way, they were interviewing

family members with a particular purpose. So even if the answers did not match, the participant

was still engaged in the production.

18 Respondent 17, survey response to Jennifer Kellett, February 29, 2016.

24

While it is difficult to tell whether or not my acting theories worked, several of the

respondents noted the actors’ commitment to their characters. As Respondent 17 noted,

“Dodge’s acting was pretty on point.”19 Such comments suggest that our non-traditional

rehearsals made the actors feel

more comfortable with each other

and therefore more comfortable as

a family, which came across in

performance. One of the

overarching things that people said

about the performance was that

they really believed in the

characters. I like to think that this

is due to the extensive work we did in rehearsal building characters and character relationships.

In casting, I chose actors who were, for the most part, very similar in habit to the characters they

created. The exception to this was Dodge, whose character was so strongly negative that the

actor simply could not find common ground and had to completely construct the role. In casting

as well as creating immersive experience characters, it is helpful to keep actor and character

similar, so that natural reactions are just that: natural. When an actor and character’s personalities

differ this can create a large emotional toll on the actor. At the end of every performance, Enzo,

who played Dodge, would lay down on the floor for a minute or two because the character

required so much energy in resisting the actor’s natural reactions.

19 Respondent 17, survey response to Jennifer Kellett, February 29, 2016.

Figure 3 The Shepard family out on a walk

25

Objects in Performance

Imagine a table, any table. It means very

little by itself, aside from its various style and

material aspects. Now place a black tablecloth on it.

How has this object changed been shaped by the

addition of this new item? Add an American flag,

folded military style, medals representing heroic

acts during war, aged photographs of a young

man, and the stems and dried pieces of flowers

that died long ago. In spite of the brittle flowers, the table remains tidy and free of dust, debris,

or unrelated items; the space is clearly cultivated and cared for. Now the table has become a

shrine. Through a few simple objects that mean little on their own, an entire story has been told.

In figure 4, one can see that individual objects work best when they are in conversation with one

another.

A picture says a thousand words, or so they say. However, as Susan Sontag notes in her

seminal work, Regarding the Pain of Others, images mean very little without their context. As a

society we believe photographs to be true and infallible. But photographs, much like the

proscenium arch, create a frame that cuts off a part of that world. What happens when we

remove this frame? Returning to the table with the black tablecloth, folded flag, medals,

photographs, and dead flowers, it tells a story within itself, but by placing it the context of this

house and this family it tells more. What does it mean if this table sits in a parent’s bedroom?

What if it also faces an empty crib? The objects and the space complement one another in a

Figure 4 Shrine to Ansel

26

conversation that is easily and quickly conveyed visually, but would be cumbersome to

incorporate into dialogue.

Many of the participants noted that when entering the house, because they were strangers

they did not feel comfortable judging or investigating the environment. I would argue though,

that people are always judging environments based upon the objects around them. When entering

an acquaintance’s house for the first time, a person is naturally drawn to their objects as a way of

determining that person’s character. For example, when I enter a space for the first time, I

immediately examine that person’s bookshelf as a means of examining that person. Others may

look at the art on the walls or the records they keep, but it is all the same: a way in which we

examine others in relation to their surroundings.

Knowing that the family would be judged on every individual item in their home,

choosing items became an arduous task. In populating the house with objects, mostly those from

my and my parents’ homes, I followed three rules on if the objects could be in the house:

1. Can the object obviously NOT exist in the home? When filling Bailey’s drawers with

clothes for example, she could not have any of my Harry Potter t-shirts because Halie

would find that unacceptable.

2. Does the object disrupt the performance? Certain objects, while exciting by

themselves, hold no value to the performance itself would serve only as a distraction.

One such object did make it into the performance, a newspaper from the 1960s that

several audience members found too interesting to pass over. While interesting, it did

not serve the plot and ended up being a waste of time.

3. Is the object relatable to the characters? Not all objects in the house must be essential

to the plot. Some things just end up in our homes and are not necessarily indicators of

27

our character. In Bailey’s closet she had several snow globes; when asked about them

she said “My mom tried to get my into them when I was a kid.” If an object is not in

direct conflict with, and can be related, it is acceptable to the performance.

Following these three rules I was able to fill the entire house and keep everyone in character.

One of the most important aspects about objects is not the physical thing itself, but it’s

placement within the house. The Woman’s Guide to Entertaining would make little sense in

Tilden’s room, but served as a great addition to Halie’s character in the kitchen. In order to help

with the labor of sorting these items, the first day of rehearsal in the house was letting the actors

decorate their own rooms. This gave them a sense of ownership of the space, as opposed to the

alien quality many people feel when entering a foreign space. The exercise gave them a chance

to explore their character in both a physical and mental way. They had to ask concrete questions

like: “Does Bailey like this book?” or “How did Tilden get this teddy bear?” This is also a

helpful precursor to the show when they might be asked questions like this from the audience.

Cliff McLucas, of the Brith Gof company in Wales describes site-specific theatre as “the

coexistence and overlay of two basic sets of architectures: those of the extant building or what he

called the host, that which is at the site—and those of the constructed scenography and

performance or the ghost, that which is temporarily brought to the site.”20 In our production the

host was the house, the structure within which we worked, and the ghost was the objects with

which we filled it. It is interesting to think of these objects as a sort of malleable architecture,

because not only can it be changed by the actors but by the audience as well. For example, at one

moment when Tilden was upset in his bedroom, one of the audience members asked if she could

20 Mike Pearson, "Haunted House: Staging 'The Persians' with the British Army," in Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice, edited by Anna Birch and Joanne Tompkins, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): [70]

28

get him a glass of water. In this action, bringing him a glass of water, she was interacting in and

changing the architecture of the space.

The audience’s ability to connect with individual objects became one way of accessing

the influence of objects and space. When asked what objects he touched in the space and why,

one respondent explained, “I touched the food and the kitchen supplies. I touched my glass of

water. I touched a book. I was either told to interact with these objects or I felt a personal

connection to them.”21 This idea of a personal connection to objects was crucial to the

performance. Because the audience members were bringing their own preconceived notions to

the production, they placed meanings upon the objects in the house. For example, one audience

member noticed that speaker cables had been taped down (a practical choice made purely for

audience safety purposes), but to her this meant that there was a young child in the house.

The most successful objects were the bus tickets in Tilden’s room. The two bus tickets in

combination with the backpack spilling open were a very beautiful and object-centric way of

telling a story. That story being: Tilden is running away with the baby. The first night many

people did not connect the backpack to the tickets. When the backpack spilled open, the baby

clothes could not be distinguished from the adult clothes packed there. After the first night we

added baby shoes to the backpack as a clear indicator that he planned to take the baby with him.

One audience member noted that a shoe hit his foot as it fell out. The shoes became a very

interesting source of sensory information: the sound of them hitting the floor, the sight of them in

a place they should not be, and sometimes the touch of a very foreign object. Also, it is my

personal belief that baby shoes are terrifying no matter the circumstances. Once we added this

element, the bus tickets took on a whole new meaning and became a very central point to many

audience members’ experiences. The one thing I waited for every night was for an audience

21 Respondent 16, survey response to Jennifer Kellett, February 29, 2016.

29

member to reveal these tickets to either Dodge or Halie, as a combined form of investigation and

interrogation, unfortunately it did not happen.

Objects truly were the crux of this performance. Perhaps the most interesting thing about

the objects in this show was that for the most part they were not built or bought, but borrowed.

They were all real objects with a real history. There were no foam turkey legs or wooden TV

remotes. Nearly all the items came from my life or my parents’ lives, from the photo albums to

books to the ceramic figurines. This gave off a very strange personal surrealism, which I hope

translated to a hyper-realism for the participants.

Audience Immersion

I draw a great deal of my theory on immersion from video games, and in particular, video

game sound design. For example, say you are playing as a character walking through the desert.

With every step you take you hear the footfalls on the sand and the wind is blowing. This

consistent “positive reinforcement” constantly reminds the player that they are not in their

bedroom but are in the Sahara. This focus on spatial immersion makes good video games all-

consuming. In discussing his current project game, Night Terrors, an augmented reality game

that takes place in real space and time, Brian Mitchel argues, “Why are we still waiting for that

really great augmented reality game? Where are those games that are so believable and so

immersive that you’re afraid to play them?”22 In this type of augmented reality game, the

ultimate goal is the complete immersion of a player. The world of the game is meticulously

crafted in order to draw the player into the story. Creating this immersive environment in real life

22 Brian Mitchel, Night Terrors, published February 19, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQsyr4QX-GU.

30

requires this idea of reinforcement through a constant influx of sensory information. Here

however, I wish to tackle the question: how do we make the audience a player with agency in

this narrative?

The first step of any Role Playing Game (RPG) is the naming and choosing of a

character. Before an audience member sets foot in

the house, this has been accomplished through

our invitation. (See Figure 5.) The invitation

establishes that they are dinner guests, and, as we

elaborate in our first “cut scene,” they are also

neighbors. One advantage of small audiences is

knowing who will be in attendance. The actors

can then learn those names so as to properly

address individual audience members during the

show. No longer are the audience members

anonymous viewers, but characters with relationships and purpose within the world of the play.

A Dinner Party at the Shepard’s is also inspired by the free-form nature of video games.

A player can interact with the world in his or her own time and then return to specific,

unchangeable parts of the storyline. Many videogames, particularly contemporary games like

BioShock, Fallout3, and the Stanley Parable, are interested in the nature of choice and player

involvement in the story. In this way, games follow a pattern similar to choose-your-own-

adventure stories where “at the end of each story part, the [creator] needs to offer the reader two

directions in which the story may proceed.”23 This format was particularly helpful in the

23 Barbara Sargent, “Writing ‘Choose your own adventure’ stories,” The Reading Teacher 45 (1991) 158-159.

Figure 5: Invitation to the Dinner Party

31

construction of this immersive performance experience in order to preserve audience agency

while still staying within the arc of the story. This differs from traditional theatre in that the

audience—not the actors—determines how and when the experience will move forward. Keren

Zaiontz describes this in her article on “ambulatory audiences,” saying:

Audiences regularly take on roles within the performance as facilitators and co-creators.

In short, these site-specific performances contexts compel spectators to perform ‘double

duty’: audiences retain their role as interpreters and witnesses of the stage action, but they

also labour as role players and aides to the performance.24

By giving the audience an objective or purpose—in this case the mystery of the crying, but

invisible, baby—the audience gains a sense of control. This spontaneity reinforces the reality of

the situation as well making the audience aware of their reactions to particular events. Rather

than staying silent, they must vocalize a response to the actors. The interaction between an

audience member and an actor transforms the audience member from a passive receptor of text,

subtext, and gesture into an active creator of the three. Giving the audience a sense of control

gives them the tools they need for their own narrative expression.

This focus on the audience member is both the strength and weakness of immersive

theatre. Even the most prepared, meticulous, planned immersive experience will have audience

members who meet it with cynicism and skepticism. As one respondent said, “I never thought it

was real. I always knew this was a planned experience, it was always finite. However, I certainly

allowed moments to take me in.”25 For this medium to work, both creator and participant must

24 Keren Zaiontz,"Ambulatory Audiences and Animate Sites: Staging the Spectator in Site-Specific Performance," in Performing Site Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice, edited by Anna Birch and Joanne Tompkins (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): [167]25 Respondent 14, survey response to Jennifer Kellett, February 29, 2016.

32

meet each other halfway. The participant cannot engage without a well-constructed piece, and a

well-constructed piece means nothing without a willing participant.

That said, experience in immersive pieces is anything but uniform. In one of Rubber

Repertory Theatre’s successful immersive pieces, Biography of Physical Sensation (2010), the

production asked audience members to choose their level of immersion. The audience sat in a

circle of chairs, the lowest chairs indicating their interest in the lowest level of interaction, the

middle chairs indicating a willingness to engage in more interaction, and the highest chairs

indicating a high level of interest in very physical interaction. This kind of voluntary audience

sorting ensures that both the actor and audience member will be comfortable and successful in

their interaction. In the same way that there is a splash zone at SeaWorld and a poncho section at

Blue Man Group performances, immersive theatre must find a way of sorting through the willing

and unwilling participants. We had not planned for this in my production so our only way to sort

audience members was through cryptic conversation and guesswork. My actors were very

successful in most cases of feeling an audience member’s comfort level, although some

misjudgments were made.

Like Biography of Physical Sensation, A Dinner Party at the Shepard’s offered ways for

audience members to engage with the production on multiple levels. For example, audience

members who were more outgoing received most of their information about the story by

interrogating the actors. This was especially true for those who had read Buried Child. Those

who were more reserved and refrained from speaking to actors for the most part received the

majority of their information from the environment itself. These participants were more likely to

look through drawers and magazines, examine pictures, and compare conflicting information

from different sources. This less aggressive form of investigating is in no way passive and

33

demonstrates that, when giving audience members’ autonomy, you allow them to bring a part of

themselves and their personality to the performance.

In addition to creating an audience of diverse styles of participation, this performance had

the unexpected quality of creating a community within the audience. Normally when one attends

a traditional theatrical experience, a person or group of people enters the space indifferent to

other audience members, and then exits the space in more or less continuing indifference. While

our audience may have entered without knowledge of each other, by the end of the experience

they had grown together. I believe this is in part due to the small sizes of our audience; it would

be more difficult to foster this sort of community within a larger group. Another aspect may be in

reaction to the sense of stress of discomfort of the performance. At the talkback after the first

preview, one of the participants, Johanna Miller, said “If your goal was to make us

uncomfortable, you succeeded.” While this was not explicitly my goal, the byproduct of this

discomfort led to a shared language within the audience. One participant likened it to the

bonding of prisoners. It is only natural that in an uncomfortable situation, one would reach out to

another in the same situation for support, resulting in this communal bond. I would recommend

this sort of event for any theatre company wishing to either form a strong personal relationship

with their community, or who wish to build strong personal relationships within the community

itself.

Structuring an Immersive Event

In the structure of the piece, I looked back to my favorite video games and how they

melded controlled story and player choice into a cohesive whole. In most contemporary video

games, this is done through a mixture of “cut scenes”—which are pre-taped and cannot be

34

altered by the player—and “free play,” in which the player determines the course of action.

Narrative-driven elements and necessary plot points are placed within these cut scenes.

When structuring my piece, I began with one of these cut scenes with the goal of

establishing character, situation, and rules of the game. Many early video games offered tutorials

outside of the game itself. A player would learn in the tutorial and then go on to play the game.

Contemporary games have largely integrated the tutorial into the first section of the game. For

example, in Fallout 3 the player learns how to move their character when their character is still a

toddler, melding the player and the character by having them learning the same action together.

Less jarring, this process advances character and gradually introduces the player to the controls

while progressively upping the immersion. With this in mind, I set up several interactions in the

first cut scene so as to introduce the audience to the terms of engagement:

1. The audience must knock for entrance to the performance, thus asking to be

involved and taking active steps to do so.

2. Once inside the house, Halie asks audience members if they had a hard time

finding the house, if the bridge was flooded, etc. This establishes with the

audience that they will be asked questions and are expected to respond.

3. Halie invites an audience member into the kitchen. This primarily tells audience

members that they are free to move about the space, but it also introduces the fact

that there will be multiple scenes going on at once, and they must make a choice

as to which they will choose.

4. Halie asks Bailey to show the neighbors a family album. By handing audience

members a physical object, we establish the investigatory nature of the show and

encourage the audience to touch the objects in the space.

35

After the rules and objectives are established, free play can commence. Expected to be awkward

and confused at first, the audience must come to terms with the fact that the occupants of the

house will not do anything without their prompting. For 30-40 minutes the audience may move

from room to room, examining what they please, interrogating whomever they wish, and

generally using the time as they see fit. If an audience member chooses to spend this time

examining the record collection (as one did), so be it. When audience members engage with the

actors though, they must be rewarded so as to reinforce the action. For example, if an audience

member interacts with Bailey, they will be invited under her bed to her secret reading cave. This

subtle encouragement teaches the audience to continue interacting so as to uncover more

rewards.

One of the truly challenging, and nearly unrehearsable, aspects of the piece was this idea

of audience training. As theatregoers, we have been conditioned to know when it is appropriate

to clap, talk, look at our phones, etc. This performance challenged audiences to unlearn all of this

conditioning. Many audience members reported feeling torn between whether they were a

participant in the story or an audience member, seemingly unwilling or unable to imagine their

own role as simultaneously audience member and participant. Even those that felt they

participated expressed the feeling that they should be a “polite guest” and resisted the urge to

snoop around the house. While a certain amount of this comes from a person’s own personality

and habits, but the ingrained audience training of the traditional theatre certainly plays a huge

role. In retrospect, our audience-training period at the beginning of the show could have been

more direct in addressing the audience and encouraging them to break away from the norms of

traditional audience etiquette. For example, actors could have reinforced the idea of touching

items through saying something like, “You’re welcome to look through our books.” The

36

possibility of having “plants” in the audience would certainly be another avenue of audience

control. The use of plants would need to be done minimally and carefully though, because of the

possibility of the discovery of the plant, which would result in immersion fallout.

After free play comes the final cut scene. This allows the story arc to close in a controlled

way so as to give an overarching structure to the piece. The audience is invited back to the dinner

table and allowed to participate in the discussion, but is slowly pushed out as family matters

overtake the discussion. Environment takes over as the lights go out and everyone is ushered into

the back room for the final family confrontation. Respondent 18 had an interesting reaction to

this particular point saying, “The final scene was weird for me because I was so immersed in the

action and really believed in the situation but it was so much easier to distance myself because it

felt more like we were audience members then than in any other part of the production.”26

Despite this being one of the moments in the show where the audience had very little

participation, many noted that it was the most immersive moment of the show despite their

awareness of their state as audience members. This scene ends with a directive from Dodge to

leave the house before the rain gets any worse, giving a clear end to the experience.

By structuring the play in this way we are able to facilitate story and exploration

simultaneously. The outcome is controlled, but if our goal is achieved, the audience will believe

that their actions in some way influenced the course of events, which in many ways they did.

Returning to my favorite game franchise, Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3, have karma

systems, so if the player steals something they lose karma but if they complete a good quest they

gain karma. After the final cut-scene, which gives closure to the narrative, there is essentially a

roll of credits going through the different characters in the story and what happened to them

because of the player’s actions and karma. So while the overall skeleton narrative of the game

26 Respondent 18, survey response to Jennifer Kellett, February 29, 2016.

37

remains constant, the way it is fleshed out by the player changes with every play-through. Our

production of A Dinner Party at the Shepard’s operated in much the same way. While we

wanted to give participants autonomy in the production, we knew that we had to embed this

agency within a strong structure. In structuring immersive theatre it is necessary to find a balance

between control and manipulation in order to create unity in a production.

Another excellent game, The Stanley Parable, investigates the possibility of free will in a

meticulously crafted environment and mocks this idea of player choice in one of the

advertisements for the game. In the advertisement the narrator is responding to a critic of the

game, sarcastically saying, “Whereas many video games are content to offer you a finite number

of things to do, The Stanley Parable is breaking ground by allowing the player to do

LITERALLY ANYTHING.” Through the ridiculous example they give (of a bicycle being

infused with a ghost so as to undo temporal paradoxes) the creators of the game make it clear

that ultimate free will in a constructed video game is impossible; there is only the simulation of

free will. In my production I did not aim to simulate free will, but instead to place it inside the

constraints of the experience. The structure gives the audience the possibility of exercising their

autonomy, while at the same time ensuring that the narrative that has been crafted for them

moves ahead as planned. This balance really is a dance between how much control do we, as the

creators, want over the performance and how much we want to preserve free will in the audience.

Every creator of an immersive piece must ask themselves what is more important for this

particular piece: narrative or experience?

38

The Senses in Performance

Traditional theatre experiences often occur primarily through the use of sight and sound.

You see the actors, set, costumes, and lighting, and you hear sound effects, onstage movement,

and words. The senses of touch, taste, and smell are summarily ignored.27 Theatre creators forget

however, that these other senses cannot be turned off. For example, an audience member will

have a much different experience sitting on a wooden bench than on a plush seat. If the air ducts

have not been cleaned recently, the odor of the theatre will affect the performance. Restaurants

surrounding the theatre could affect the performance through scent, aftertaste, or anticipation. To

ignore these senses is to ignore three-fifths of the potential sensory experience.

Those performances that engage alternative sensory input are often quite memorable. An

otherwise terrible production of a freak show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2014 was truly

remarkable for the way in which it forced audience members out of the space: shock pads in the

seats literally shocked audience members out of their seats at the end of the show. Victory

Gardens Theatre’s recent performance of Stupid Fucking Bird (2015) offered authentic Russian

appetizers prior to the show, including a traditional shot of vodka followed by bread and a pickle,

thus priming the audience for the production by way of taste. The withWings theatre company’s

adaptation of Swan Lake, The Duck Pond (2014), played the most recognizable tune of Swan

Lake over and over throughout the show. This culminated in a moment in which audience

members were given glass bottles filled to a certain degree with water and forks, then directed by

the bandleader to play their “instruments,” giving them a tactile way of interacting with, and

therefore owning the performance. All of these performances incorporated small moments and 27 There are, of course, notable exceptions to this, such as productions like David Cromer’s wildly successful production of Our Town, complete with the smell of cooking bacon, or those productions that change the theatre’s temperature.

39

gestures that had huge impacts on the audience. I would argue that the reason these small

gestures meant so much to audience members is because they are so frequently overlooked in

theatre; when they are used, they make an extraordinary impact. Adding a new level of sensory

input is comparable to adding a new dimension to a drawing. The performance goes from flat to

engaging and complicated.

In creating an immersive piece it is essential to look at all sensory information that may

be received by the audience. “As sensorium, performance works with and on all the senses of the

audience. The visual need not take precedence. In any moment it may favour one or another

sense. At site, it may offer an audience new sensual experiences. It may also struggle against

persistent factors of noise,

heat, odour….”28 My

assumption when

approaching the subject

of senses in production

was that the audience

would assign importance

to sense in the following

hierarchy: sight, sound,

tactile, olfactory, and

gustatory. One of the goals in production was to elevate the tactile, olfactory, and gustatory

senses in importance, but I suspected that sight and sound would take precedence. These

assumptions proved completely wrong for a number of reasons. In response to my survey

28 Mike Pearson, "Scenario: Dramaturgy," in Site-Specific Performance, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 140-78.

Figure 6 Analysis of survey responses concerning sensory information

40

question, rate the senses according to their importance in the show, the responses of audience

members ranged greatly depending on the individual. Because the responses were so ranged,

when averaged the five senses appeared to be tied, with sight and touch having a slight

advantage over the others (See figure 6). This suggests that audience members as a group ascribe

no particular hierarchy the impact of a particular sense on their performance experience. This can

in part be attributed to the different audience members and the values they place on certain

senses individually, which is vital to recognize when attempting to make use of more than two or

three senses. In retrospect, this question may have been unfair due to the fact that in this

production sensory information was so closely linked together. For example, it is nearly

impossible to taste the cornbread without smelling it.

Traditionally, the visual sense is the one with which we primarily interact with the

theatre. Unfortunately, the traditional theatre has largely ignored new and innovative uses of

space. But it is important to remember that, even in a traditional proscenium space where the

audience is separated from the stage by the imaginary fourth wall, the audience is not seeing only

that set. They are seeing the ushers bringing in people late and the spotlight operators and the

head of the person in front of them. In order to engross audience members visually in the

production, they must be completely surrounded with the performance environment.

One of the major challenges of the traditional theatre space is that the smaller, more

intimate scenery can be lost in the whole of the set. With its emphasis on the theatrical space and

the objects within that space, my production highlighted the power of details. As one of the

respondents reported that they most enjoyed “the cave [under Bailey’s bed.] Little details like

that make the whole thing fun.”29 By placing the production within a carefully constructed

environment, these smaller details come into focus, allowing audience members to spend time

29 Respondent 2, survey response to Jennifer Kellett, February 27, 2016.

41

with images and objects that meant something to them. For example, many people spent a great

deal of time at the family refrigerator, examining postcards and pictures and recipes (See Figure

7). By bringing the audience closer to the

action, we could bring to light smaller,

subtler objects that would be

inconsequential to a traditional scenic

design.

The auditory portion of the show

heightened the audience involvement as

well, and engaged the audience in the

mystery of the evening. Respondent 4

explained, “The sounds increased the

believability of the evening. Sounds of a

storm, tied into the stormy relationships as

well as the physical weather. The cries from the baby as well as the dripping water were quite

effective at getting across what had happened.”30 The major sound elements of the show included

the sound of the rain, the baseball game, the record player, the crying of the baby, and dripping

of the faucet. Many respondents noted that

the sound of the thunderstorm was essential to believing that they were entering a new space and

a new reality. The baseball game and the record player (playing Benny Goodman albums) added

to the auditory mixture the audience was confronted with upon entering. While the thunderstorm

and baby crying sound effects were recorded, the baseball game and record player gave a

measure of reality in that they came from particular sources. In a traditional theatre setting, a

30 Respondent 4, survey response to Jennifer Kellett, February 27, 2016.

Figure 7 Family Refrigerator

42

sound system would displace a sounds origin, for example during a musical you might hear an

actor singing from a different direction than your relation to the actor. Because our sounds had

very clear source locations, as audience members moved to different parts of the house, the

quality of the sound changed reinforcing that reality again.

One of the goals of the production was to reach out to audience members via smell as

soon as they entered the house as a starting point for the immersion. More than any other sense,

smell is the most attached to memory and therefore to immersion. Smell can communicate place

and sense in ways which speech cannot. In this, the cooking connected to the dinner party served

brilliantly. One respondent noted, “As soon as I walked into the space I could smell dinner which

was awesome and made it all the more believable that we were really at a dinner.”31 Another

respondent reiterated this enthusiasm, writing, “The cooking smelled great and knowing I would

get to eat made me feel like I was really a part of the whole thing. The food made me feel the

most immersed.”32 Smell and taste are senses that are hard to record or fake, unlike sight and

sound. I believe that by adding the sense of smell to the performance we are communicating to

audience members that the performance is a genuine representation of an event. And being open

and honest with the audience, demonstrating the reality of what we were doing—with real

cornbread, cooked during the event—engendered a certain amount of trust with the audience; if

this cornbread is real, other things must be real too. The other thing about smell is that it is hard

to escape without physical movement. When Dodge comes back in from the porch smelling like

cigarettes, many audience members moved in order to get as far away from him as possible.

Others went into the kitchen to get a better smell of what Halie was cooking. Much like sound,

31 Respondent 3, survey response to Jennifer Kellett, February 27, 2016.32 Respondent 17, survey response to Jennifer Kellett, February 29, 2016.

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smell has a source, and by moving around and adjusting themselves in relation to this source, the

audience was discovering a new sense of the space through smell.

Smell and taste are closely intertwined, particularly in A Dinner Party at the Shepard’s.

Many people reported the family dinner as the most immersive part of the performance and food

played no small part in that. In fact, for some audience members the food played a prominent

role in their experience. As one exclaimed: “two words.....CORN BREAD!”33 Cooking and

eating real food in performance is often a nightmare, but since this setting was built for that

purpose—it was, after all, a house with a full kitchen—it was not only possible, but highly

effective. To be indulgent for a moment, the food was excellent, and eating food as an audience

member is a level of participation available to everyone, even those who choose not to interact

directly with the characters. While we had many audience members who chose not to eat (or not

to eat certain items) for dietary reasons, the presence of real food at the table added a level of

reality that contributed to the immersion. For some audience members, the food also made them

think harder about the issues at stake in the play. One said, “Actually tasting the corn and

knowing what the corn represented to the family blurred the line between performance and

reality.”34

Despite these successes, I worry that the food was too good. Upon leaving the house,

some audience members were scrambling to take cornbread with them. One even spoke to

Dodge as he was attempting to remove her from the house, saying “Please let Halie know that

her cornbread was fantastic.” Strong sensory input can be extremely distracting, and I worry that

having good food, particularly if the audience comes hungry for the “dinner party” distracts from

the scene at hand.

33 Respondent 2, survey response to Jennifer Kellett, February 27, 2016.34 Respondent 7, survey response to Jennifer Kellett, February 27, 2016.

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The family dinner contributed to the immersion both through taste and through touch as

audience members physically encountered the food. The true distinction between the nature of

immersive video gaming and immersive theatre is the tactile nature of the theatre. More than

anything, tactile engagement was audience initiated. With smells, visuals, and sounds the

audience has very little choice in their participation; touch involves active participation. Perhaps

the most interesting part of this production was seeing what particular people were interested in

touching. One audience member went through every single record in the record player, counting

the number of John Denver albums (fifteen, to be exact). Another audience member “looked at a

Saturday Evening Post from the year that Kennedy was shot and [felt that] it really added to the

feeling of time slippage.”35 In this way, audience members brought their own experiences and

values directly to the performance. A different respondent used touch to focus in on key elements

in the show: “the bus tickets. I almost didn't notice them, but when I saw them it clicked in my

head that clearly Tilden was at least smart enough to get out of his situation.”36 This difference

highlights the potential danger of offering objects for an audience to explore in a performance

space. While some audience members connect these experiences to the major ideas in the show,

others become distracted from the performance itself. This sort of distraction is hard to avoid

however without creating a streamlined performance where the only objects in the house are

those crucial to the plot. This sort of minimalism may work well for some immersive

performances, but I fear it would have created a sense of missing pieces in this space. When

giving the audience autonomy, the creator of the piece must accept that the audience will use

their autonomy however they see fit, otherwise the piece would be meaningless.

35 Respondent 7, survey response to Jennifer Kellett, February 27, 2016.36 Respondent 2, survey response to Jennifer Kellett, February 27, 2016.

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Conclusion

The future of theatre has always been tenuous. Even in Aristotle’s Poetics he complained

about the decline of theatre since the “Golden Age”. However, theatre it always seems to surge

back into prominence with a new force and movement to pull it back into the public. I firmly

believe that the immersive and site-specific theatre movements are the remedy that commercial

theatre has been looking for.

Site-Specific and Immersive Theatres are the future of our industry. Want to do A Cherry

Orchard? Set it in an actual old southern plantation home. Want to do No Exit? Set it in an actual

hotel room (perhaps with blocked-off doors). Want to do A Dream Play? You could probably set

it anywhere and make it part of your concept. Plays that have a single location, or a small

number of locations that can be combined, are ideal candidates for site-specific work. Large

musicals and other plays that involve grand set changes can be done, but not without an

extraordinary amount of money to create the infrastructure to support them or an extraordinary

amount of reconceptualizing to imagine the piece within that small space. The addition of the

history and significance of a location can add a whole new level of conversation within the piece

itself. Beyond this artistic outlook, a pragmatist can see that site-specific theatre has the potential

to be cheaper, less wasteful, and require less labor. It enhances the immersion of any piece, and

sets the production apart from other more traditional performances. Potential drawbacks include

the challenge of bureaucratic negotiations and a general lack of infrastructure and facilities in

terms of stage lighting and sound, as well as other environmental challenges like parking,

weather, and much more.

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Reactionary acting is essential to immersive theatre. The more scripted a performance is,

the less interactive it can be. It allows audience members to investigate different parts of the

story that interest them and lends a reality to character that simply cannot be found through

scripted text. Furthermore, this sort of character-first, text-later approach is useful not only to the

immersive and interactive crowd. It is tremendously useful even in the most traditional theatre

scenes because it trains the actor to react as the character. In order to react as such, the actor must

have a connection to the character that goes far beyond that of the text.

Broadening our sense of space also necessitates a broadening of the concept of objects

within that space. When props are looked at as a form of storytelling in and of themselves rather

than simply a tool of the actor, they take on a life of their own. Thoughtful set designers employ

these visual stories often, but often find their work not fully appreciated by the audience either

because directors highlight other elements of the production or because the audience simply

cannot come up on stage and interact with the objects that are a part of the world of the play.

Moreover, often they cannot be seen for proximity reasons. By incorporating audience

immersion into a piece, theatre makers encourage audience members to engage more fully with

their environment.

An intensive engagement with objects also adds an investigatory sense to immersive

theatre. Audience autonomy is gained through the ability to actively search the environment for

narrative elements. In immersive pieces, audience autonomy is a crucial aspect. While theatre

makers may find it difficult to relinquish control over their audiences, by opening up the

production to audience interaction, the production becomes a conversation. I would make the

analogy that a conversation with an audience member is more memorable than that of a lecture.

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Audience immersion allows participants to engage more fully with the topic at hand and to leave

the production with a richer experience.

There is a myth that immersive theatre requires a grand framework and years of planning.

However, immersive theatre can be as time intensive as you want it to be. The adoption of a

structure that allows for audience autonomy or interaction, even if it is very mild, can be

effective in making a lasting impression on an audience. While the form of any given piece

depends on the needs of the content, I have found that the practice of interspersing free play with

cut scenes has been a very effective way of controlling the narrative while giving audience

members autonomy. Video games, and video game theory concerning player choice, are an

excellent place to start when looking for a structure for an immersive piece. Video games are the

one of the most immersive experiences currently available in the world of entertainment, and the

theatre community would greatly benefit from their model. Even pieces that do not employ

audience autonomy can be made more immersive by simply adding another sense, be it smell,

taste, or touch. These small alterations make a performance more immersive and memorable.

With each new sense added, the performance grows more and more immersive. Many theatres,

such as the Theater Reconstruction Ensemble, are now employing “smell designers” like David

Bernstein, in certain productions to create a stronger sensory experience. I firmly believe that my

show’s success was due to the integration of sensory information.

When asked by people, “What will happen if they believe it is real? What if they break

down the door?” my answer was always enthusiastic—then it will have worked! If an audience

member was so convinced in the final scene that they would break down the door to the

bathroom to find the baby, for a moment they would really believe in the immersion. Of course

when they broke it down all they would see is Kae and her computer running sound and the

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immersion would be broken, but for the time being, it was real. Immersion is not possible in a

long-term sense. It is not hypnosis or some sort of degenerative mind state that lasts for years. It

is almost a transcendental state that audience members only see flickers of as they move through

the event. It is a reactionary state in which the body reacts to real stimuli, even though,

intellectually, one recognizes that stimulus is constructed.

I’ll close with a short anecdote. One night, the Saturday second show, the most amazing

thing happened: the immersion really worked. During the final scene, Tilden was sobbing in his

corner when one of the audience members came over to him and held his hand. She held his

hand for the entire final scene, comforting him and trying to get him to stop crying. The actor

playing Tilden reported that this only made him cry more, because it made it feel so much more

real. At the end of the scene when Dodge is ushering everyone out of the house, this audience

member had to be pulled away from Tilden. One of the people who came with her had to tell her,

“It’s only a show.” When I later inquired about her experience she responded with a shaky laugh

and said, “I know it was only a play but it just felt so real.”

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hotel-review.html?_r=0 .

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Tompkins. 69-83. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

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(1991) 158-159.

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Appendix

Following the production I sent out a short survey to the participants in the experience. Nineteen

individuals responded and agreed that I could use their responses in my thesis. The questions

from the survey are included below:

1. With which character/space did you spend the most time?

2. At what moment, if any, did you believe the play was real? At what points did the

immersion fail?

3. What physical reactions, if any, did you have to the performance?

4. On a scale of one to ten, one being not engaged and ten being totally immersed, how

engaged were you with the performance?

5. How would you rank the importance of sensory information to this show?

6. What did you SEE that excited you? Why?

7. How did SOUNDS affect your experience? Why?

8. What SMELLS did you notice and how did you react to them? Why?

9. How did TASTE affect your experience? Why?

10. What objects in the house did you TOUCH? Why?

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Permission of Use

I, Chiara Montali , hereby give permission for the use of my image in the thesis

“Sam Shepard and Objects: Site-Specific Immersive Theatre” written by Jennifer Kellett.

4/12/16

Participant Signature Date

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