 an amazing experience as an audience member in Bushwick, Brooklyn, which I live in Park Slope and I generally tend to not believe that anything good happens in Bushwick. But I was proven wrong. I attended this astonishing performance at a converted, what would you call it? What is this space? It's a converted warehouse. A converted warehouse. It's a real space. Oh, you're supposed to use your microphones here. Oh, before we get started, I've been told that for those of you watching on HowlRound, the live stream, that if you have any questions for us today, you can tweet them using the hashtag CNPS16, that's Colorado New Place on it, 1-6. So I saw your latest production, it's called The Grand Paradise, and we're going to get into sort of the idea of what it is that you do, but I just wanted to explain my experience briefly so that we can start with my reason for being here, right? And because I'm used to creating theater, I'm used to being in the audience as a creator of theater, I'm used to being in the audience as an attendee, but this was an amazing experience for me because I was asked to be a participant in the event. I was asked to, in some ways, be an actor as well. I was asked to be complicit in the events that transpired. It was not a passive experience, and I realized that the performance I was seeing to a degree was only as good as I was willing to allow it to be for myself, and that is something that you rarely get in theater, and that was, for me, I came away from that really energized and really excited to talk to you guys, so I'm with that. I want to just sort of begin our conversation by talking about, before we even get into specifically your work, by talking a little bit about what it is, how can we define for our audience here, for the audiences in Denver and for the people watching on HowlRound, what it is, how do you define immersive theater? Do you call when you do immersive theater? What do you work for? Experiential theater? Sometimes. Well, let me just, to explain the piece that Matthew just saw, so this is a project that we just opened in New York called The Grand Paradise, and in the middle of Brooklyn, we've made a 1970s-era tropical resort, and we're sort of booking it like that. Come to Paradise, you go through an airline terminal, you kind of get onboarded, and then you find yourself in, for those in Denver, something that may look a little bit like Casabonida. I grew up in Denver, I interned at the DCPA, and so things like Casabonida are deep, deep in my psyche. And Tom grew up in Florida, and so there's all manner of theme parkiness, and we talk about all of that, and the inspiration for that is Vision Keeper for that project. But basically, what happens is there are 60 audience members who come to this tropical resort. They are greeted by a flowered garland, and cute cabana boys in really short shorts, and you find yourself transported to another time and place. And then pretty immediately thereafter, you realize that you have the agency to be able to explore this resort. You can go to the beach, you can go to the Mirrorball Disco Tech, you can go to any of these things, and you may find yourself in intimate encounters with performers. You may find yourself alone in a room with a performer who is not just doing a scene for you, but doing a scene with you. I'm having a conversation with you. And while sometimes people feel like they are asked to be actors in it, more often than not, we actually just ask you to be yourself, and to have a conversation with us, to think about this, and maybe to go along with some of the strange little journeys that we go on. And then over the course of this evening, 60 audience members experience as many as 20 simultaneous scenes. No one, it is impossible for anybody to see the same show. No one sees all of the same content. And so at the end of it, you walk at like, if we had gone together, Matthew may have seen something vastly different than I did. And so that's sort of a jumping off point for, you know, what is this conversation about? What is immersive theater? Or what is it that we do? Do you want to talk a little bit more about this? I think when we start talking about immersive theater, sometimes it's like easier to talk about what we do than the whole field, because it gets defined both by the song and by the parts. And I think that the parts are doing really, really different things. Immersive theater, as I understand the way it's been labeled and why it's been labeled, is sort of classify an experience, something that is tactile and something that is like a 360 degree world that wraps around its audience. And I think most of the immersive theater or experiential theater, which is sometimes called, I mean, it depends on who's calling it that. But I think the leading characteristics are that, that it's environmentally based, that you're in the middle of it as an audience. And then to some degree, more or less, you have some of your own agency within those worlds, so you're making some choices about how you experience it. The audience models that I've seen work really well are somewhere, you know, it's about anonymity, and you're given a license like in the Plumstruck where it's lit no more, you're given a mask and they can get hundreds of people in the door and you're sort of free to go wherever you want. You have all the choices you can follow. Follow a character, follow a room, stay in one place, and the experience can be very, very different for you, depending on what you choose to do. For us, our agenda is more about intimacy and crafting an audience experience a little bit more invisibly and also with very fragmented narratives but also really connective art for our audience. So more often than not, we start with them in mind and we say, what do we want this audience experience to be? And ultimately, how do we get there? So scene building happens with the audience in mind and the scene actually can't happen without the audience, so we bring in test audiences very early on and we really craft it with that idea that it's going to be about what this person's experiencing and I think when you say you were invited to be a part of it, that's true and it can't happen without you. So it's meant to be a responsive model and we're still going to land on the scene. The scene has certain parameters around it. The piece has certain parameters around it. You have agency in some areas and then others are very invisibly guided and I think that the structure for us wants to always remain invisible but you want to feel that we're responding to you or to anyone that comes into these scenes and so maybe we'll talk about this later. There's also a different performance technique that gets employed in this type of world because as an actor you get to define the scene and you still have to get somewhere by the end so you have a palette of responses for whatever an audience choice might be you can honor it and then you can still get the reading that they go. What was so fascinating to me and my experience watching Ground Paradise was experiencing Ground Paradise was I had to learn that it was okay to be a part of this thing. Even as open minded to anything as I like to believe I am, there is, I think in anyone, unless you walk in completely like gung-ho ready to tackle this thing and take it on, I found myself going oh wow, there's a lot going on around me and I have agency. That is such an amazing experience as an audience member to know. When you see any production of any play you don't have, unless you're that guy at Hand of God who decided to go plug himself over on the set, you don't really have a lot of ability to explore the set, to explore the world of the play. You are the ancient model as you sit there, we present it, you respond and we're done. With this I was invited into rooms with just three other audience members. I was invited into rooms with one other actor. There was an entire, there were scenes that were played just for me and what I mean by and I think you refined my statement about being an actor I became a scene partner in the events. And what happened to me in my experience watching the piece over time was that I really, once I found that I was being taken care of, once I found that everything was being done for my benefit, for my viewing pleasure for my learning, for whatever I was able to just absolutely let you take me on a journey in a way that I don't remember the last time that happened to me at any play. As much as I loved any particular play I may have seen, it stayed with me and it kind of haunts me actually. There are moments because these moments I know I'm like, we always say about theater it's different every night depending on where you sit in the audience the experience you have, but it's still the same play every night. And in this, like you said, there is no every moment in this is a unique moment and in some instances it was my own private moment that only I know the actor sharing it with me and so I've taken this experience away from me and it's been a week, a week and a half since I've seen this I can't stop thinking about it and that's, for me that's the mark of success as a theater artist. I think it's more about than she felt, which is the first piece that, I don't know if that's the first piece you did in New York, but it's certainly the first piece that they gave you some attention and and put you on the map as they say. What was the genesis of that project and can you explain that for those of us who may not know what that is? I'm going to go a kind of long way around that but I wanted to talk a little bit about how this type of work appears for a group of artists we didn't start out wanting to make this kind of work, we kind of didn't even know what we were doing once upon a time in 2001 we had all graduated from college, third rail projects was at that point third rail dance we were doing more sort of the first thing that you do when you come out of college producing repertory works in a rented space sort of doing little projects around the city and at a certain point we started asking ourselves the question who are our audiences? We felt in some cases a little bit like we might be preaching to the choir and there were a couple opportunities that afforded us the chance to start making work outside of traditional spaces to start creating site specific work and it was I think that that really sort of spun us off in a direction that sort of inevitably led us to where we are now where we were exploring these non-traditional performance spaces whether it was the lobby of the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian where Tom did his first piece the first site specific work that third rail ever did where the South Street Seaport in the middle of Happy Hour where I had a piece called Hope and Henker we were looking at these we were looking at these spaces understanding what the architecture was trying to listen to who are the people who come here what are they doing here and what might we be able to offer them as opposed to just like showing up and like arding at them because nobody likes that, right? So how can we create an offering that fits into this space that uses this space that responds to this space and asks questions of it and then we sort of continued working in this way refining a lot of the techniques that we work with and in parallel we became really interested in creating large scale installations installations in some cases where an audience member is able to go through and explore sort of like a museum and so you might be able to open up a drawer and find out more about a story the more that you dig the more you can honor the story sort of like object theater and so those two those two interests really started converging for us and then I think the final piece of the puzzle is it's kind of a question that we keep asking is how do you re-contextualize an audience's relationship with performance? How can we mess with that, especially in the wake of the digital age that we're in right now where we find ourselves so separated from other human beings where we are able to get whatever content we want on the crazy computer that's in our pocket what are the things that performance might need or want to do right now and for all of those reasons we sort of found our way to the sort of initial creation of Then She Fell would you want to talk a little bit about what that piece is? Then She Fell was the first time we really truly decided to synthesize what we had been working and fully integrate all of those aspects in terms of the visual site specific work on real world architecture the idea of ephemera being part of the story the objects within the world the world itself, the art installation really bringing all that together and we knew that it would be a fun experience but we were questioning the way in which we would put the story together and people would relax into it and not feel like I'm going to miss out on something or I'm not getting the narrative or whatever because we knew it would be inherently fragmented and in some ways work within a dream logic so we decided for the first time ever and the only time ever to use an existing source is when we are on from our personal stories because our lives are weird enough so what can we use that would have cultural catching kind of everywhere we were actually in Hong Kong on a rooftop talking to someone when this story was born and she was like oh you should go with Lewis Carroll because everyone knows Lewis Carroll I was like I don't like Lewis Carroll and everyone thinks I'm obsessed over not so we were like well that would be really interesting because then we could hook our narrative into something that has cultural signifiers and people could relax they would go into a room and if they were asked to paint roses with a white rabbit that wouldn't have to be explained you would know the consequences of that already so we could go even further into psychological space and we could really push this and so we started looking at it and we got really excited his life was way more complicated than I thought we had a real life relationship with this family and this real Alice and there's missing pages from a diary of some event that happened so it started getting really juicy and we looked at this idea Zac had actually the vision he brought on this one and Zac was really thinking along the lines of duality and split sort of agendas mapping that out and we were looking at the two works the two primary works Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Plus and they both they happened on either side of whatever this real life event was and so the first one was very much about you know this idea of a child in an adult world and it making no sense and it's based on the logic of chance it's a card game and the second one is based off the logic of chess and it's very much driven and there's a program here there's a strategy to it and so for me that's where I started getting really excited because that was like this go babble stuff that I was really into and so I think thematically that all kind of merged with the work we were doing this really rich kind of real life story and the two very different agendas within these books and then the ability to have a fragmented narrative and make lots and lots of room for our audience to see whatever they want to see in it and this is where we started talking about the work as a rorschach and what it means to make space for your audience so that whatever they need to see whatever they want to see it's framed for them and they can have whatever take away and how many can you talk about what this actual structure of them is? Oh, yeah for those of you who do not hear the question was explaining the structure, the physical structure of how then she felt works, what the audience experiences and also I think also talk about like I think this is a great way to transition as well into the idea of how you begin to put these things together the process of writing, devising, rehearsing these pieces. I'll start with the structure and I'm going to balance it to you for that. The structure is very intimate, it's 8 performers and 15 audience members and it's in the 3 story building in Blamesford Brooklyn and it's actually running simultaneously with the new show so it's been going for 3 years now and it's you know that was the thing that we walked into it knowing that we wanted to make it an intimate experience for 2 hours you would go into this world and you would feel like it was there just for you and you were the only one often you are the only one in a room with a good one and so that that became the really driving mission of the audience model of the work was like how to keep it in this tight form so that everything was about you and that led us to the way in which we built it which you can talk about yeah I mean I think that was the thing that kind of blew my mind as a theatre maker was early on in this process we knew that we wanted to create a show that was decidedly intimate which was in some way about the audience you know and as a good theatre maker I kept on asking what's the major dramatic question who is the protagonist in this piece and at a certain point I think we all realized that the audience was the protagonist which blew my mind but then that affords all of these really exciting possibilities that if our audience is the protagonist then it's actually their journey that's the most important so what is the exposition that they need to get what are the little hooks of information that they need to find and then how do we create enough space for them to go on kind of whatever journey they want to because anytime we come to the theatre we are looking through our own lenses and so then how can we create scenes in which there's space for you to really look through your own lens so you can you can read whatever you want to read or need to read throughout these sort of fragmented moments I would kind of like to talk about it as our job being that we're supposed to create these series of dots hopefully really interesting dots and the audience's job is to connect those dots but what that means is that everybody who comes out of the show has a vastly different picture they're all the same dots but you've connected them this way you've connected them this way it's great to hang out outside of like then she fell and listen to someone walk out and be like that was a story about the subjugation of women and Victorian times and I was really moved by it somebody else was like no that was a story of lost love and somebody else was like no that's a story of and they're all right is the thing which was the other thing that blew my head as a theatre maker actually my job isn't to tell the story my job is to create the opportunity for the audience to tell their own story and that's the thing that's most important so how do you build that I think we're still figuring that out but it really is about kind of what Tom said thinking about what the experience is that we want the audience to have are playing with that I want to because I think this is a really interesting and I do want but I just want the audience to know I want to describe for them briefly the experience I had from Paradise so they get a sense of one individual person's journey through that story and then I want to find out from you really talk about the rehearsing thing so I show up at this place I get my airline ticket we are sent into this small room where a video plays and it is the standard video in which you get the safety guidelines for your flight wonderful low-made video I love that was an incredible touch and then you walk into this big room and there's how many of us are there there's 60 people and the performance begins as I understood them they're a family and they arrive and they check in and you're there with them you've been given flower garlades and you are you are instantly I just had taken my honeymoon in Hawaii just like a month ago so I'm like oh this is I know that and then the performance begins it kind of already has started but then it begins and you realize you're told don't open any doors that are closed but other than that there's a lot of freedom to roam and once things were underway I just realized I could go anywhere and I was like okay what do I want to look at and there was a beautiful room that was sort of like behind a window which was like a woman's boudoir and it was I could look at it through the window it was almost like a very voyeuristic experience there's a bar off to the side so after the beginning of the performance I was invited to join a smaller group of audience members and we went into another room and the performance for us started to break down from this group of 60 to this group of maybe like 6 or 7 and then I was broken down into a smaller group of 3 and we were all just started to be fragmented and then there were moments when I was allowed to free roam around this and that's when I was looking in the boudoir and then eventually at some point someone came up to me and said follow me and they like took my hand and they led me somewhere and I had there was a scene just for me with another actor and I was involved in the telling of that story and then I was able to roam some more and then I was invited elsewhere and what was amazing to me in the experience was my ability to determine for myself what my experience would be and your and your company is very and I mean this in the best way calculated a way of funneling me into the storyline as you needed me to experience it the crowd control which never ever felt like crowd control and there were some moments there was a moment in can I tell you the bedroom scene I'm sure I don't want to give away any secrets I was invited into a bedroom and this young woman and I was in this bedroom and I was asked to pick a record it was a Linda Rotsab record I mean I didn't pick Linda Rotsab it was just luck of the draw maybe I picked Linda Rotsab and you're in this like run down hotel room it both feels very intimate and dangerous but in a safe way and exciting and I was fascinated about what was going to happen next and that never happens and I was led into another room where I had my column read and I was led into a room where I was someone was talking about our astrological signs and it was and there was something cumulatively beautiful about the entire thing and I was walking out that yes indeed I had an experience that no one else has ever will ever have the chance, the infinite chance have you ever figured out the mathematical possibilities of someone actually having the exact same experience yeah I mean it leads me to my question and then I'm going to shut up it did cause me to realize that this must be there are scenes that go on in the play that I didn't get to see they were happening simultaneously as I was maybe in that bedroom having a pillow fight with this woman no kidding listening to Linda Rotsab and I realized these are all happening simultaneously and the other thing that was amazing to me was it wasn't until the end when we all regrouped that I had forgotten there were 60 of us doing this thing there were moments when I felt I was the only person at this thing in the form all the participants evaporated and what was left was me and the performers and the experience we were having and so I know it's sort of dangerous to dissect the magic but I am so fascinated by the nuts I'm a theater maker too I was like half of my brain was split by like this is wonderful how the hell do they do this so how the hell do they do it how do they do it I'm curious about the schematics of it do you write it are you like a general pattern with a big map and you're looking at how this thing works yes all of those things and it's also it is radically different for every project a lot of it is what is the experience that we want the audience to have not only individually but collectively for what then she fell we did a lot of figuring out how to create this series of events for an audience that had both that would provide both a satisfying aesthetic and narrative arc regardless of in what order you might see scenes or what scenes you saw, what scenes you didn't but also had a degree of randomness and a chance because that was important to the work for this how do you how do you create a structure that affords the audience the opportunity to to explore or resort you go on vacation and you want to look around and see all this stuff how do you get a chance to do that and then how do you get a chance to decide where you want to go and then be able to have a satisfying and so it really depends on on the project how that structure gets made and it involves a lot of spreadsheets it involves a lot of maps of the space it involves a lot of wandering around and very often it involves the entire cast being in all of the various spaces of the theater practicing sort of well what happens if you're doing this over there okay everybody shift and you know you were talking about this very often our rehearsal process is it's sort of strange in that we will rehearse a 15 second transition for four hours or four days because we want it to be invisible because we want the audience to not know that they are that they are being moved from one space to another and in fact to make it feel like it is their choice to move from one place to the other there's two things we work very differently than most groups already even if we weren't doing immersive theater so there's three of us who direct the company who are artistic directors and we have really really different aesthetics that most often get along and so we actually rotate through on a project we always work collaboratively and we always co-write, co-author co-choreograph, co-direct we share all of it but we kind of rotate through who is what we call vision keeper on a project and that is usually the person that comes forward with the initial idea of the structure and so Zach was that on then she fell I was that on Brand Paradise and in between those two our third co-artistic where Jeanine Willette was doing this touring piece and it was the first time we ever toured and we wanted to do something like we're site specific artists but how do you tour that because it's different in every site so we got a pop-up camper and we made that our site and we just kind of hauled it around that everywhere we could and so just I can speak a little bit more specifically about the structure of Brand Paradise because it was a rip off of that where Jeanine was developing the narrative of this family unit it was under pressure on vacation writing each other crazy coming of age or having a midlife crisis all at the same time this family needed to end up somewhere and I was thinking oh man what if they ended up in my hometown or something like that you know that would really undo them and I'm from the same Augustine Florida are you really? I'm from the city of Florida and you know we have a fountain of youth and I thought that would really add some drama to what these people are yearning for and so starting thinking about how to build that world and where those characters would come from and I'm really obsessed with you know the Clarissa Pincolais and Women Who Run with the Wolves and that idea of the story is every story is a single psyche and that every aspect of that story every character in that story represents some aspect of this idea and it's like that's where my campaign is coming from so all the people at this resort are some some sort of mythological manifestation of the archetype and they all have something to offer kind of Mr. Roark style Fantasy Island style for this family and the family becomes the structure so these five people come in and you only get two fifths of this structure when you come to the show and it benefits from sort of repeat visits and anyway so the way we organized that in the more the more curated portions of the show where you're actually kind of invisibly let along follow one of their journeys and you're meant to have this anonymous experience with that character in those moments you know we talk about don't be scared of this work we're not going to make you be an actor in it that's not how it works but whatever wherever you are and whatever you're experiencing we sort of meet you there so and these family members sort of act as avatars in a way for that experience and they get to go further into the scary places we might not take you but we might take you into other scary places that they don't go so that kind of gave the central framework for this and then on top of that because Zach had crafted the structure of then she felt very very meticulously I mean it's almost a chess game that you enter and we wanted to have like some release around that so it's framed on multiple sides by this free range stuff that you're talking about where you get to go and make your choices and often that leads you to the curated path that you're you don't know you're going down but something that is attracting you this character is really interesting where this some some loud noise in the bar and someone just dove off that thing so I'm going to run to that there's a fight at one point in the bar that will get you in trouble yeah I doubt I'm following that I want to know what's going on there and that I guess probably you know steal my fate for the rest of the evening yeah I wanted to touch on I want to stay a little bit on because I have a question about like rehearsing but the one thing you said you know the idea of we are not asking the audience to be actors but we are asking the audience I hate when the house lights come up and the actors come into the audience and while I freeze up I'm like no no I but you know that is sort of like things that happen with you and what you're doing is something that is for you it is it is there is a generousness about the performance and for me it was very I mean it's almost very flattering you're like oh wow you're paying attention to me you know you as an audience never feel very special in ways that you don't usually and but I do want to go back to the rehearsing and then I do want to transition into what you guys are here doing now but the one thing that is fascinating to me is how what's the process and I just want to stick with Grand Paradise because it's the one that I know how do you rehearse it do you rehearse in a rehearsal space before you take over the actual space and then that space being so multifaceted and there's so many rooms how do you actually how do you rehearse it how do you corral it when there are actors you can't be everywhere at once in this space well so we knew that we were making this piece The Grand Paradise which wasn't named The Grand Paradise for a really long time but we knew it was about this place this sort of mythical place this place that was offering offering whatever people might be longing for the pleasures of youth so we started thinking about the devising process for that and it really was we don't rehearse in a rehearsal studio actually that's not it's almost counterproductive to what we do because we we climb on furniture, we climb up the walls we respond to architecture and so an empty rehearsal studio is at least for me terrifying and so we were on residency in Jeffersonville, New York at this beautiful old house sort of mill with all these weird little bedrooms and various spaces and we started just riffing on some of these ideas and starting off with what can we do with an audience member what are the experiences that we can provide for an audience member what is the most ridiculous thing you could do to an audience member what can't you do what can't you do to an audience member and then how do you do that in a way that is sort of loving and honoring and generous and so one of the things that can actually happen was what can't you do with an audience member you can't kill them let's figure out how to stage that scene and so how do you do that technically speaking I witnessed that did you die? did you die? I did not die but the person that I was with did so we killed somebody she's fine but but then we began just figuring out what is that and it's very often we collaborate as directors but we're also an ensemble-based collaborative group many of our artists we've been working with for 15 years, 7 years we've got a lot of people we've been working with for a really long time and so these investigations we've sort of made as a group and so we often rehearse in non-traditional spaces in building scenes around the environments that they would actually be in and then we will often set the score for a scene bracket that and then begin sort of collaging the other experiences and then from there we start stringing them together and trying to figure out what is a satisfying movement through all of these things like do you want to have a pillow fight and then you want to die or do you want to die first and then do you want to have a pillow fight or where are the moments where you do want to be invited into into action where are the moments where you want to be able to be a voyeur and oversee something what are the moments where you just kind of need the optical white space to process whatever just happened to you and do you want to move on? Well here's a question then when the piece because that makes absolute sense the creative process which is just like with anything it just starts as a little kernel and then it builds and then you build a molecule gets attached to that and then it just eventually it just sort of grows and it becomes this thing and it requires patience and just driving and I think a lot of people would be shocked at how daunting it seems to be at the beginning of any process creating either a written work or a production it is painstaking and slow and a patient process and I can only imagine that for you it must be triple that do you then when you bring your do you take do you become an audience member do you do the experience so that you have an idea of what it's like for them and do you do that with your test audiences as well do you take do you do the show with your test audiences well I a lot of times you know when we're building these pieces we're building something we call a long one right so I've got this lifeguard and I've got to figure out what we're doing and so as a director I'm also audience member in that moment and we're figuring that out together like one of the questions that we have to ask ourselves of this type of work is like what am I doing during this and it's like here's a great idea here's a great set of language here's a great movement score but as an audience member what am I doing how am I active in this how am I being activated in this and why do I have to be there why am I necessary to this scene and at the end of the day that scene cannot work without me so it has to answer all of those questions and when we're building this scene we're like well this lifeguard is a really funny guy but he's really serious about it he's like well why am I here I'm here to train to be a lifeguard water safety and one of the questions was like how do we get audience to go further than we've ever gotten not even that they have to kiss the lifeguard by the end but that they're willing to and if we can make them want that or be willing to then yeah we landed the scene so we're like how do we get them to say yes right after that and a lot of times we think well how do we gently earn trust and this is what you said at the beginning of the movie you're not sure you're suspicious I'm the worst audience for this kind of thing because I don't want to participate I'm passive audience number one which is funny that I make this kind of work but we're sort of thinking the first time you touch an audience member in this world it has to be like a really easy kind of brokering relationship and you're listening to their comfort level on that and if it's like not something that they're into then you guide them in a different way you cue them differently can I come back to the lifeguard though yeah okay I'll make sure you get your lifeguard started and you get my back here's a moment of something that we've discovered the first moment like we do touch in the pieces because very often our pieces are about these intimate moments and touch and that tactileness and the multi-sensoryness is really important but one of the things that we discovered pretty early on was the first time that you touch an audience member it has to be their choice you don't go up and grab somebody if I need to take you to a scene the first scene that you got taken to the performer went like this and he took that and it's that that's important to our work is that we create an offering and an opportunity and that if you want to take it you can but you don't have to have people declined people decline and you just move on and then you honor them you're like great that's incredible you don't want to drop that the lifeguard story is definitely coming up what happened to me and I think when you talked about building trust with the audience was so important from my experience and it makes sense that that's the ethos for you because by the time I got to the Linda Rods at bedroom pillow fight scene I had already had enough of these sort of at least face to face intimate moments with the actors so now I'm in a bedroom with this woman and after the pillow fight she sits me down on the bed and she covers my face she tells me to cover my eyes and not to peek and I being a very dutiful person did not peek and she changes out of her clothes into a bathrobe and then she takes my hand down and she's changed clothes and she sits down next to me on the bed and she holds my hand and I'm like at first my instinct is to go and then I'm like she sees my wedding ring right yes she sees it and then she just holds my hand and she places her head on my shoulder and then I just relax because you know what that scene for me was about yes of course it's sexually charged you're in a bedroom with a woman it's like it's a tawdry bedroom too but it's about there's just a moment of connection there's a moment of it's such a simple lovely gesture of just resting your head on someone's shoulder and then I responded in kind with my head against her head and we just sat there for a moment and I think there is something incredibly especially coming at a point when we have experienced at that point what we've experienced in the piece and the thinking that you cause us to do because the piece is also very philosophical and it causes you to think about your life and the meaning of your life and fate and destiny and so at this moment you had completely earned my trust and I knew that I was safe and I also knew that the actor was safe and that was the other thing for me as a theatre maker I was worried about the audience's safety I don't care about the audience's safety I worry about the actor's safety and I was like okay this is a safe moment for both of us and it was beautiful now lifeguard go I can do this from what you were talking about the thing that you can often land a great profundity by doing it through comedy and like there is this this thing that happens especially in the kind of paradise where we raise an expectation or a discomfort level or titillation or whatever but then we were able to turn a corner on it and then land something that is much more profound out of it and so 9% of our work I would say we do it like there's an offering there's an incremental step there or the situation you walk into and you walk into this room and it's hot or whatever you experience something immediately and then through these incremental steps we get somewhere else and you're actually suddenly able to hear it in a way that you wouldn't if we'd just gone straight for it with the lifeguard here I come 9.1% where it's just like let's not earn trust I don't think this guy's trustworthy let's just assume it and see what happens so he gets you in there and is like hey you know he's very bro-y about it and like you're ready to do your training and you're like okay yeah I'm ready to train like boom a shirt comes off and he hands you lotion and get my back and you're like you don't have time to say no and too bad because you've already said yes so now you're going to keep saying yes and you're like getting into this place where you actually land some of the most profound thematics of that particular track you know and you're just like oh yeah okay wow cool and you're like really with them and then I'm not going to tell you about the end but the end is cool well and I want to talk quickly about I have a couple more questions being mindful of time the the ability to say no is so important and then you are the experience that you have is only as meaningful as you allow it to be I was in a group of four people and we were asked our astrological signs at one point and we all gave our astrological signs and the actress was sort of riffing on what we gave her and this one guy refused to give it to her she was like no I'm going to give her my astrological sign and without missing a beat she goes oh you're a tourist and then she continued to just do it as if you were a tourist and it was the there must be some comfort for them in the rehearsing in knowing what they're doing but then there also must be an ability on your actor's part to just sort of like with what the moment gives you like how just a question of these actors being used to this because they've worked with you before or do you find actors who eventually you're just going to need to trust that every night the actor is going to be able to need to think on their feet can you give me some great stories because we want to hear great stories about things going magnificently well like these beautiful like wow we could never plan this moment and then like just we want to hear the disasters too I can do at least one of the disasters answer to your question yeah we are the people who we work with have a really bizarre set of skills they are beautiful speakers they are beautiful movers they have the ability to climb up the wall and onto the ceiling and they are quick-witted and I think the thing that's most important is that you want to be in a room with them and they are in the room with you that when they are giving a monologue or talking they are actually talking to you they are seeing you and that being seen is so important and it's something you just can't teach do you want to talk about magnificently wrong things well okay I had to be in the show last week right before I came out here for eight shows as dad and I've done several hundred performances in this type of work and learned all kinds of things but wow you learned something in arena and this was kind of the coolest moment ever because we were there's a scene where dad goes into the bar and you get to buy an audience member a drink and you get to talk to them and you're pulling on your wallet and you're looking at vacation photos and by the end of that you're getting a window into dad's desperation for this vacation to bring something back but we've been playing most of the material within what we're doing right now is the matrix of the pieces finding it's footing this is one of the scenes where dad keeps trying out little bits of new material every night to figure out what that pallet of responses are because we're also learning what audiences will do and as we learn what audiences will do we develop a pallet of responses so we know they're going to do one of five things they're going to refuse the drink they're going to really act with us or they're going to shut down and so and I've never really done a lot of them so I like to define things a little bit to myself and I got into this situation the other night when I was talking to this guy and his girlfriend and it was getting too much pressure on me so I threw it onto him no but you're here together and just to get it off of me we started talking about their vacations and this is circa 1969 the world that we're in and I said to him where would you two really like to go and he goes, burning man burning man I don't know that one but I loved that so much and then I became such a chatty Kathy through the rest of the show I was like I'm going to talk more to people but I love those moments where audiences will also challenge you because they're like let's see how in this you really are and when I was playing the white rabbit I had a scene one night where this woman was determined to get me to eat the flower and our job is to paint those flowers we have three minutes to turn those things red and get out of that room my rabbit is very middle management he's he likes to have everything done well and fast so we're painting the roses and she kept plucking off petals and eating them demonstration this is what we're doing and I'm a firm believer somebody tries something three times you got to honour it and after the third time she ate it I was like I ate it it was like the most pesticide ring she was so happy about it but I just think that was a really great scene for her because she got to win something in it and we still got where we were going but that ability to really hear people because I think that's what people come for it's a tactile world it's a world where they can be seen and heard and honoured and be in the room with you and the more you can listen I think the more profound the experiences for them that's amazing that just fits in with what my experience was watching it I feel like I want to go back ten times we were running a little short on time I want to be able to open up two questions from the audience I would love to talk briefly before we do that and then we'll open it up to some questions what it is that you're working on here so third rail and the DCPA are working together on a new immersive work a new immersive experiential whatever you call this kind of thing whatever it is that we do we're doing it and we're doing it here and we're doing it with local artists we've been blessed with the opportunity to come out get a chance to meet several local artists and for the last week we've been building this work with them it is the piece is going to happen somewhere in a warehouse somewhere in Denver and the audience is going to arrive find themselves but like all of our pieces there is an invitation there is a facade that you find yourself going to and then you may find yourself deeper in this world in a world that is perhaps more of a dreamscape and and a lot of the piece is fundamentally about memory for a couple reasons I grew up in Denver and so the opportunity for me to make a work in Denver obviously has a lot is resonant personally and this city is steeped in memory and nostalgia for me and that just sort of got me thinking about what is memory, how do we remember what do we remember what do we forget what does it mean to forget what does it mean to go through your life and that thing where every time you remember something you're not actually remembering it you're remembering the last time you remembered it and so there is this spiral away from the actual event no wonder people may have vastly different interpretations of the same event and what does that mean for life what does that mean for a love and when will they be able to see this the piece is it will be premiering in May of this year May 20th and you will find out more about it on both the rail's website and the DCPA's website and its website when it appears and and yeah we've just been building these scenes and doing exactly what we've been talking about at the panel there is a scene where it's really important to walk into you've all done this you walk into a couple's house and something is wrong but there being the consummate hosts right? and so you walk in and you're like oh no what's happened I don't want to set the table but you're you find yourself complicit in this in this sort of wonderful, terrible fight you're doing an interactive Virginia wall you can tell us yes that would be awesome royalty please thank you just as a quick plug for it the fact that this is happening in Denver is incredibly exciting I can speak as an audience member you guys have no idea what you're in store for this conversation has given you perhaps a glimpse of it it's just an amazing and unique opportunity and I'm really excited that it's happening here and I can't wait to come out and see it we have about like maybe 10 and that's being generous 10 minutes left I want to be able to open up to it at least a couple of questions does anybody have any questions right here so the question is for those watching on how around the question is how do you protect the actors from disruptive audience members what happens the example of like being in the bedroom with that woman I was very respectful what if someone grabbed the woman's breast what if someone threw water in an actor's face what are the safety controls for actors I have moments like that happen and how do you deal with that and the other question is is there a time out mechanism the play the play shuts down and order is regained so that particular scene is probably the furthest we've ever pushed an audience in that regard so when we were building that it was engineered where it is always the performers game and most often it's such a heightened kind of place that people do exactly what you did kind of like freeze and wait for their cues which is exactly what we want them to do and that the game is my move as a performer it's always my move and if you I can honor your choices I can honor some of the more subtler negotiations that you may have but if you make a move the game stops and it's been very clear we've been very lucky so far that it is it's one of those things that if an audience understands the rules they know what to do if the rules are clear they will behave within the spirit of the piece if the rules are unclear that's when you get crazy behavior or if they come in and really drunk or whatever we have and that's identified and communicated throughout the world like heads up this person just they're opening doors they're already breaking rule number one keep an eye on them and so oftentimes we can route them to the least sort of provocative sort of place and then other times they're pulled aside and given warnings like our stage management team there is supervision in every area it is really really subtle and unseen by the audience but everything has has safeties in place and if people have a certain system of how far is too far what is participation and disruption and that gets defined very clearly for people and we've had people that we've pulled out and we've said this is your warning again and you're out and we've kicked people out not very many but we've had to do it and certainly the actor safety is of utmost importance to us yeah and just in answer to that question the actor safety is the most important and so there will be sometimes where like some of I think we kicked somebody we've kicked so few people out I think because we established a world in which we are offering as opposed to interacting at them so most of the time people are on incredible behavior but there are times when somebody like walked into a scene and just started freaking out like banging on the doors and we were just like Ed, you go home now you go home because it is our performer's safety is first the other audience member's safety is first and you can't disrupt another audience member's experience I have to say in that in my experience at Grand Paradise the audience was I wish audiences at other places were as well-behaved as the audience I wish, no one I checked my bags and my coat and I inadvertently had my cell phone on me and I did not at once have the urge because there's down time from time to time in this piece you're left alone and I never once had the urge to take my phone out and it was the night of the New Hampshire primary and I was like you know normally I'd be like I was winning and I did not the entire time see a single cell phone out and it was a testament to your audiences as well sort of like being willing to follow the rules and also the way the rules are so clearly established there's a lot of the night I was there there was a lot of respect and there was a lot of willingness and I think that doesn't happen often and that's to your great credit I think as creators do we have any other questions in the audience? the bag are you in the bag? we can get one more okay so the question was how does the greater sphere of where you're working affect your process in terms of we create work in New York but then when we're creating work in other spaces how does that affect us? I think a lot of it actually comes from the years of work as site specific artists one of our practices is to walk into a space and do this amazing method that Tom has developed which is called site exploration where we're really listening to the site we're looking at the architecture we're looking at what we call the topography which is cultural, social architectural, historical and really listening to everything that is about that site and so for Denver I've had a lot of conversations with my amazing producing and presenting team here about what are the things that right now Denverites love to do what are the things that aren't available here what are the things that what are the things that are most popular what are the things that feel like they're lacking what are the things that what are the experiences that people in Denver don't have and one of our artists as she was thinking about this was like you know what isn't happening in Denver a lot but like spaces which is totally like you know all we deal with in New York but we're like oh right make a bunch of tiny rooms Denverites don't spend a lot of time in broom closets we're used to it but you know so it's that it's really about listening listening both locally and then you know a little bit more regionally is there a Denver specific component to the piece that you're making more universal no I mean it is definitely it is definitely Denver specific at least for me because because of my point of entry into it but I think it is also informed by all of these things it's you know in listening to the city you know what are what are the offerings that we want to give to you know what is the song that I want to sing to my hometown let's take a how-round question oh yeah that's actually I think that the previous question what advice do you have for traditional theater audiences so the how-round question was for those uninitiated in this type of experience what kind of advice do you give to your potential audiences show up early and wear comfortable shoes really the two most important and then I mean at least for our work I would say just just breathe like we're going to take really big care of our audience so you don't have to know a lot you just have to I think you just have to be you just have to show up you just have to show up and wear comfortable shoes I think that's true of life too yeah that really is life boiled down to the essentials yeah I think we are done did anybody have a one last question basically the question is with such small audiences how do you make any money that is that is a perennial question the answer is the answer is the third rail the way that our organization is structured is a lot like the way that we structure every piece we sort of look at the challenges of a particular model and then figure out how to make it work we are right now we are in almost entirely artist run company the three artistic directors are the executive directors our managing director our business director our associate artistic director all of these people are also the artists with whom we work and so our organizational model has likewise been sort of built from the ground up it's been re-envisioned to be able to support the kind of work that we make and to be able to deal with those questions of how do you have a small audience and some of it is that our ticket prices are a little bit higher than what they might be for work that's like this but also we are offering we also offer a lot for those ticket prices so it really is that balance, that navigation and just again we kind of listen to the cultural moment that we're in and try to figure out how to respond to it thank you both on behalf of Denver Center I'm so happy that you're here I'm so grateful that I've had this opportunity to talk to you guys I've been so looking forward to sitting down with you both let's give them a round of applause and thank you all for coming today we'll see you at the next thing thank you