Back Rooms & Between Worlds: A Peek At ‘To The Wild’

The makers of Devoted try their hand at bringing faerie tales to Los Angeles.

Noah J Nelson
No Proscenium
Published in
4 min readMar 2, 2017

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There’s a lot of back rooms involved in immersive theatre.

Indeed, one of the big thrills of the great immersive game is getting to find out that the actual, physical world is different from what you get to see in the day to day. There’s the nondescript warehouse that conceals the sketchbook melancholy of The McKittrick Hotel, and the elaborate entrances of the Houston Brothers bar empire in LA. All of which stirs up the sense that there is another world out there.

That sensibility has deep roots in the myths and legends across the world. Perhaps no legends are better known in Western culture than those that surround faerie lore. From their origins as god-like figures in the mists of Irish history down to their Victorian revivals, the fae have possessed a glamour that have drawn countless storytellers into their hedonistic webs of deceit.

That allure is how myself and a host of the local immersive theatre reviewers found ourselves in the back room of MacLeod Ale Brewing Co in Van Nuys on a Sunday morning. We were there to be the second test audience for Shine On Collective’s latest immersive theatre show To The Wild.

At the heart of the piece is the story of a family that has had their world touched by the faeries, and were never the same ever again.

“We wanted to explore something legendary in this show,” writer Anna Mavromati told me. “Faeries were a fun subject because they’ve gotten so…Disneyfied. But the original tales about faeries were often pretty dismal. Faeries are tricksters, thieves and liars a lot of the time. They have this monkey’s paw quality were they show humans that they should be careful what they wish for.”

The rehearsal we experienced was still very much a work-in-progress. The core structure — which moved the audience through a series of group scenes and small two-on-two/one-on-one breakdowns — played with one of the harder nuts to crack in immersive: the small group experience. It is one that many companies have struggled with, as a audience of under a dozen doesn’t quite lend itself to the “default spectator” mode of a larger group, while simultaneously making it harder to create the intimacy inherent in solo experiences.

Shine on nailed the later in their triumphant Devoted cycle last Fall.

“After Devoted we wanted to open this year by experimenting with something completely different,” said Mavromati. Most of this show involves the audience experiencing scenes in groups (though there are one-on-one scenes as well). This show also has a different tone and a different range of emotions to explore when compared to Devoted. All of these things were definitely challenges for us, but also helped us try different structures for our performances and we’ve explored a lot of ideas that are new to us.

“This show’s been a particularly challenging one — since the dress rehearsal we had you attend we’ve made some pretty big changes to the staging of certain scenes. We’ve constantly been tweaking it and experimenting with it to make it most effective. We’re hoping that this ultimately makes us grow as a theater company and diversify what we are able to do and how we perform.”

What was evident in that rehearsal is that the Shine On Collective’s literary chops are holding firm. Under the narrative structure that they were still working on is an archetypal faerie story.

“When researching faerie lore, and particularly the lore about changelings, which is another faerie trope we use, has this disturbing witch-hunt vibe to it. There was a woman in Ireland who was essentially murdered by her husband because he had become convinced she was a changeling and that his real wife had been stolen by fairies. Like any good mythological character, what faeries really reveal is the nature of being human — and all of the good and bad that comes with that. We wanted our faeries to be morally ambiguous, and for our human characters to be too. As joyous as the tone of this show can feel at times, we think the real through-line for this story is depression and how we try to cover it up with a false sense of happiness.”

Balancing that liminal tone — between melancholy and mania — speaks to the psychological underpinnings of the lore. As any theatre maker can tell you nailing tonal shifts is one of the harder things you can set course for. Of course, when that call to challenge yourself emerges, it must be answered. Dans of Shine On’s Devoted, which explored psychological horror themes, won’t have to wait long for the company to return to the home ground they’ve shown such mastery with.

“The next show we’re doing will definitely go back to having darker, moodier and creepier tones, similar to what we did with Devoted,” said Mavromati. “We can’t wait to get back into that dark material again. At the same time, it’s been nice to do something so different for a few months too. To The Wild is very springtime-inspired and more whimsical — though there’s a lot of sadness in it too.”

You’ll have a few chances to see just what fruit Shine On’s experiments have borne starting tonight, and carrying on through March 11th. This week’s run is in Van Nuys, and next week’s near Culver City.

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Founder and publisher of No Proscenium -- the guide to everything immersive.