The show in the creepy hotel with the masks still looms so very large in New York. Immersive shows here, whether they intend to or not, are in dialogue with the story of Sleep No More and the expectations it has set about operational scale, interactive modality, aesthetics, choreography, design, you name it. You can feel this particularly at Third Rail shows: throughout Grand Paradise one detected deliberate embraces of the Punchdrunk idea, and in other parts, deliberate rejections of it.
If, like me, you’ve spent the last year or so thirsting for something new to come along and fill the void that’s opened up through the slow disenchantment process at the McKittrick Hotel, then you’ll likely find HERE to be an intriguing and challenging response to the state of NYC immersive theater. Rather than play larger, it plays radically smaller. The time scale is cut to an hour; episodic by design, the story unfolds in very deliberately selected stages. Spectacle is out, extreme familiarity is in.
After seeing one of the preview performances last week, my best friend – also a long-term SNM veteran – and I both started our responses with the same tricky question: did it feel, well, derivative? And we both knew immediately that wasn’t quite the word we were looking for.
HERE does feel very familiar, and familial: the movement vocabulary shares a great deal with Punchdrunk and for obvious reasons: Kelly Bartnik and Tori Sparks alike both have long histories with the company and contributed a great deal to it; Tori’s movement work also has a visible impact at Third Rail. HERE chooses to embrace its lineages. The setting is dark; there is wonky distorted sound design and garbled radio effects, and carefully perfumed spaces. Aesthetically speaking, if you feel at home in the McKittrick, you’ll very much like the Riley house, and anticipate some of its secrets.
Familiarity of this kind, though, proves to be helpful: the choreography, pleasing though it is, doesn’t feel alien and can instead move toward the background. The storytelling is done primarily by the space and the sharp characterization. With so little time to establish character, world and story, the choices made in HERE are all critical and deliberate: gameplay in the house isn’t for its own sake. The track I experienced gave me a decent sense of the five characters (four of them living), a sense of their conflicts, and a glimmer of what is likely a disturbing backstory; a quick check-in with the other four guests after the show left us all with a slightly more detailed, but purposefully incomplete picture of their world. As a pilot episode, it works perfectly.
The performance space design, I should add, is absolutely top-notch, with a degree of finish and detail I never would have expected from a small, short run. One particularly impressive moment involved the creation of an impromptu space (we’ll call it “the thing in the tent” and HERE audience will know what I mean) that is sort of a Danvers 1:1 on steroids and felt brilliant: it executes so smoothly and segues directly into important reveals from Jack.
The frustration, of course, is that the show will now enter the run of Episode 1. I’ll want to go back and try to get another track, but mostly I’m thirsting for Episode 2 and that is probably months away. The short elapsed time is a good creative constraint, but I wonder on a strategic level about how to make it unfold in good succession with other episodes: what’s the right release pace? How does an audience get caught up (or do you just not?). But overall I think this is the right gamble in a tight attention economy. Given limited space, there’s limited mobility: given limited mobility, you don’t want interminable time for exploration, but rather a sense of urgency and guidance. HERE’s first episode delivers both, and I’m looking forward to where it goes next. Hopefully soon.
