Taking the Dive: Creating Original Immersive Theatre with High School Students
By Andrew Geha
“Is anyone feeling brave?” the elevator attendant asked.
One of our sophomores tentatively raised his hand. She grabbed him, pushed him off the elevator, and closed the doors. We were two minutes into our first immersive theatre experience and had already lost a student.
It was 2007, and we were on a field trip to London to see theatre and tour the city. We bought tickets for Faust, produced by the company, Punchdrunk. We had never heard of the company, but they were in partnership with the National Theatre, so we took a chance. We arrived at an off-the-beaten-path four-story warehouse and proceeded to have a transformative theatre experience.
We found our “lost” student as we wandered through the warehouse, experiencing the story of a man selling his soul to the devil as it unfolded around us. This was “choose-your-own adventure” theatre — we could stay together or separate, sit in one room and watch the action come and go or follow an actor throughout the building, experiencing the story from one character’s perspective. There was no traditional seating, a few rules, and an adventure around every corner.
We left exhilarated, our perspectives shifted of what theatre is and could be. An art form I’d known and loved for years had been magically reinvented, letting me fall in love with it all over again.
Since Faust, I have been lucky enough to see Punchdrunk’s London productions of The Masque of the Red Death, The Drowned Man, and The Burnt City. When they announced Sleep No More in Boston, five of us drove from New York for their opening weekend, seeing the show two nights in a row.
Nowadays, I jump at the chance to see immersive pieces by other companies. Just like any art form, there are the good and brilliant pieces like Third Rail Projects’ Then She Fell, and there are the, um, less good pieces which I will politely leave nameless. But something about this particular style of storytelling takes me out of my element, transports me to a new place, and helps me see the world (and sometimes myself) differently. And just like any good recipe I’ve had at a restaurant and recreated in my kitchen, I’ve wanted to create a version of it here at my school for years. However, how to do so proved elusive until the summer of 2021.
That summer, I attended Liminal Archive by the Al Límite Collective. Produced at the New Ohio Theatre, Liminal Archive explored “intimate moments of isolation experienced by artists as they traverse the unknown during the early days of the pandemic.” The production was beautiful and haunting, and each artist’s piece was expertly crafted. Structurally, however, it was familiar territory.
From 2001–2013, I was the co-director of The Artist’s Institute, a 5-week summer arts intensive. For the opening and closing days each summer, we created events where the students traveled from space to space, having a unique experience or interaction with a staff member. Liminal Archive was built on the same principle: audience members traveling from space to space, participating for a short time, then moving on to the next space.
I knew how to do that.
And I was feeling brave.
In August, inspired by Liminal Archive, I announced our fall show as a devised immersive piece of theatre exploring how the pandemic changed us as individuals and as a community. No auditions. Any student who wanted to participate could show up and be a part of the production.
Ten students joined me to devise what would eventually become Who Are We Now. The root of inspiration was a tweet by Amanda Palmer: “Fill in the blanks: In February of 2020, I was ______. Now, I am _______.”
The students wrote to that prompt and a series of others (“Something I gave up in the last two years is…something that brought me up….something that brought me down….”) From there, we developed the most potent themes and workshopped how the audience might engage with them. We talked about Zoom School, PPE, the 24-hour news cycle, and ultimately came up with the following stations:
- Doctors: A dialogue between a modern doctor and a plague doctor about the history of pandemics. The audience was invited to wash their hands at two portable handwashing stations after the virus laden dialogue.
- News: After a two-minute montage of news stories from January of 2020 through October of 2021 (ending with the shooting on October 6th at Timberview High School in Arlington, Texas), an actor spoke of the trauma of the non-stop stories and engaged the audience in a conversation about how they dealt with it all.
- Wall: A dialogue between two characters, one who is ready to return to “normal” and go out into the world and the other, who wants to stay safe behind a wall. This piece had no audience interaction.
- Traps: An actor traveled through a field of mousetraps, talking about the many things which could trigger them into losing their temper or their mind. But they kept moving forward, moving toward people, toward human connection. The actor emerged from the traps and offered each audience member a small scroll with a quote about hope and connection.
- Remember: A rotating group of actors told a personal story about someone or something they had to say goodbye to during the pandemic. Each audience member was invited to write the name of someone or something they said goodbye to and affix it as a leaf to a community-built tree.
- Mirrors: Each audience member stood in a room of mirrors and was invited to speak to the prompt, “In February of 2020, I was _____. Now, I am _______.”
Thirty audience members traveled the stage in groups of three to five, experiencing each station. At the end, the cast brought the audience into the center while singing and playing a song about change and saying goodbye.
We performed the show six times. The response was powerful. A parent wrote the following:
“You truly captured the essence of all the thoughts and emotions that I have experienced…yet never shared. It validated many of my thoughts and feelings regarding the past year and a half. … This show was raw, authentic and pure, three things that aren’t easy to come by these days. The kids’ performances were delivered with such depth, emotion and maturity that it was mind-blowing.”
We were incredibly proud of our first immersive production. I also figured it was a one time experience, that afterwards, we would revert to our normal production styles of traditional plays and musicals. But the 2022–23 school year had other plans.
For reasons too long to explain in this article, I had to pull the plug on our intended fall play and make a new plan in a single September weekend. Feeling defeated, I asked myself, “if I could do absolutely anything I wanted, what would I do?”
I knew the answer: Immersive. This was the beginning of our Fall 2022 production, The Haunted.
I proposed the idea of an immersive ghost story to my department, our administration, and the group of students who auditioned for the originally planned production. Everyone was game. I wanted to take the storytelling further than Who Are We Now, creating a cohesive audience experience which told a singular story and made the audience participation more hands-on.
At our first rehearsals, the students and I threw ideas at the wall to see what stuck. The following Monday, a cast member brought in a concept that unlocked the whole thing: Forget the audience witnessing the story. Forget them meeting a ghost. What if the audience member was the ghost?
Whereas Who Are We Now was about COVID’s impact on our community, The Haunted would center the whole story around the audience.
We launched into writing. Each actor created an original ghost story in which they, the main character, was being haunted. Toward the end of the story, they reveal the twist, saying a variation of, “and it was you. You were the presence I felt behind me.”
The show was divided into four acts, taking place on a stage divided into nine rooms — a large central space and eight small chambers. (This was mostly done with stud walls and curtains, beautifully designed and built by our Technical Director, Tye Burris, and decorated by our costume designer, Pia Fleishmann.) The acts broke down as follows:
Pre-Show: Each audience member was given a Venetian Bauta mask and invited into the main room and given the basic rules: They would be led everywhere. They should only speak when spoken to. No physical contact. Wear the mask until invited to remove it.
Act 1: “The Ghost Story” — An audience member was led to a room occupied by one actor. The actor told their story, ending with the reveal that the audience member was the ghost haunting them. Then, the actor fled the room.
Act 2: “Unfinished Business” — A second actor invited the ghost to follow them, explaining, “if a ghost is haunting this world, it means you have unfinished business with someone you left behind.” The audience member was asked to spell out the name of a person tying them to the living world using Scrabble tiles. Next, they were asked to write a message to that person — something left unsaid — on a patch of wall revealed behind a curtain or underneath the carpet. Finally, they were given a piece of paper and asked to write what obstacles held them back from saying what needed to be said to their loved one.
Part 3: “The Solution” — In a final room, a third actor acknowledged the audience member’s obstacles and offered them a “solution.” The actor ground up a series of symbolic herbs and flowers — thyme for courage, lavender for peace, feathers for hope. The grounds and the note were placed in water where the note dissolved (water soluble paper — a simple and elegant piece of theatre magic). The actor poured the brew into a small bottle and offered it to the audience member as their “solution” to what stops them from being honest with their loved one.
Part 4: “Freedom” — All audience members returned to the main room for a final encounter with the actor from Act 1. The actor acknowledged how the “solution” could set the ghost/audience member free, then spoke about what they needed to be free. They asked the audience member to remove their mask, sending their spirit back to the land of the living to reconnect with their loved one.
The show was small and intimate — about fifteen minutes long with only eight to sixteen audience members. We ran it seventeen times over five days.
Our audience loved the show, with many of them returning to see it again (Each actors Acts 1 & 4 told unique stories). The show felt original, personal, and unlike anything most of our community had experienced.
The cast loved the show, proudly owning the material and the experience they were creating for their audience. Our school leaders took note that we were creating art unlike anything any school in our area was doing and they encouraged us to keep going.
When I started working at my school, the community expected well-known shows which draw crowds. I have been exceptionally lucky that the community embraced the original shows I have written. Still, devising always seemed like a huge gamble. To start a rehearsal process with nothing more than an idea while having definitive productions dates on the calendar — wasn’t that a set-up for failure?
COVID forced us to step outside the “traditional theatre” box. From masks, to Zoom theatre, to making television (I am particularly proud of this project), I’ve stepped all the way outside my comfort zone, experimenting and creating alongside my students. Who Are We Now and The Haunted gave students opportunities they’d never dreamed of and asked them to step into new, scary, and exciting challenges. And they did. They bravely gave these productions 100% of their energy, love, creativity, and dedication.
There were many times during the process for The Haunted that I had no idea where we were going or whether or not the show would succeed. Still, I trusted the process, trusted my instincts, and trusted the impressive and growing instincts of the students. And we got there. It looked nothing like I thought it would when I first had the idea on that depressing September weekend. It looked (and felt) a whole lot better.
So how brave am I feeling?
I have an idea for next fall. It’s bigger, more encompassing, and more interactive than the previous two pieces, but it’s still just an idea. There’s a lot of work to be done before it’s a show, and as I learned this past fall, the best laid plans sometimes need to be thrown out on a moment’s notice.
Ultimately though, that’s what I truly love about teaching theatre. It’s never about my ideas alone and it’s never the same old thing. It’s a collaboration between artists to create a unique experience which far outweighs the sum of the parts.
There will always be a place on the school stage for the traditional and well-known (we followed The Haunted with SpongeBob — so, a slight tonal shift). But there’s a wealth of exciting places for non-traditional work, for experiences that offer new and innovative challenges within the educational theatre space. For everyone who travels to New York to see The Lion King or Moulin Rouge on Broadway, there’s someone else who needs to see Fat Ham or Sleep No More. Let’s provide our students and schools with the same beautiful range of opportunities.
So, how brave are you feeling?
Andrew Geha is an award-winning playwright and theatre teacher who has worked at Friends Academy, a Quaker school in Locust Valley, NY, since 2001. His musical featuring LGBTQ+ teens, Standing in the Current, was one of the winners of AATE’s 2018 Unpublished Play Reading Project. In Dreams, I Am Invincible, a play about bullying, was the 2018 winner of the New England Theatre Conference’s Aurand Harris Memorial Playwriting Award. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Acting and a Master’s Degree in Educational Theatre, both from New York University. His work has been produced internationally, including a five-star production of We Didn’t Have Time to Be Scared, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He will be at AATE’s National Conference in Seattle this summer, presenting the workshop, “The Haunted,” An Immersive High School Theater Ghost Story, which will take participants through steps and tricks they can use to devise immersive theater with their students.
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