COMING SOON: The LA Immersive Invitational
Learn more about the Sunday Showcase, with details on the full lineup!
This April 21st the Nocturne Theatre in Glendale will play host to the most fun event in all of the immersive cosmos: The Immersive Invitational.
This year’s LA edition, now in its third incarnation, will see eight teams create wholly original work over the weekend and compete for superlatives.
The LA Immersive Invitational is produced by After Hours Theatre Company in association with The Immersive Experience Institute. Institute co-founder and NoPro Publisher Noah Nelson braved the dreaded third person to answer his own questions about the festival showcase.
Tickets for which are now on sale starting at $60, and disappearing because of the incredible lineup. I mean really, go look at it below.
This is No Proscenium’s COMING SOON, a look at ongoing immersive experiences & events. To learn more about how your event could be considered for the feature check out How To Get Covered By NoPro.
No Proscenium: Tell us a little bit about the festival and its focus. How do immersive experiences fit in?
Noah Nelson: Let’s start with the second part first, since Immersive IS the festival’s focus.
The public side of this is the Sunday Showcase, where eight teams will present 10–15 minute immersive pieces — and they WILL be immersive in the sense that fans of the form think of it — to small audiences of 6–10. It’s like a Sunday buffet of immersive, this time out made by an incredible cross section of theatrical professionals drawn from across LA.
The Invitational is inspired by 48-hour film fests, where teams of creators get a challenge at the start of the event and then screen their work at the end for each other and the public. When After Hours Theatre Company found itself with some spare theatrical space on the tail end of a successful run that was cut short thanks to TV production, Graham decided to do something cool with it. I got roped in to help being artists in, and the Invitational was born.
This will be the third time we’ve done this, and previous editions have seen work like Koryn Wick’s CASTING — which was just on tour in NYC — and Cricklewood Immersive’s The Sleepover get their starts in the event.
NP: Is there a theme that was set, or has emerged, for this edition’s programming?
NN: So we DO have a theme this year, but as always it is secret until we spring it on the artists at the Friday kickoff.
You can think of this a little like it is a reality TV show, with challenges and maybe even a twist. We did a twist last year which also got the teams playtesting each other’s work early in the process. There’s not a lot of time to second guess when you have less than 48 hours to get something up and going.
In so many ways this is like getting to summon the creative team’s ids.
NP: Tell us a bit about the artists who are involved.
NN: This year the talent is STACKED. Let’s go alphabetically. Deep breath…
Coin + Ghost is one of LA’s most adventurous theatre companies, and while they haven’t made immersive their focus, artistic director Zachary Reeve Davidson is a veteran of multiple productions with The Speakeasy Society including the seminal Johnny Cycle. The company is rolling right from this into their next project, a workshop of a devised adaptation of Lysistrata that centers trans or gender non-conforming sex workers and their clients.
The HRS/Cherry Poppins team are known for their incredible cabaret musical parodies, just absolutely ribald affairs that bring an electric energy. We’ve been watching them for years and more than once the Alli Miller-Fisher and Sarah Haworth-Hodges led Cherry Poppins have slid over into experiential antics, like with their Cluelesque production. I’m also a bit over the moon because Alli’s husband and frequent collaborator Michael Shaw Fisher, whose Exorcistic HRS just co-produced in LA and NYC is along for this gig as part of the team. Not only is his Shakespeare’s Last Night Out one of my favorite one man shows ever, but we made theatre and films together back in college. We’ve acted with and for each other and I know how much he brings to any work.
KatNip is the collab between Katy Foley and Lena Valentine that have done what few others in immersive in LA have done: focused on comedy. Their most recent production was Single Doubt, and interactive parody of the 90’s MTV dating show. During the high pandemic they did a lot of work crafting interactive Zoom comedies that were actually funny, so making a short piece in two days should seem like a cake walk in comparison.
Last Call Theatre have made a name for themselves as LA’s most prolific playable theatre company. So prolific that they’ll be running a show the same weekend as the Invitational. Which would be Pirates Wanted!, which takes place on a tall ship out in San Pedro. Their work usually involves a longform show that plays out a bit like a massively multiplayer online game, so I’m really interested to see what they do with the Invitational’s challenge structure.
The Queen’s Fools made one of my favorite pieces of the last few years, Not Another Midsummer, which played at the Hollywood Fringe and then got a remount. I liked it enough I went back and saw the remount. Creative leads Mason Conrad and Morgan Taylor are ridiculously talented, and their creative producer Kristin Childers moves mountains. When they call their banners the actors they assemble are a murderers row of talent, a lot of whom have worked together in JFI Productions shows like Creep and The Willows.
All of those teams are new to the Invitational, and we’ve got three returning teams who just happen to be at the end of the alphabet. Funny. Must be the eclipse season energy.
Rogue Artists Ensemble are easily the most accomplished artisans and theatre makers in LA who don’t have a permanent home. Whether we are talking the fully immersive Kaidan Project: Walls Grow Thin or the Pinocchio riff Wood Boy Dog Fish they never do anything but all-out “hypertheatre.” Last Invitational they fielded this huge team and had built out environments and video and puppets and… and… anyway. Expect the unexpected with this crew, and keep your eyes peeled for Schlitzie: Alive and Inside the Decaying Sideshow which is coming later this year.
What can I say about The Speakeasy Society I haven’t said over the years? Honestly if it wasn’t for an early Speakeasy show at Edendale way back when I’m not sure that NoPro would have gone for more than six months. They were the first sign to me that someone here “got” immersive outside of Spooky Season. They also know their way around short form, as their epic serial The Kansas Collection proves. What’s neat is that, like Rogue Artists, The Speakeasy take a long time cooking up their work, so at the Invitational we get to see them in a raw and improvisational mode. Real uncut theatre vibes.
Finally there is Spy Brunch, the group headed up by the dynamic duo of Nick Rheinwald-Jones and Katelyn Schiller. The company made a splash on the LA scene with the Safehouse series years ago, but Nick and Katelyn have also collaborated on some pieces that do the tricky job of stitching genre and emotionally dramatic beats together like The Pod, which I still think about from time to time. Last Invitational they did this awesome police procedural sitcom thing complete with intro music, which I honestly wish they’d develop into a standalone. You haven’t lived until you’ve strutted into a room to theme music.
Uh, was that enough, Noah?
(Ed. Note: Yeah, Noah, it was enough.)
NP: How do you approach programming the festival?
NN: I’ll make this one short…ish.
Graham and Sara and KJ and Michaela, the After Hours squad, and I talk a bunch and figure out which of the dozen different permutations of the format we want to try out this time. Usually after a venue has been found. This time meant making a wish list of teams we have and haven’t worked with, both in and out of the immersive scene. Next time will be different. And there’s always folks we wish we could fit in but there’s only so much time.
NP: What’s your best case for why someone who is on the fence about all this immersive stuff should attend this event as opposed to binge watching whatever series dropped this week?
NN: You’ll never find a better cross section of LA’s immersive scene under one roof on a single afternoon. Everyone just amped up and looking to make some theatre that gets people buzzing. Low commitment: just bring yourself and trust that the teams know how to get people into the mood to play along.
Discover the latest immersive events, festivals, workshops, and more at our new site EVERYTHING IMMERSIVE, home of NoPro’s show listings.
NoPro is a labor of love made possible by our generous Patreon backers. Join them today and get access to our Newsletter and Discord!
In addition to the No Proscenium website and our podcast, and you can find NoPro on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and in the Facebook community also named Everything Immersive.
