Distant Shores, Locally Sourced. At Home With ‘The Under Presents: Tempest’ (First Impressions)
Are we entering a ‘Diamond Age’ of ractives?
We must start this not-review off with a disclosure. Several decades ago, back in the mythical year 2019, I helped Tender Claws run the West Coast casting workshop for what was then their still unreleased VR project The Under Presents.
The core work on The Under Presents had pretty much wrapped. The development team had built out the core narrative Timeboat, which was structured like an immersive theatre piece which one could rewind and manipulate to reveal more of the story. With the help of NYC theatrical troupe Piehole they’d also built out The Under itself: an inter-dimensional night club where various cabaret and vaudeville acts popped up on stage surrounded by a vast desert that felt very much like an immersive sandbox, primed for creative exploration.
Into this mix, Tender Claws wanted to conduct an experiment: for a few months they’d have live actors drop in and out of The Under. The actors would have a wider range of interactive options than the players in the space. For starters: they can talk while the shadow-like, mask-wearing players can “only” communicate through body language, finger snaps, and the presentation of objects they conjure with the help of their masks and an elaborate series of secret magical formulas. (Turns out, you can say a lot without using your voice.)
The original plan was to have the actors do this for a few months as part of the launch window for the title on the Oculus Quest. I was brought in because I know a plurality of the immersive theatre actors in LA. We had a grand old time over a few nights devising a casting workshop for something that had never been made before. A few months later, I finally got to see the results of those workshops.
Cut to 2020.
The actor corps of The Under has expanded and extended their run as a community of players has come up around the experience. There’s a Discord server and a Subreddit. An elaborate lore has emerged out of the improvised performances that the actors conduct with the players. Yet, whether or not a given player will encounter a live actor in the vast deserts of inter-dimensional space is up to chance. Until this week.
Soon, players of The Under Presents will discover a new building has sprung up next to the facade of the night club when they load in. The Decameron, an Art Deco theatre which is currently home to a production of Shakespeare’s Tempest, after a fashion. Like a theater back in the real world, back when we had a real world, you get your tickets at the box office.
(Minor spoilers follow.)
Before the show, there’s time to hang out in the lobby, where scattered bottles (as in “ships in a bottle”) can be picked up to reveal that the lobby maybe isn’t what it appears to be. At the appointed time, the doors to the theater proper open, and heading inside will lead to another transition, which lands the assembled audience in a backyard somewhere in the multiverse. A bonfire has been set up on what looks to be a soon to be stormy night and I’m tempted to recall beach bonfire afterparties from my own cast and crew days. There’s something like six of us masks around the fire and one more detailed human figure is our performer for the evening.
I recognize the voice as James Cowan. He’s one of several actors who are leading these sessions and I’ve had the pleasure of seeing him live in a number of roles over the years. The acting corps has performed in Delusion, Creep, and work from The Speakeasy Society, among others. In other words: LA’s immersive theatre acting scene has pretty much been translated into VR, along with some talented improvisers and Henson-trained puppeteers to round out the group.
For Tempest, the price of a ticket entitles you to time with one of these performers, who begins the session with a bit of an apologia. They are, as it turns out, sheltering in place. They were going to performing in a production of The Tempest before the pandemic put a kibosh on live performance and now, since they’re at home, you might end up hearing a stray siren or — since they’re coming from LA — helicopter. It’s less of a breaking of the fourth wall than a necessary evil that manages to ground what happens next in a bit of bittersweetness.
The 40-minute runtime of the Tempest plays out as a participatory Cliff Notes version of the Bard’s work. Our guide acts as director, stage manager, special effects, and narrator as they whisk us from location to location to play out the big set pieces of the play. Sometimes the actor will simply tell the story, at other times you will find yourself drafted into a role. It is here where the creativity and expressiveness of your fellow audience members will come into play. I found myself fortunate in that whoever was pulled in to play Miranda and Ferdinand, the play’s young lovers, managed to do an excellent job pantomiming their characters relationship.
Of course, being set inside a stylized immersive environment with an indie game aesthetic means that this production has a virtually unlimited effects budget which is put to fantastic use in the set pieces.
This isn’t the empty space of a black box theater, but the fabric of dreams made digital flesh.
All in all, the experience reminded me most of Shakespeare summer camp, which I taught for a few years after college. We would do these cut down versions of the canon with third graders on up through high school students. You really haven’t lived until you’ve seen small children act of Ceasar’s murder on the steps of the Senate, or choreographed a dozen teenage girls in a samurai movie style fight sequence in an outdoor amphitheater.
Man, I really miss live theatre.
My time with James Cowan and our nameless masked actors brushed up against that feeling of being on stage with others. It’s not a perfect one-to-one substitution — we’ll need sophisticated brain computer interfaces for that — but the spirit of play that permeates the whole affair gets the heart of the matter right. It also helps settle down my own internal debate on just what to call things like this, be they digital or physical.
In Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age, which was a definite influence on the development of The Under Presents, the virtual reality entertainments are called “ractives, ”short for interactives. What Tender Claws has done with their live actor program has brought the fundamentals of ractives to life, a quarter century after the book was first published. But while I, Nerd, will secretly call these things ractives in my heart until the day I die, the summer camp like experience has me settling on the much more prosaic “play” as the appropriate term.
We settled here at NoPro on defining immersive theatre as “a play you can play” about a year ago. The blurring of the line between actor and audience is a core feature of this form. Like life itself, there are no absolutes in terms of agency. Sometimes you’re the star, sometimes you’re background. This functions as both a practical reminder and as a kind of moral lesson. We all need to do our part if the show is to go on.
I wouldn’t say that The Under Presents: Tempest is the last word on this sort of thing. I very much hope it is not. There would be little fun in that. Instead I hope that this is the opening line of inquiry which sparks a kind of creative arms race amongst independent and major studios alike. One that draws more live, trained performers into the mix, coupled with formats that can pay them for the performances they give. And for fate of The Under itself, I hope it makes a path for even more experiments in this vein.
The Under Presents: Tempest is available for $14.99 as an in-app purchase on the Oculus Quest and Rift, with performances starting July 9th, and includes ongoing access to the multiplayer space of The Under. The single player Timeboat experience is available for $11.99 as an in-app purchase and also includes multiplayer access. The 45-minute long (give or take) intro to The Under Presents is available free of charge as a demo.
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