What’s the most welcome you’ve ever felt in an interactive show?
It’s a big question, and partly depends on the person, and partly on the experience. Who are guests encouraged to be?
No Character
Some shows, especially at the more commercial end of interactive theatre, don’t ask for any persona from the guests at all. The audience are people there to have a good time, engage with some interactive mechanics or similar, and more or less behave as they wish. It’s fun, it’s straightforward, and asks little of the audience. However, it also means that any moment one audience member talks to another audience member, they’re dragged a little bit away from the world of the show.
Light Character
Some people love stepping into another, familiar world; whether that’s being an occult investigator in The Key of Dreams, or a frantic Labour party member in Crisis? What Crisis? This model gives attendees a very slim sense of character (Here is your function; these are your goals; these are the tools by which you can achieve them), and then lets the audience decide how far each individual wants to take it.
Some people dress up and effectively LARP their way through such shows; others stay as more-or-less themselves. The shows’ actors treat the audience as people from the world of the show, and thus help audiences relax into a sense of belonging. Equally, it relies on audience members both committing to such engagement, and on them not disrupting each others’ fun with hammy acting or mismatched tone. If one audience member engages with a show as a tragedy, and another treats it as a farce, at least one is likely to not have fun.
Supported Character
Other shows offer support in character-building, more akin to LARP. Hidden Figures gave each audience member a historical person to embody (though didn’t give details). It included a fascinating moment of giving-audiences-a-character, when my historical figure was treated as though everything I said was both flirtatious and witty. Regardless of who I was, the show supported me to be someone else.
Chloe Mashiter’s Shield and Torch took a different approach, with a structured process for each attendee to create their own character to live in that world. Facilitators guided audience choices, allowing a LARP-like level of individual-led but still collaborative persona-building. It’s not an approach I’ve seen elsewhere in the interactive world outside LARP, and one I’d be interested in seeing more of.
This works well for experiences trying to curate a very particular experience - and reflects Chloe’s interest in both making audiences feel like residents with an (especially emotional) stake in the world, and how different types of immersion impact guests' experiences.
Disrupted Character
It’s impossible to write about interactive theatre at the moment without mentioning Jack Aldisert’s The Manikins: A Work In Progress. [MINOR SPOILERS]. Here, the audience member is welcome to behave as themself, or create a persona as in light-character shows. It is very interesting comparing notes between different who’ve experienced the show, and seen how it twists and challenges either approach to interactive theatre - and fits well with the generally disconcerting weird fiction-esque tone of the show. It’s certainly engaging, and I’d be interested in seeing such an approach in a less psychologically-focused piece. Does it work, for example, in an interactive epic where the interest is on the world and not the individual?
Which Approach Is Right?
Obviously, that’s the wrong question. Each of these approaches works for the right context. Disrupted characters work for psychologically-focused and intimate work; supported characters work for shows trying to create a very specific community; light characters work for shows (especially those with a pulpy edge) where the focus is less on the character and more on the world.
For Come Bargain, we’re mostly straddling the light/supported options.
People ought to feel like they are part of their community. It is a world much like our own, except for the Uncanny Things. The audience are a community, even if they might be subject to or in control of an eldritch being.
As in light character shows, they can choose to lean into the world a bit, but in general the questions being asked of them (how do we serve our community in this situation? Which people deserve to be treated in which ways?) are ones that are very intuitive to human beings.
As in supported character shows, they are given clear guidance as to how they fit into the world. They are a community, this is the nature of that community, and it makes sense. It’s why this show is saturated with the supernatural, but it’s deliberately described in everyday language beyond a few core terms that are quick to pick up, with any more specialised words being treated as rare knowledge an everyday person would lack.
Ultimately, the audience of any show form a community together. You might not know your neighbours, but you treat them with a care and respect. As in disrupted character shows, we take a fact of interactive audience behaviour (in this case, that strangers generally treat each other decently at shows) and use that fact to support our world. You are a community of strangers who have come together, but you are yourselves.
Looking Forwards
This blog was initially going to be more about the community and courts of Come Bargain With Uncanny Things and Come Worship Our Uncanny King.
However, it’s mostly made me think about the world of Come Murder An Uncanny Thing.
Here, the audience are members of a community, summoned by a vigilante that has captured an uncanny thing. Are their identities visible to each other? Is everybody masked? What happens if people are given ceremonial identities to wear; that of judge, juror, and executioner? Or if the uncanny thing starts disrupting the show’s sense of ‘who is the audience’ as a weapon?
All questions to ponder - for now, thank you for reading, do consider contributing to the crowdfunder, and more anon.
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