Hunting the Witch Hunter in ‘The Visitation’ (The NoPro Review)
A new immersive theatre company debuts in Brooklyn
It’s 1682; the “witch hunter” has come to town to investigate yet another suspicious incident. Will he find witchcraft or some other form of evil? The young girl in question is one, poor Anne Gunter. And she has been afflicted with something terrible: eyes rolling into the back of her head, flailing limbs, babbling verse, and even spitting out pins, to her father Brian’s astonishment. Her family are concerned and have called in two specialists; however, the two priests on the scene are more inclined to use patience and prayer as their primary weapons. Both Father Wake (an authoritative, wise-sounding Daniel Harray) and Father Prideaux (an eager, unsettling Brian Lore Evans) have traveled great distances to the Gunter family home in order to complete their investigation.
But we’re not in just any old family home: we are in the storied Wyckoff House, which is the oldest house in New York City. It has been lovingly restored in the colonial style and now functions as a museum, except for tonight, when it has been transformed into the set for The Visitation. This very old, worn house is mostly dark on this brisk November evening, save for some carefully placed votives. There’s a soft, orange light coming up through the floorboards from the basement.
During The Visitation, multiple scenes occur simultaneously over the course of evening and audience members are free to wander both indoors and outdoors, taking in different pieces of the story. The performance is layered, dense, and rich, with action happening in nearly every corner of the building and its grounds at a rapid pace. Each performer in the talented cast of six carries an eerie glowing lantern that casts ghostly shadows as they wander the historic Wyckoff House grounds.
Interestingly, the show is not looped, meaning that pivotal moments are often revealed by a piercing shriek or violent scuffle heard from afar, as both performers and audience members alike come running from the far corners of the house to see just what has transpired; I often wished for a rewind button to see what I had missed. Over the course of an hour or so, some secrets are confessed to us in conversation, while others are revealed to the audience through action. Characters suspiciously go missing at inopportune moments and some shocking, even violent, moments occur mere feet from us.
And each character in The Visitation seems to have a dark secret they’re hiding from the others. Why is the family servant stealing from her master? Is the daughter truly possessed by evil spirits or is her malady caused by something else, something far more sinister? And what exactly happened to the father’s first wife? Why is the family farm yielding fewer and fewer crops as time goes by, could it be a hex on the land?
Aside from the wonderfully creepy site-specific staging, the second biggest strength of The Visitation is in its excellent ensemble acting and highly polished script. The magnetic Father Wake has a charisma which makes him a natural fit for the up-close intimacy of immersive theatre; something about his presence demands the room’s attention. I also commend the stamina of the possessed daughter Anne (Rae Haas) who seemed to be going into supernatural spasms at literally any given moment, writhing up and down the hallway, inches away from spectators. In fact, all of the cast are impressive for their boundless energy, as the action unfolds around us and performers move constantly from scene to scene with alacrity. And unlike many of the long-running immersive theatre works in New York City, The Visitation is a dialogue-based work which also relies upon a traditional narrative structure; there seemed to be a clear beginning, middle, and end to the performance, which is often unusual in this genre of work.
The Visitation aims high and comes very close to hitting its mark, which is remarkable for a theatre company’s first go-round in the immersive world; in fact, the biggest problem in The Visitation is the one you want to have: one of scale. The show’s ambitions are simply too large for the confines of the Wyckoff House. Our crowd of around 40 people frequently created bottlenecks wandering from room to room (of which there were only four), making it difficult to both see and hear the action at times, though the talented cast and crew did their best to keep things accessible. Other times, I was taken out of the moment as other audience members’ shoes triggered creaky floorboards underneath or someone accidentally kicked a stray bucket on the floor. Because of this, I became self-conscious about my own movements, particularly during the quieter, more intimate scenes.
While I appreciated the additional illumination upon the “farm” grounds as the father figure of the family tended to his potatoes, it was a bit too obvious that the extra light was coming from… a nearby garage. These anachronisms were not the fault of the creators but an artifact of the setting; after all, we were still in Brooklyn, adjacent to a busy street, on a typical weekend night, with all the doors and windows of the house open.
The youth of the company also demonstrated itself in the ending of the performance (or lack thereof), wherein a staff member cheerfully announced, “…that’s the show!” to the audience, who were equally amused and befuddled. “It seems like something I would do if I put on an immersive theatre show,” mused a friend. These are, of course, elements that would likely be worked out over time, especially during a longer run, and indicative of a group that is just starting to find their voice.
The production company, WITNESS, has created a impressive debut with The Visitation. (They are also looking to remount the show sometime soon in the same space.) I look forward to seeing what they could do in a space that is wholly their own in the future. And the company does plan to debut a brand new immersive piece in 2018. It seems likely that the work of WITNESS will grow and evolve; I hope that the group begins to carve out its own niche in the immersive theatre world.
The Visitation has concluded but may return sometime soon in the future; the company also has a future production planned for 2018. Sign up for WITNESS’ mailing list for more information.
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