“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.” – William Shakespeare, As You Like It
When you first enter Measure for Measure: the Immersive Experience, the interactive theater performance based on the Shakespeare play at Majestic Repertory Theatre in Las Vegas, you are greeted by City Manager Maureen Escala who welcomes the no more than 18 audience members. The audience limit is so each member can engage both with other audience members and the cast themselves. She gives a healthy dose of expository information, including setting the story in the 70s in the amusingly designated Lost Wages (say it out loud: Lost Wages/Las Vegas), all the while relaxing the audience – most of whom are a little nervous, not knowing what to expect from interactive theater – with small talk. From there, the audience is led, blindfolded, into another room and the story begins.What is expected of an audience member who by act of purchasing a ticket must needs interact with characters who have a story to tell, to act out? It’s a fairly intimidating prospect for viewers. But theater director Troy Heard thinks it’s the perfect question to pose to a new generation of theater-goers who have grown up on video games which over the last decade have worked to become experiences that give the player control of the story.
Heard likes to talk about interactive theater in relation to video games and while talking with him, I couldn’t help but recall Roger Ebert’s thoughts on video games as art. Ebert somewhat now famously wrote, “I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say ‘never,’ because never … is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.”
Ebert seemed to be hung up on the “game” aspect of the form. A thing to win or lose. But Heard is approaching the question from the flip side – how can art learn from video game design? Video games are interactive by definition, but the actual control of characters has always been limited. Early text based video games like Oregon Trail and Zork allowed players to make decisions and use in-game objects that to varying degrees affected the outcomes of individual situations, if not character or storyline endings. The development of popular video games diverged from developing player agency for a few decades as graphics and player control inputs became the focus of the industry.
Still, the idea of more player controlled agency persisted among avid gamers and designers until games like Planescape: Torment and Fable began to merge what had become status quo visual design with more cutting edge open-ended player-decision based elements. Today, practically every genre of video game, from RPG (role-playing games) to FPS (first-person shooters) to platform to puzzle games incorporate some form of player influenced outcome.
This sort of emergement, with control over the story, in fictional worlds, did not originate in video games. For more than a century, in fantasy and science fiction literature – from Edgar Rice Burroughs to C.S. Lewis to Philip K. Dick to Stephen R. Donaldson – characters have been transported to other worlds, able to engage and affect outcomes. Even, in some cases, prophesied or destined to do so. But these stories were still framed in a setting where the author was an all-powerful narrator, and the reader left to follow along, filling in details with their imagination, but not affecting the story itself.
A popular, and now cult-classic book series, Choose Your Own Adventure, allowed readers to make decisions for the main characters at certain points, instructing readers to turn to different pages to continue the storyline they had chosen. In film and television, adaptations and original stories like these began to emerge. Current television series like Westworld and Black Mirror, or films like Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, imagine a future where video game players or technology users can inhabit or upload their consciousnesses to wholly constructed, but open-ended worlds – where their actions have very real effects on the people and worlds around them.
Many of these film and television based stories take on an air of dystopia. But Heard imagines something else for interactive theater, a world where the characters interact and empathize with other human beings – yes, they are still actors, but ones who must collapse their roles on the stage with interactions with other, autonomous human beings who make up the “audience.” The actors must not just inhabit their characters, but also be comfortable working in improv and in fact be aware of the psychological factors – the moods and mentality – of their audience.
From an audience perspective, the entire experience is somewhat disorienting – which is not at all to say bad or undesired. In Measure for Measure there are multiple “tracks” audience members can follow. So while you are led by character or extra from scene to scene, you become involved in their “lives,” supporting, discouraging, engaging in their activities. You also don’t see every scene, so as characters interact with each other over the course of the story, you remain limited in your knowledge of the story to what you have witnessed and engaged in. The logistics of creating such an experience in a theatrical setting are intimidating, and even if at this point less polished than they could be, utterly impressive in Heard and his team’s bootstrap execution. You can run through the play multiple times on different tracks and experience different storylines and see different points of view, without losing track of the overall plot.
Having read Measure for Measure years ago in high school, I knew the overall plot, even if I had forgotten some of the details. Still, I found myself engaging in the character’s actions, questions to me, and pleas for… connection. Given the source material is Shakespeare, it’s not hard to get wrapped up in these character’s lives and feel some measure of empathy, if not sympathy for them. I knew these were actors, I knew the story, and yet I couldn’t help but connect on emotional and intellectual levels to the people in front of me. This is not your parent’s theater.
I mentioned to Heard a drawback to theater in this form is that the one thing a structured story with an all seeing audience has is a set, definitive sequence of details that happen. We see all characters and all their motivations and circumstances (setting aside authorial conceits such as unreliable narrators). In an immersive experience, I feel more engaged in only the characters I have interacted with. He acknowledged that, but doesn’t see it as a limitation. He views it instead as an opportunity for audiences to come back and run through different tracks and/or just compare notes with others at the end.
To that point, after the performance, the audience – the entire audience – stood outside and engaged each other, sharing their experiences and piecing together parts of the story they didn’t directly observe with others who had traveled down different paths. It was unlike anything I’ve observed after a theater experience — from Broadway productions to independent theater productions in the arts district of downtown Las Vegas. It also leads my mind to other questions, such as wondering why we feel so trapped to act how we think we must in the “real” world, but free to act more openly in imagined ones. But maybe that’s part of the point.
Measure for Measure is closing, but not before it drew attention and national exposure in places like USA Today, among others. But Heard is committed to developing more interactive experiences, with a few already lined up for the upcoming months. It’s rather exciting to have such a creative, sociological, and indeed, psychological experiment happening in a city that has struggled to establish independent artistic voices (despite being filled with ones looking for their big break or as a comfortable place to fall back on). Maybe Las Vegas can also be a place where they can flourish.
