Imaginary Worlds - Then She Fell

Episode Date: June 2, 2016

Immersive theater is a new trend where there are no seats and no stage. The audience moves through the space like a virtual world, touching whatever they want, interacting with the actors who give them food and drink. I love immersive theater. I've experienced a film noir-themed Macbeth and a fictitious elementary school reunion set in a real East Village apartment, but my favorite immersive show is Then She Fell. It's a retelling of Alice in Wonderland set in a turn-of-the-century insane asylum. Tom Pearson and Marissa Nielsen-Pincus of Third Rail Projects explain how the show reflects Lewis Carroll's own duality and the mystery behind his relationship with the real life Alice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Eric Malinsky. It was one of those nights in New York where everything feels surreal, and I'm reminded how weird it is to live here. It started out where I was in the East Village, and I had to get to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Now normally that would be a straight shot across on the L train, but when I got down to Union Station, the L was suspended in both directions. This was rush hour. We were all diverted to another station to take the M train, which I forgot even existed. It didn't come till every 10 minutes, and each train was packed to the point where you literally couldn't squeeze in.

The amount of people waiting on the platform started to swell. A fight broke out. The cops came down. And I kept checking my watch like the white rabbit, being like, I'm late, I'm late, I'm going to be late. And finally, I just couldn't take it. When the third train pulled up, packed like sardines, I just wedged myself into these people. They were not happy. I felt bad about it. I could barely breathe, but I was going to make it. Where was I going? To see a show called Then She Fell. So I am in deep, deep, deep into Brooklyn. I don't even know where I am. I finally got there about 45 minutes

later, and I knew that I couldn't record inside the show, so I made a voice memo in the front steps. And there is an old church here. Two old churches connected. It's all like red and rusted, and this seriously looks exactly like Arkham Asylum. By Arkham Asylum, I'm referring to the Batman video game, actually series of video games, with super creepy, awesome production design. And the comparison wasn't far off. I mean, the show was not Batman related. It was a radical interpretation of Alice in Wonderland

that played out like a video game. It's this new trend called immersive theater, where you interact with a show like it's virtual reality, no headset required. There's no stage, the whole building is the stage. And three hours later, I reemerged. I was like completely amazing, and I'm in some kind of like seventh heaven right now.

I have to figure out how to get home and digest everything and reread Alice in Wonderland. What did I discover? What happened in there? Who put this thing together and why? That's all after the break. Why? That's all after the break. All right, so let's back up. The building attached to the church was actually an old brick schoolhouse. And when I got inside, it looked like it had been barely touched since 1945. I wasn't allowed to record during the show, so I'm going to describe it. And if you're in the city and you plan on seeing it,

you might want to skip through the next few minutes. Music was playing throughout the whole building, all three floors. This music, in fact. The production design was Victorian, or maybe Edwardian, evoking a time period when madness had a feeling of wild abandonment, letting go of repression, consequences be damned. Actors dressed as nurses and doctors in this sanatorium brought us into a waiting room, and they gave us little vials to drink. This was the first of many little vials we were given, with signs like drink me on them. Each one was alcoholic and really tasty. If the plan was to get us tipsy, worked on me.

And the doctors each gave us a skeleton key. We could touch anything, open anything, except the doors. We were discouraged from speaking unless we were asked a question. There wasn't going to be much dialogue anyway. Almost everything was movement. There wasn't going to be much dialogue anyway. Almost everything was movement. We started out as 15 audience members, and then we were broken into groups of four. Our group was led downstairs,

and there was Alice, waiting for us. She showed me objects in her room, and then a bearded man in a Victorian suit slowly came down the stairs. For some reason, I just understood that this was Lewis Carroll. They performed a dance on the stairwell that was mesmerizing and ambiguous.

Like, I couldn't tell, was this a seduction? I wasn't sure how she felt about it. In the next room, Alice discovered another Alice in the mirror, which was not a mirror, and the other Alice was another actress playing Alice. And their mirror movements were also really mesmerizing and weird. Our group of four was broken into two, and the other guy with me was starting to look kind of uncomfortable

with the intimacy of the show. The white rabbit appeared. He wasn't dressed as a buddy. He had a rabbit cane and a white Victorian suit. And he was pretty peeved at how late we were. At one point, he led us into a closet, which turned out to be the back of a medicine cabinet. And so there we were, like voyeurs, staring through these shelves of pills

into a padded cell where the Red Queen was dancing her mental breakdown. And when she noticed us, she was angry and chased us out. And we found ourselves then in the largest room so far. Broken teacups piled up to the walls, and I was like, the Mad Tea Party. It did not disappoint. First, the White Queen came out, and she's wearing a herringbone corset dress. And her dance was seductive, with, like, fierce eye contact.

In fact, I have never experienced this much eye contact in a show. The actors are delivering lines, you know, inches from your face. I loved it, but the dude next to me was kind of shrinking away. So the White Queen started calling him the Dorm to me was kind of shrinking away. So the white queen started calling him the Dormouse, which kind of fit. Alice, the red queen, the white rabbit joined us, and then the Mad Hatter came out, looking exactly as you'd expect from the illustrations, but played by a woman. The tea party was a violently passive-aggressive dance of cups and saucers. Later on, the Mad Hatter brought us to her shop, and I had to take this insanely fast dictation to Lewis Carroll.

She was obsessed with him, tacking clippings about him and the real-life Alice all over her dresser. Finally, after a few more encounters like this, I met with Lewis Carroll himself. And at this point, I'm an audience of one. I don't know where everybody else is. He also asked me to take dictation in his office, but not insanely fast.

It was normal dictation. And he wanted me to say goodbye to Alice for him. And then he led me into a room where the floorboards were ripped off and there was water underneath. And he put the note in a bottle and placed it in the water. And there were a dozen bottles there already. And I remember that old joke that the definition of insanity is trying

to do the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. In the final scene, I met with the doctor again, and he handed me a note. Alice Little's family has told Lewis Carroll he can no longer see her. All right, so I'm back a couple weeks later. This place does not look nearly as mysterious as it did. It looks fairly, I don't know, typical out of Burroughs neighborhood. Hi, I'm Eric. Nice to meet you. Tom Pearson and Marissa Nielsen-Pinkus are members of the artistic team at Third Rail Projects. They've played Alice and the White Rabbit before, but not in the production that I saw. Carrie Fisher just said something really cool when they were launching the new Star Wars series that I loved

about not going to the character but bringing the character to her. That was something that happened with me and the White Rabbit. I would have never, ever chosen to play the white rabbit i don't like rabbits i'm scared of them and uh but everybody in unanimous agreement was just like tom i was like oh it's true it's so true because he's the guy with a stopwatch trying to get this really really complicated show to run on time they've been doing two shows a night for the last four years. It's an open-ended run, so long as they keep getting 15 audience members per show. I'll show you something else.

I was surprised how much of the old schoolhouse they were able to use, from the desks and chairs, which were welded together into impossible structures, to the insects and dissected critters and glass jars and cases. And the butterflies. That's from the school. Yeah, the spiders and the insects and dissected critters in glass jars and cases. And the butterflies. That's from the school. Yeah, the spiders and the frogs and the butterflies and all of the pressed leaves and things. Unfortunately, seeing the space during the day was kind of a letdown.

It's like someone had opened the window and all the magic had dissipated. I know. I kind of hate showing you in the daylight. But that's the price you pay when you really want your questions to be answered. Like, I was really curious about the room that Lewis Carroll brought me into, where the floorboards were broken away and there was water underneath. If you remember in the Alice in Wonderland stories, there's, when they first get to Wonderland, there's, she's big and she's lost and she's crying. And because she's so big, her crying creates a pool of tears.

We don't talk about this very much, so I'm going to be minimal in what I say. Oh, because... It's more psychological space, you know? So when you're with a character and you're in kind of a literal moment with them taking a letter or whatever, when you're with a character and you're in kind of a literal moment with them taking a letter or whatever, and then you walk through, again, a threshold into sort of like an interior space that they're experiencing. Right, because these are Alice's tears

and this is Lewis Carroll's sort of final, at least for me it was his final scene. Oh, is this where you ended? No, it was here, and then I went into the room where the doctor handed me the note. So yeah, for me it was like that actually, that arc. That's a nice way through. Yeah.

My experience was a fluke. Everybody who saw Then She Fell that night saw it in a different order. It affects your sympathies in the show too. Like if you see the Red Queen breaking down at the beginning, she's humanized for you early on. Whereas if you see her engagement with the White Rabbit early on and you don't get her till later,

she's kind of the devil for a while. Tom specializes in this kind of theater, which he compares to role-playing video games. The audience is the player moving through a space. You're able to pick things up, examine them, but you is the player moving through a space. You're able to pick things up, examine them, but you're still being guided by a character. At first, I felt like we were the antidote to the digital sort of experience we've all been living in. And that's why people were coming, because they wanted to have tactile engagement with something very real.

And I do think that's true. But I also think that people understand the world through the digital upbringing, that the show itself teaches you how to deal with the show, you know? So there's, there's always like in the video game, that kind of training, uh, field where you, you go through and you learn the rules and then you, you know, how to apply them. My husband is a video game designer. Oh, really? And the way he talks about games is completely the same as the way we talk about, like, the structure of immersive theater, whether it's something like Sleep No More, where you're, like, where you have agency and, like, the world exists and you can move within it.

Like, that's one model for a video game. That show that she just referenced, Sleep No More, is like a much, much bigger version of this show. Bigger budget. It's in a gigantic building in Chelsea, which is a very trendy part of Manhattan. And that show is a modern retelling of Macbeth. But I wasn't crazy about it. I walked out completely confused.

I liked their show, Then She Fell, much better because when I walked out, I was full of questions, but they were poignant questions, like, why was Lewis Carroll part of the show? And what exactly was his relationship to Alice, the real Alice? Tom says it all started with this idea that they wanted to do a show that explored the theme of duality.

And then someone in the company said, you know, I'm reading this really interesting biography of Lewis Carroll. The idea of Lewis Carroll organizing that became an anchor point for the audience. Like if we could hook them into something that they already had a cultural framework for and could recognize the symbols of, then we could go into deeper psychological space. Because when you're in a moment with an Alice growing, you know what that

means. Or painting a rose, you know the consequence of that. That's true. I had those moments too, that recognition of like, oh, that's the white queen. Oh oh that's the white queen oh that's the red queen you know i think i think like behind it all he was you know like literally and metaphorically authoring the work you know and there was uh in my mind he's the only one that's whole as as a character like he's in the middle and and he has conflicting desire but but everything on either side of him is a reflection. So you have the two Alice's, and then you have a red queen at one end and a white queen at the other end, who are the kind of ultimate results of that warring agenda. And then the rabbit and the hatter in our world kind of reflect each other's too. So there's a sense of duality all the way through. And then

he became the kind of anchor in the middle of that for us. So you started then with Lewis Carroll and his feelings about Alice, his relationship to her, his obsession to some extent, and then everything else then sort of, because I mean you had so many characters to choose from, Cheshire Cat, Caterpillar. Tell me a bit more about how those, specifically how you ended up with this cast of characters from that initial kernel of Lewis Carroll. The two texts are the things that really drove those decisions. There's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and then there's Through the Looking Glass, and they both happen on either side of whatever this real-life event was

that caused the little family to sever their relationship with Charles Dodgson, who is Lewis Carroll. Even his identity has a duality to it, who is Lewis Carroll, you know, even, even his identity has a duality to it, but the two books are very much, one is written as kind of a love song to this child of wondrous things or nonsensical things in an adult world, following the logic of chance and card games. And then on the other side of that, you have a young woman who is on her way to being a queen who follows a certain set of steps to get there as advised by the queen on this very logical chess strategy sort of pathway. And that was

written after the event. Lewis Carroll had lots of child friends, as he called them, but he was most fond of Alice Little. That's L-I-D-D-E-L-L, not L-I-T-T-L-E. She, of course, was the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. In the summer of 1863, Carol took the 11-year-old Alice on a boating trip, and shortly afterwards, her parents forbade him from seeing the children again. He did re-establish polite relations with the family eventually, but that closeness was gone. The cause of that rift has been the subject of scholarship and debate for decades.

Now, some say it was a misunderstanding. There are rumors that he was using Alice and her siblings to court their governess, which was considered inappropriate. But there's also a rumor that he was using Alice and her siblings to court their governess, which was considered inappropriate. But there's also a rumor that he asked Alice to marry him. He also was taking nude and semi-nude pictures of children, which was somewhat acceptable at the time. There were cherubic pictures of nude kids all over Victorian culture, but Alice and her sister, who appeared in some of those

pictures, were not toddlers. And the pages from Lewis Carroll's diary are missing during this time, which is unusual because he was a meticulous note-taker. I think in our interest in this sort of rupture between Lewis Carroll and Alice Little, like we were really interested in staying in that ambiguity and not trying to answer that question. On some very basic level, it's a love story and whether it's more on the innocent spectrum or not, you know, it was up for interpretation, but it's, um, it was definitely a moment of, of real rapture and real loss for the people involved, and the stories, I think, reflect that.

The characters in the show are caught in that ambiguity. The Hatter is obsessed with it. Hatter is never called the Mad Hatter in the text, and that was a subtlety we picked up on. The madness is a projection that the readers put on the Hatter's never called the mad Hatter in the text. And that was a subtlety we picked up on. The madness is a projection that the readers put on the Hatter. And it is, you know, there was a tradition of Hatters going mad because they use mercury in the hat making. But there are a lot of little things like that that we pulled out and attributed the Hatter's madness to an existential crisis with her author and God. madness to an existential crisis with her author and God. And if you're created by someone for the amusement of this girl, like, do you really exist?

You know, she's making connections between the written text and the images and the real man and the author, kind of like when the FBI is trying to find a serial killer and bring that all together. But the thing I really wanted to talk with him about was the intimacy of the show. What's it like to play to an audience of one or two people? I think it's so much fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

The Alice's both have some scenes where you're having a really, like, intimate conversation with the audience, and they're sharing very personal things with you. And I just never got tired of having those conversations. We even talk about the audience as your scene partner, as if they're another performer. The way that we meet another performer in a duet, it requires that same kind of attention. It almost goes back to just really, really clear social behavior

that we all know, but sometimes in performance it gets so heightened that you forget to listen in that way, and I think in this type of work you have to really listen in that way. Don't make eye contact if you don't want to engage someone. If you do want to engage them, make eye contact. Simple things like that, subway rules. Subway rules. Subway rules. Yeah, exactly. Then She Fell is not the only show that Third Rail Projects is doing. They have actually several different immersive worlds around the city. I mean, the only thing that I

wish was different is that I wish I had more of a sense of who we were supposed to be. Sometimes during the show, I imagined myself as Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense, like the characters were ghosts who had a story to tell me. And I know that wasn't an oversight. I know the creators of the show made a very conscious choice to keep our relationship with the characters ambiguous, to let us decide. And it worked. It made me wonder, if we're not sitting in a seat, who are we? What kind of audience have we become? And on one hand, this trend of immersive theater goes really well with the technology that we consume, and we're used to interacting with virtual spaces and clicking things to open them up. On the other hand, technology has made some of us

terrible audience members. I get really mad when I go to the theater or symphony and I see that flash of someone's phone light up. Or they're talking to the person they came with like they're sitting home watching Netflix. And I keep reading stories about actors that will stop in the middle of a performance to scold an audience member. And I think that the reason why I love the show so much is that it reestablishes us as listeners. And I never listened so actively, so intimately. I felt like I was listening down to my bones. It's like the best kind of rabbit hole to fall down. It's like the best kind of rabbit hole to fall down. Well, that's it for this week. Thank you for listening.

Special thanks to the staff at Third Rail Projects, including Marissa Nielsen-Pinkus and Tom Pearson, who says just because the audience is supposed to stay quiet and do what they're told, that does not always happen. I mean, this is New York. My favorite moment's not my own, but it was one that Lizzie experienced where she had an elderly couple in hat shop with her, and one of them is her assistant

who's taking this dictation to Lewis Carroll that she is blazing through at light speed, and you can never catch it, and then she's starting you over, and it's like a futile endeavor and the the the man was struggling and the lady just kind of took over the scene and gave lizzie the pen and paper and said i'm going to tell you what to tell mr carol this nonsense has to stop imaginary worlds is part of the panoply Network. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at Emalinski. The show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.