It's been a minute since there was enough of an immersive critical mass at the Hollywood Fringe Festival amongst the massive number of shows to warrant an entire Fringe Diary and not just a few notes in the Rundown.

This year is different, with immersive & interactive work – largely of the experimental kind – populating not only the Immersive & Games category but slipping out into others as well. Why I'm still fielding recommendations on shows that we should actually cover which are coming from the Clown and Solo sections, for example.

(Not that this is an invitation for everyone to pitch me! But if you've seen a show that we should cover and you're a member of the site, make a note in the comments.)

Test Pilots: Little Changemakers – Say Nothing and Leave

Before I get too far into it, I just want to note that the Test Pilots project is ambitious as hell and fascinating. The “show” actually consists of seven different pieces that sit in the “Test Pilots” container, all of which contain varying degrees of audience participation.

At the base layer of participation in the show I was in — and I do mean “in,” we’ll get there — audience members had access to a device that allowed them to shape the flow of the show, branching narrative style. The script that was delivered to the performers on stage via teleprompter was determined by the choices that the audience made. 

But there was another layer of agency in Little Changemakers, the Test Pilot that I wound up starring in.

It began when our small audience — there were six or seven of us for the Sunday matinee — were led into the Audition room. There we were told by the first time director, fresh from a stint as a kindergarten teacher, that we would be test audience for a biographical movie about Super Good, the host of the kids show “Little Changemakers,” who had gone missing years ago. She did this as a few Test Pilot network execs looked on, largely in silence. 

We were not brought here randomly, but because the producers had figured out that one of us was the actual Super Good. That in fact I was Super Good. Would I agree to star in the show about my own life?

And that, my friends, is how I got to live out — sort of — the childhood dream of being a kids TV show host. Kind of. 

After agreeing to be in the show I was whisked away backstage where I was put into costume (over my own clothes) and “makeup” (a goblin masked makeup artist pretended to put makeup on me with a brush, wisely not contacting my face as they were pretending to put makeup on other people with the same brush). It was deliciously disorienting. Was I actually going to perform? How would that work. No one would tell me exactly what was going on.

As someone who came up in high school theatre on Christopher Durang, it felt like I was living out an even more madcap version of The Actor’s Nightmare, complete with puppet companions and a ukulele. 

I don’t want to spoil more of the experience, as things get goofier from the moment I stepped on stage, but I do want to report that at least one of the audience members who were limited to voting on what was happening reported that they had a good time. Indeed that they too had some of that “wait is this really happening?” effect that I was positively swimming in.

I desperately want to check out some of the other Test Pilots shows, although I’d demure from being a direct participant again. Not because I don’t want to — quite the opposite, as I wish there had been an audience full of my friends to bear witness to my turn as Super Good, or video evidence, something that would let me share this with others — but because other willing participants deserve to have this kind of whirlwind fever dream. 

Also I’m sure the Say Nothing and Leave team wouldn’t spoil me like that. While members of the creative team were behind San Francisco’s Change Your Mind, they didn’t clock that I was that Noah until towards the end of the show. In part because I went into a run of the show that was an hour and change earlier than the one I was supposed to go into.

This is one of my all-time favorite Hollywood Fringe experiences, and I hope that the rest of the lineup and the audience side view of it is just as joyful.

–Noah J. Nelson, Publisher

Don't Kill Daisy – Soleil Kohl 

This interactive one-woman show is an agile mix of clowning and video game tropes.

Denver based performer and creator Soleil Kohl plays Daisy, who acts as the audience’s avatar through a loose narrative about the end of the world as we guide her through a wasteland filled with random objects and mini-bosses on her way to a final confrontation with the Big Bad.

Before the show starts we’re given a chance to pick random objects from the stage, or bring something of our own, which we can hand to Daisy to help her overcome the challenges that appear. Of course, sometimes that backfires and Daisy winds up dead. Luckily shouting “Main Menu” and “Continue Story” lets us pick up where Daisy died.

This is a fun, if loose, piece that will benefit from some more reps for it to figure out exactly what it wants to become. The object based help/hinder model has something to it, but doesn’t feel quite dialed in. Nor can I put my finger on exactly what is holding that back aside from some singalling isues between Kohl and the booth which slowed the action when a videogame like sound or lighting effect was called for.

Don’t Kill Daisy works best when it feels like it is about to go off the rails, but sometimes actually goes off the rails. Luckily not for long and not in a way that leads to a total wreck. Yet it will still come down to Kohl's honing the show’s ability to give the audience just enough agency to push her somewhere sublime without letting that force grind the show to a halt.

–Noah J. Nelson, Publisher

ROOT (RUNNING OUT OF TIME) - Mindweird

There is a lot going on in ROOT (RUNNING OUT OF TIME), and therein lies the problem.

At the heart of the show are some interesting questions: what happens when access to life altering technology isn’t evenly distributed? Both to the haves and the have-nots. Where does total faith in technology lead us as individuals and as a species, especially when a preponderance of resources are vested in the hands of those who view technology through a messianic lens.

Unfortunately, while there are a lot of interesting ideas under the surface of ROOT, the piece itself is a mess.

The main storyline is about a young woman, Pluto, who has chosen to terminate her life and become a digital version of herself. The audience is cast as the witnesses of this event, for which an android bodied officiate (played by a human actor) and her sister are both present. The Officiate, being hosted in an android body, can summon up different digital entities to give testimonials on this, Pluto’s Ascension Day.

Which also happens to be her birthday. And her grandmother is in the hospital. And there are protestors outside. Oh, and there’s a whole plot about a generational spaceship in the future that is going to crash into a planet outside our solar system which is told through flash forwards which are distinct from the flashbacks, even though both forwards and backs are told through projections. I think that’s everything.

Well, I think that’s everything story-wise at least, because there’s also a whole AR component which is how Pluto’s digital self appears onstage. Which we use our phones to view. This is, ostensibly, the reason why I came to the show in the first place and one of the major challenges the production has taken on for itself. It is very high tech, and this is Fringe, so the fact that it almost works is a win.

As opposed to how the spaceship appeared for the opening day performance, which was as a plywood cutout of a 1950’s rocket ship which a body-suited actor playing an AI would walk into center stage every so often after pausing the action on stage to stick their head through the porthole of and say a number and then walk it to the other side of the stage. It took me a few times to realize that this was a countdown, since the spaceship story was so disconnected from the ascension service — staged very much like a funeral — that I didn’t know why the spaceship thing was happening at all.

From the tone of the pre-recorded bits and the actors performances I was pretty sure this wasn’t intended to be a farce, but the spaceship bit really tried that conviction.

The assembled cast is a storied and talented bunch, with the two sisters having extensive experience in the L.A. immersive scene on multiple big name projects and experience performing in headset. Our Officiate does a game job, indeed it is his performance that carries the show, but in the end the script is just too fractured to make even watching veteran actors who know each other perform together.

Fringe is the place for wild experimentation, and maybe the show that was on opening day will be radically different from the last performance. But I think the issues with ROOT run deeper than a Fringe run can fix, and if the core creative team wants to keep exploring this idea they’ll need to go back to the lab and pare it down significantly.

– Noah J. Nelson, Publisher

Next Up: The Mysteries of Persephone

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