The velveteen rabbit comes to life by a creek-bed in the woods. Children race alongside the tortoise and the hare in Aesop’s famous fable. Audience members step into the action to help a young hero fight off an evil menace threatening to destroy the universe. Hippies sing and dance beside viewers in a wildflower meadow at sunset.
It seems that some of the most intriguing things happening in Atlanta theater lately have actually been occurring outside the theater. In recent years, theater groups have increasingly picked up their shows and moved them into inventive new settings, offering up interactive and immersive productions that take viewers, often quite literally, on a journey that extends well beyond the confines of a theater’s four walls.
"Atlanta audiences want something fantastical," says Michael Haverty, associate artistic director of 7 Stages, which created last year's hit production "The Navigator." The show had audience members dashing in and out of the evocative late 19th-century industrial architecture of the Goat Farm Arts Center as they followed and participated in the story of the young hero Owen as he battled the evil alien force Harsh.
“It was different. It was a spectacle. I think that’s why ‘The Navigator’ did so well. People want to be surprised. They want to be thrilled. It sells.”
Selling tickets is a key motivator for interactive, immersive theater.
"One of the things we noticed was that audiences were dwindling," says Adam Fristoe, who co-founded Out of Hand Theater in 2001. "We tried to figure out what's missing from the traditional theater experience."
His group began to create shows designed to give audience members a greater stake in the performance. Their 2003 show “Big Love” was conceptualized as a wedding in which audience members were treated as guests. Instead of just sitting a darkened theater, participants interacted with actors playing members of a wedding party at an event venue. With the show going on all around them, the audience drank a champagne toast, competed to catch the wedding bouquet and enjoyed a slice of wedding cake. Out of Hand’s “The Game,” which takes place every Mother’s Day weekend, mixes traditional theater with a scavenger hunt. Audience members compete to decipher clues given by actors in various locations around the city. And the show “Group Intelligence” involves no actors at all. Led by mp3 players, audience members perform in a piece about chemical evolution in which they’re instructed to imitate the processes of molecular assembly.
Such productions are what Fristoe calls “event-style theater,” and he contends that one of the strengths of this type of show is the fact that it can reach audiences that don’t typically attend the theater.
“Our audience is pretty broad because there are a lot of people who are untouched by conventional theater for various reasons,” he says. “They find it boring or it’s too long of a commitment or ticket prices are too high.”
Although it’s a style of theater artists often adopt out of necessity, either to reach new viewers or to avoid the high costs of theater rental, producers are rewarded by the audience’s enthusiastic response.
Brian Clowdus founded Serenbe Playhouse in 2009 with the idea of eventually building a proper playhouse. But after an initial season of site-specific productions, he realized the creative use of existing space fwas a major draw for audiences. He scrapped plans for a theater and focused on creating site-specific productions. So far they have included "Ugly Duckling," which that took place on a stage that extended into a lake; "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" with a Headless Horseman galloping through the Serenbe stables; and an outdoor Woodstock-inspired production of "Hair" that had audience members purchasing tickets in a psychedelic school bus and watching the cast perform in a field of wildflowers.
“That’s all people were talking about after our first season: theater al fresco, theater under the stars, site-specific work,” Clowdus says. “I decided that was our thing. We’ve attracted an audience that isn’t a typical theater audience. It becomes communal, it becomes festive.”
This summer, Serenbe Playhouse plans a production of “Wizard of Oz” with audience members following Dorothy through the woods from Kansas to Oz; a contemporary drama called “Ten Mile Lake,” which will take place on a dock; and a production of “Oklahoma” set in a barn with live goats and chickens wandering through the action.
Clowdus contends that theater artists have to realize they’re now competing with a fast-paced, screen-based culture.
“We can’t ignore what’s going on in media,” he says. “We really do have to redefine what we’re doing to cultivate a young, new audience. Unless we reinvent what we’re doing, we’re going to be in a bad position.”
