MEGO

As I discussed in my first book (and maybe my second?) I think that the best way to develop a story, any story, is to tell it over and over, to different people, without notes. This gets you a bunch of things:

a. You can tell how it holds together. If you can't remember what comes next, then the story logic needs mending

b. You can immediately tell if your listener is bored. People who read your writing have time to prepare a lie, but if their eyes glaze over, they're bored

c. You may come up with something better as you tell your story on the fly. Writing a story down freezes it, but until then, it's a fluid, living, growing thing.

So here's Yannick Trapman-O'Brian, immersive experience-maker, on Reality Escape Pod S8E7:

"I wish upon everyone an intoxicated audience. The clarity it requires of you, someone just looking you full in the face as you do your beautiful dance piece and they go, 'Okay, this is boring, I'd rather go pee.' That is such good feedback."

See? 

Odysseus is a comic hero:

 

Odysseus is a comic hero:

• It's Odysseus's fault he doesn't go straight home, because he just HAS to tell Polyphemus his name
• After he ends the war by hiding in a fake horse
• After he tries to duck the draft by pretending to be insane
• Circe turns his men into pigs
• He's captured by a nymph, Calypso, who keeps him as her boy toy. For, like, 7 years.
• When he gets to Ithaca, he lies his head off to the first person he meets, a shepherd boy, telling him a cockamamie story about having been kidnapped by pirates...
• ...the boy turns out to be Athena in drag.
• When he gets home, he doesn't tell anyone who he is, not even his wife, Penelope, who he tells that he "saw" Odysseus, in Egypt or something
• Even after he kills all the suitors, Penelope still tries to trick him by asking him to move their bed, to his great irritation, because it's impossible
• His final task is to appease Poseidon by carrying an oar inland so far that people have no idea what an oar is. 

No Proscenium

 Another interesting thing about immersive, experiental theatre:  it is local. So much of the world is now global. There is no proper city in the West without a sushi restaurant. You look at a new museum (probably by Frank Gehry) and you have no idea where it is without looking at the caption. 

But immersive theatre? If you want to experience Phantom Peak, you have to go to London. 

Ladders? Los Angeles. 

Meow Wolf's Radio Tave? Houston. 

Factory Obscura's Time Slip? Oklahoma City. 

Moment Factory's Foresta Lumina? Parc de la Gorge de Coaticook, about two hours East of Montreal.

(I was commissioned to pitch a Moment Factory show for Jean Drapeau Park on Ile Ste-Hélène in the St. Lawrence River. That was super fun even just thinking about it.)

Wasteland Weekend? Neotropolis? Burning Man? The freakin' Mojave Desert. 

(I'm not counting the projection shows where you pay $30 to look at Van Gogh screen savers projected on walls.) 

Like, I'm seriously thinking, wouldn't it be nice to fly to London and go to Phantom Peak? I'm sure there's other things I could find to do over there. 

And notice that it's not all cultural hotspots. There's a lot of theater you can only see in London or New York. But Oklahoma City? 

(Check out Everything Immersive and No Proscenium if you want proof.)

I keep thinking: this is the exact opposite of video games. Each copy of a video game is identical. You can have different experiences, but you can't have an experience that isn't programmed into the game. You can have emergent gameplay -- the interaction of different mechanics producing unforeseen effects -- but true emergent storytelling is ... well, I've never seen it, and I've played a bunch of games that are supposed to have it. 

You can buy any videogame almost anywhere. You can download anything on Steam in Hokkaido or Honolulu and (if you're clever) Hanoi. 

Videogames scale. If one person can play it, a million people can play it (if you throw on enough servers and work out lag issues). Every immersive theatre show is artisanal. 

As with theatre, each performance is unique. There's a script, usually, but you'll never see the same performance again exactly.

It's interesting to contemplate the other end of the spectrum from the art business I'm in.