Review Rundown: The One Where We Get Timey-Wimey
Adventures with The Doctor in London, “digital theatre at its best” out of NYC and more. (Four Reviews)
Now this is what we like to see: a mix of large scale work with beloved characters, daring digital experiments, and long gestating works coming to fruition. Not just in one spot but all over.
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Doctor Who: Time Fracture — Immersive Everywhere & BBC Studios
£39.95 —£79.95; London, UK; through April 17
Following a couple stunted starts (some venue floods and worldwide lockdown), Immersive Everywhere’s officially licensed Doctor Who: Time Fracture hits the post-pandemic London theatre scene with heavyweight impact: the decadent budget shining through as Doctor-does-Disneyworld in its attention to environmental immersivity.
While my partner ends up snagging coveted intimate scenes and even a one-on-one experience, the group I fall in with doesn’t get offered many interactive calls to action but does end up traveling more of the lavish landscape: from an Elizabethan palace to the hardscrabble market of an alien world. There are plenty of side rooms and cubbies that not everyone has the time or track to visit, and enough hosts and characters to interact with that the audience is constantly engaged at high octane. Drinks are on offer throughout our journey but I’ve got no idea who has time to stop for one; thankfully we’re granted a well-placed interval in its own spaceship bar with a chance to rest up.
Only one gripe: after the candy box joy and hallway-sprinting thrills of the first half as well as an Act II opener that leaves us wide-eyed and gasping for breath (no spoilers here, sweetie), it’s a shame that the climax’s pacing feels so static. Being stuck in one place (no matter how lavish) feels like prison after such exciting chases and new things to look at every few minutes — where’s a TARDIS when you need one? But the purpose is served in the end: the narrative wraps neatly and the audience gets their well-deserved payoff.
New initiates and seasoned Whovians alike should flock to DW:TF. Punching at a weight class far above expectations, Immersive Everywhere delivers every fan’s fondest dream: to spend a day — just one day — as the Doctor’s companion traveling through time and space.
— Shelley Snyder, London Curator
FEAST — The Tank
$15-$30; Remote (Zoom/Web browser); Through April 7
FEAST is a perfectly fine Twine game. That’s the problem. It’s pretty much just a Twine game.
For those of you who don’t know, Twine is a program that helps design hypertext fiction. Think a digital choose-your-own adventure, told over a series of links, with some fun programming logic on the back-end tracking progress. The idea to combine hypertext fiction with a live component is admirable, but goes nearly completely unrealized by FEAST. While patrons receive their link to the game through a Zoom call, no element of the game seemed live, besides the opportunity to leave asynchronous messages for other players at points in the story. Other players and staff seemed uninterested in post-show discussion.
The game itself is fairly charming. The story follows one day as you attempt to escape your small post-apocalyptic town with your best friend. The main obstacle is your own nostalgia. On a mission to gather food for your journey, it’s easy to become weighed down by nostalgic curios and trinkets, in shades of the junkyard scene from Labyrinth that still haunts me to this day. Despite a strong premise, a handful of glitches and broken links occasionally jarred me out of my enjoyment.
(Ending Spoilers Follow)
What makes this plot work more elegantly in Labyrinth is the possibility of success. Playing the game five times, I never managed to escape, even with an unrealistic laser focus on my tasks. It’s unclear what message is trying to be sent; perhaps that you can’t escape your past no matter how hard you try? If so, the rejection of finding comfort in that past feels incongruous.
(End of Spoilers)
All in all, the game is an interesting 30 minutes for those already interested in hypertext fiction. For those looking for a live experience though, you would likely be best served elsewhere.
— Blake Weil, East Coast Curator at Large
I Agree To The Terms — The Builders Association, in collaboration with MTurk Workers, presented by NYU Skirball
$15; Remote (Zoom); Through April 3
The original Mechanical Turk was a sophisticated hoax: constructed in 1770 by Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen, the Turk was a fake chess automaton. What seemed like an intelligent machine was actually a device that concealed a human chess master within it, playing against opponents without their knowledge. This secret was upheld for more than 80 years, as the Turk toured throughout the Americas and Europe.
150 years after its fiery destruction, the Mechanical Turk term was resurrected… by Amazon. The Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform consists of jobs outsourced online, often posted by corporations and universities. Known as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), these mundane, repetitive, and tedious tasks (often worth pennies) cannot be completed by a computer (although HITs sometimes function as testing for artificial intelligence technology).
This globally crowdsourced, unregulated, and predatory labor market serves as the narrative foundation for I Agree To The Terms, a remote experience by The Builders Association in collaboration with real MTurk workers. A blistering and brilliant production, I Agree To The Terms blends non-fiction storytelling with a dynamic, interactive framework that illuminates the internet’s ethical black holes.
Citing key players in its development, such as Stewart Brand, Art Kleiner, and John Perry Barlow, the show launches with a fast-paced, excerpted history of the Web. Declarations from 1996 of how the internet will unite and democratize the world sound acutely familiar to today’s proclamations for Web3. The show’s second act integrates live, personal tales of MTurkers (Sybil is a verifiable rockstar), as the audience wades into the surreal world of MTurk.
Designed for and about the internet, the production needs to be experienced online and is a prime example of remote theatre at its most innovative and engaging. Imbued with humor, I Agree To The Terms confronts the dark horrors of capitalism without any semblance of preaching. It’s digital theatre at its best: profoundly human.
— Laura Hess, Arts Editor
STILL GOES — Nola Lotty & TRAFFIC — Christina Tang — Presented by The Brick & The Exponential Festival
$15–25; Brooklyn, NY; Run Concluded
Still Goes (The Game) & Traffic were first planned as a January double-bill as part of The Exponential Festival, which shifted its programming online due to Omicron. In both cases, the show formats allowed a fairly seamless pivot. Still Goes is a video game played live by its creators Nola Lotty and Thomas Wagner, who also narrate the journey. Traffic is a theatre-game which has audiences control one car out of 50 stuck in gridlock, and work together to escape. The two pieces worked great online. This Brick Theater double-bill confirmed they are even more delightful in-person.
Still Goes made some upgrades to its central video game. The two playing characters now have outfits, hair and pleasing personality, an improvement from blocky stick figures. A heartbreaking final scene was added which leaves the piece’s narrative in a much clearer place.
The biggest boost to Still Goes, though, was following Lotty and Wagner’s emotional journey while playing the game. When the two were consigned to a small box in the corner online, the parallels between their loving bond and Lysol and Spot’s search for connection were less clear. In person at the intimate Brick Theater, the pair’s adoration for one another was palpable and lent Still Goes a greater emotional punch.
Traffic, meanwhile, requires a steady buildup of momentum in order to work, as our attempts to escape gridlock devolve into complete chaos. That buildup was blunted on Saturday night by a technical pause and restart. There’s still some technical kinks to figure out.
But once Traffic gets going, it is a delight. My crowd’s useless, doomed efforts to communicate and work collectively soon gave way to psychotic yelling and screaming as the game spun out of control. It is a silly, profound, and joyous collective release. Just what theatre should be.
– Joey Sims, New York Correspondent
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