Since 2016, the Speakeasy Society has been presenting their immersive reimagining of L. Frank Baum’s Oz stories. For almost three years and across ten chapters, the shows have had their ups and downs, successes and failures as they’ve headed towards the end.
No Proscenium chatted with the cast and crew about where the idea came from, what it’s like to put on episodic theatre, the challenges of working with audiences large and small, and so many other things.
So on the eve of the finale of the Kansas Collection, let’s take a look back at how it all came to be…
Julianne Just (Artistic Director, The Speakeasy Society): So [the first chapter] was at the USC campus, I think it was actually the first time they did IndieCade at USC. Maybe the first and only time, but, one of the nights was “Night Games” and Noah [Nelson, founder of No Proscenium] had kind of talked them into exploring an immersive theatre element.
We were told, here’s this giant lawn, you have this much time to set up, there’s some cords to get some power to you. And that’s about it.
So we knew we wanted to create something that would engage some kind of gaming techniques, which ultimately turned into a branched storytelling kind of a direction. There’s a whole series [of shows] it goes down and we really liked the idea that you would make choices that would potentially determine what side of the story you were on or who you are following.
Matthew Bamberg-Johnson (Artistic Director, The Speakeasy Society, and Phil Daring): We talked about different [video] games that were sort of influences for us and that we enjoyed playing. So we drew from Telltale style games. Also from Firewatch and Gone Home and there’s a little, thematically and design wise, I’d say from Bioshock. Bioshock Infinite, specifically. And then in that first chapter particularly, I, at least, was channeling a little bit of the G.O.A.T exam from Fallout, where they do all the aptitude tests and theoretical questions of, “If this, then what?”
Just: I remember particularly talking about Bioshock. We had a conversation about the twins that you meet there early on. There’s a thing with flipping a coin and how that feels so important and it feels so personal and intimate. And that feels like a very important decision. We were excited by that and how they were small choices that felt like they could have big ramifications.
The Oz part of it came out of when we knew we had to get a lot of people in quickly and we knew we wanted it to be an intimate piece.
We really had maybe 10 minutes with an audience member. So, knowing that, we thought it’d be great to use something that people maybe have some familiarity with so that you can build on some existing knowledge and then kind of flip it on its head.
Genevieve Gearhart (Artistic Director, The Speakeasy Society, and Phoebe Daring/Ozma): The great thing when we did it at IndieCade for Chapter One was that was the only time that no one knew going in that had anything to do with Oz. After we remounted people knew based on marketing and things like that.
But because people were coming in blind, no one knew. And what would happen is about halfway through the chapter, one of us would say something and you would see that light switch flip on in people’s heads. And they’d be like, “Oh,” someone even said like, “Oh, that’s where we are!”
Chris Porter (Associate Artistic Director, The Speakeasy Society): It’s a fun thing when we go back through the scripts, you can still see the remnants of that, how we just layer it on piece by piece. [Phil] talks about a coven of witches and that doesn’t mean anything out of context. And then all of a sudden we’re looking for Dorothea Gale and since she’s never called by her full name, you don’t make that connection. So it’s not until they finally say Oz that it’s like, “I understand this world now.”
Just: IndieCade was kind of a big grand experiment. So we knew that we were setting something up that could have the potential to have lots of additional chapters, but, also, we were really interested just seeing how people responded to it. Part of what was exciting to us about IndieCade was that it’s a new audience. It’s a gaming audience, not an immersive theatre audience which has been exciting because the Kansas Collection has really grown our audience. So I think our audience now is made up of people coming from a lot of different sort of interactive backgrounds and mediums.
Bamberg-Johnson: There was the idea that we would move from one component of the story to the next component of the story.
But I think, for me, by the end of the first night and by the time we had finished IndieCade, I think we all kind of looked at each other and said, “Wow, there’s something special here. This was really cool. And we have to find some way to continue this and make it longer lasting.”
Just: We knew if there were going to be future episodes, it would be episodic. That was kind of built in. I will reveal doing Chapter One, we hadn’t mapped out the whole rest of the story. So Chapter One for us, we wanted to introduce characters, elements, ideas, and themes.
People went from Chapter One to Chapter Two, they followed it and then coming out of Two it was like, “Well what’s next?” We have to make sure this is going somewhere and we’re not just introducing or creating cool situations or exciting situations. And that’s when we did the real kind of larger map out.
Porter: We’ve had to continually revise what Chapter Ten would be, and sometimes we were like, “Should it be eight or should it be seven?” But in the end we decided on the ten just so that we could let all of the plot that we had introduced over even just the first three chapters play out.
Bamberg-Johnson: Fun fact for those who are considering constructing episodic series of their own, we do not recommend putting most of your major artistic team as characters in an ongoing series. That’s been really taxing. We’re two of the artistic directors and then our producing director is also acting in the shows. And another associate artistic director. It cuts down on our capacity to do front of house and back of house stuff in a way that we did not really think through at the beginning of the series.
John Henningsen (Producing Director, The Speakeasy Society and Lyman): The episodic nature of the Kansas Collection was an experiment for us. Both in how we would be able to tell the story and how the audience would react. We have been releasing chapters over the course of about three years and we have seen thousands of “recruits”.
Michael Bates (Associate Artistic Director, The Speakeasy Society and Jack Pumpkinhead): The serialized aspect feels closer to a TV show than a play in many ways. Because of the nature of the format, I generally find the big shows (Chapters Five and Ten) easier to do than the smaller chapters where we repeat eight, nine, ten times a night. The flip-side is after one night of a smaller chapter, you’ve learned more about the show and the audiences coming through than you may over the run of a normal show.
Just: Besides the fact that 2016 was a long time ago, people have been kind of observing like, “Wow, you guys are really driving it home now.” There was a part of us that realized that while we really love Kansas, it just takes our full capacity running it. We want to see it to a satisfying and powerful ending. But also we are excited to start exploring some other content.
Bamberg-Johnson: And we’ll do it again, Kansas will live on in some form. But we won’t be in it, probably.
Just: There might have to be some recasts involved, which of course would be a totally different can of worms because they all exist in a way now. So, it doesn’t need to unfold over three years. It can potentially unfold over a year or six months.
A devoted portion of the Kansas Collection’s fans took part and engaged with the world and the characters that inhabited it through a long-running series of puzzles. They hadn’t initially been conceived as part of the show, but quickly became a way to build the world and add texture for those who were interested.
We really wanted to make clear boundaries so you know once your ticketed round starts, the things for you to really engage with are the performers. — Julianne Just
Porter: We decided to make the waiting room for the first time we mounted Chapter Two a very detailed set. So we had a jar filled with keys, we had a list of names, and we had all these letters that had dates and I was like, “Oh, this is so clever of me. They’re all going to be dated in May because the May birthstone is emerald.” And so I was like, “Oh, this is very wonderful.” And we found out after the second show that audience members took it as a puzzle.
We were like, “Okay cool, let’s give them a puzzle.”
When we released the video after Chapter Two, we had a number buried in the video. So if you decoded that number, you would call it, you’d hear a message from Jinjur saying, you know, “Oh tell Lyman this thing at the next chapter.” And it turns out there were a lot of people who found that and a lot of people decided to activate that and we started creating the puzzle tracks and that ended up being a whole different way to give additional world-building and information about the characters.
It’s been really rewarding to figure out a way to make the puzzles. By the way, shout out to Richard Malena Webber and Jennifer Kretchmer who came in and helped me with the puzzle design because I thought I had made a great puzzle and someone solved it in two hours.
Bamberg-Johnson: We’re learning from our audience as we go. And that was, at first, just an effort at more robust design, but also learning that there’s this intersection of communities of people coming from different backgrounds coming to see the show. Everyone has different baggage of expectations coming in. We were providing some social cues that we weren’t aware we were providing in that space. Cool. We learned from that. And have figured out a way so we can bury some Easter eggs in there if that’s something that’s going to be rewarding for people.
I think that sometimes that’s a pitfall of ARGs and ARXs is that if you don’t invest a lot of time and energy into the pre-show material that you’re not going to feel as if you really have all the information that you need and we really wanted to combat that in the construction of this piece.
Just: Coming out of Chapter Two we did that big check in and one of the big things we decided was that at the end of the day what we care about most of all is meaningful narrative and emotional storytelling.
And that’s where I think we really tried to make this clear division of this puzzle track that happens outside because we don’t want people distracted. Our pieces are short because they’re so intimate. We don’t want you wasting your 20 minutes trying to count the light bulbs in a room because maybe that’s going to be the cipher. We really wanted to make clear boundaries so you know once your ticketed round starts, the things for you to really engage with are the performers.
Gearhart: I think we found it to be a really nice way to kind of start linking the chapters together, right? Because we couldn’t produce those chapters back to back to back. I mean, it was just impossible for us to run all 10 chapters right in a row. So to have those moments where we can extend the content outside of the show and then you even have chances to interact with characters during that time where you’re texting or other ways. I feel like it really helped our engagement and helped people want to continue along the story and not drop off.
With so many audience members coming through each show, it was important to prepare for any type of interaction and question while alerting the audience to what type of agency they had available to them.
Zan Headley (Jo Files): The moments of improvised audience interactions are the most rewarding. Those moments really fuel the shows and keep the connections between the audience and the characters alive. Yet, they are also the most challenging from a technical standpoint. It feels a lot like juggling.
Just: We are very deliberate with when we ask you a question. We always are anticipating you might answer. We’re prepared for you not to answer. When you do a script read and there’s no audience there, the tendency is to ask, “What are you doing?” And then you just move to the next point. And I think we always have that reminder of like, “Hey, just a reminder,” so you’re flagging it in your head, which isn’t a continuous thought. We want to use this as a space to give and if the audience wants to engage, this is the space.
Henningsen: In the first four chapters, Lyman is the gatekeeper and gets to talk to the audience members and welcome them into the world. His mood and how he was dressed would indicate a little of what was in store in that chapter. Lyman is also the “rules room”. It is his job to set the tone of what is about to happen — getting audiences comfortable with talking to the characters and explaining how much freedom of choice is involved in each chapter. Whether they knew it or not — Lyman was training the audience members how to interact with the characters in the chapter.
Gearhart: This really connects to Chapter Nine. In Chapter Nine we had two different versions of the script. So this is something we also do. We’ll write several different responses based on how Ozma has to choose to act. We’ll talk a lot about choice in The Kansas Collection. But one thing that I think as creators we know that the audience doesn’t always know is that they’re making choices even when they don’t know they’re making a choice.
Headley: There are some interactions that can be anticipated, we open the door, so there is prepared text for some of those moments. We also do hold space for improvised interactions like the moment the recruits introduce themselves to the Queen in Chapter Nine. There is both written text and space for me and Genevieve to improv.
Gearhart: We were really curious to see how many people were going to spill the beans. Now, obviously, some people are not going to spill the beans because they are not loyal to us. That’s it. That’s a choice that they’re actively making.
But we did kind of provide two cues in the script. One with Jo Files upstairs. Which I would say only probably two or three groups actually took that moment. And then the bigger moment was [the] what did you bring me moment. And many people took that as an opportunity to say, “Oh, well, I don’t have a gift, but I can tell you some things.” And that was really fun.
Sometimes people didn’t [bring up the events of Chapter Eight] and sometimes that’s because they’re loyal to Patchwork or Revolt. But other times talking to people, it was like they said, “Oh, I didn’t even realize.”
Henningsen: The episodic nature of the show is different than any other show I have worked on — ever. The addition of the audience choice changing the story and providing different variations also changes how the stories are crafted and how they play out.
Bamberg-Johnson: I think that it’s also really important to point out, and Lyman said this a couple of times too, that choices are choices, right? There is no wrong answer or right answer. There are only consequences, right? So, it’s not that anyone did it wrong. It’s just that it creates a different reaction.
Natalie Fryman (Glinda):
People do and say some wild stuff!! One moment in particular happened way back in Chapter 2: The Axe. It was our very first run, and I think it was towards the end of our very first night, perhaps even our very last cycle. My portion of the chapter ends abruptly with a big reveal and me yelling at everyone to get out, which they do. James [Cowan, who plays The Tin Man] and I then have a minute or two to take a breath and reset. We were in this moment of relaxation, out of character, when all of a sudden, an audience member runs in and starts yelling at James. I don’t recall exactly what he said, but it was very impassioned and accusatory.
Both James and I were completely agog and had idea what to do. I believe James managed to say, “My mother was a quilter” before the Lion came in and had to physically remove the guy. It was so surprising! Had this happened at a later chapter, I believe both James and I would’ve been more equipped to improvise something more interesting and satisfying for that audience member, regardless of how “inappropriate” his choice/outburst was, but as this was the very beginning of the journey for us, we were like deer in headlights. It’s pretty amazing that someone was so invested in our story that they felt compelled to create their own epilogue, but it definitely caught us off guard!
Christie Harms (General Jinjur): The moment that stood out to me was during Chapter Two. An audience member broke the flow of the text and asked Glinda if she knew Elphaba (from Wicked). Natalie looked puzzled then denied knowing Elphaba and got the story back on track. Later, we discussed that moment as a team, and Chris Porter told us that Wicked was not written by Baum and technically is not in our cannon, so Natalie (potentially without knowing it) replied perfectly.
Just: I think a number of people have said afterwards, “I wanted to do something, what if I did?” And I thought it was always interesting that people would say what would have happened if I did? And yet they never did. I do think that’s one thing we try really hard is we don’t want to tell you the rules but we want to tell you the rules. Most often we’re asking you to verbally engage. But we tried to do very clear signals of, this is a space where, we’re inviting you to move and walk and have some agency physically versus just verbally.
Porter: We also usually do a reading run and then an actual on its feet run, where one of us will try to be that audience. We’ll try to say all the things wrong and purposefully try to poke holes in the world and disrupt it. So that way all of our actors have an opportunity to figure out what to do as a character in that situation when it’s in a safe space.
Bamberg-Johnson: I think about each immersive show in terms of making a brain for each show. What are the things that I need to know? What are things I cannot know? What is the character’s perspective on the world they’re living in? Just because immersive is alive with unpredictable audience interactions and questions that you can’t possibly plan for.
John McCormick (The Wizard of Oz/Oscar): My favorite thing is when someone repeats back something I said to them as an ad-lib in an earlier chapter, and it’s turned out to have some personal relevance to their experience in Kansas. Oscar exists outside the power structure of Oz when you first meet him, so I got a lot of fun opportunities to provide commentary and context for folks.
Gearhart: We write so much more script than people ever see because we write a lot for action. Every possibility. We try to prepare ourselves for anything.
Just: I’d say our audiences always…it’s not that they surprised us. They respect the peace. To me, that’s always very meaningful that they read the cues. And I do think the more care we take to set up the cues correctly the easier it is for them as well.
Porter: We’re a narrative company, we love the storytelling and being part of stories. Fortunately our audiences have been very accepting of the fact that in order to tell the story, there are beats that have to happen. Dorothy gets taken, Scarecrow dies, Dorothy dies.
There are things that have to happen and we’ll cue you in on those points. And one of the advantages of doing an episodic work that we’ve discovered is that you can reward return audience by just having them repeat what happened in a previous chapter and it’s something where that experience gets to become part of that story for the next chapter.
That kind of engagement or the choice to share that is an unexpected benefit of having an episodic long term narrative.
With such a long running series told across so many episodes and an ongoing plot line, the writers and actors had the chance to develop their characters in a way not normally available in theatre.
In Chapter Ten, when I’m referencing events that have happened before, I’m not imagining what they may have been, or creating a backstory in my head: I have memories of those things! I was there! — Michael Bates
Bamberg-Johnson: We’ve been operating now for a little over six years as a company and some of us have known each other for longer than that. Some of the actors came out of our grad school program at Cal Arts, so we know them very well.
The majority of our shows we will workshop and we spent a lot of time working around broad ideas and seeing what bodies fit what characters, what voices are going to help tell what portions of the story. And sometimes we’ll cast the ensemble before we even know what parts everyone is playing.
We took a different approach with this, which in some ways it was a little more traditional, but for us it was experimental, which was that we just handpicked people.
Just: I think we cast all the roles before we wrote a single word. So there was a specific actor that it was being written for out the gate. I definitely think had we put different actors in some of those parts we would have gone really different places with them. So I will say that the characters were definitely inspired and influenced by what the actor brought to the role. After a character was introduced for the first time and as we learned more about that, we would oftentimes lean into things that were specific to the actor.
Bamberg-Johnson: With Glinda we talked about Glinda as a badass, right? And Glinda holding a baseball bat and menacing you with that bat. And then that informed the actress that we chose to reach out to because wouldn’t it be so cool to see Natalie do that?
Fryman: I’m very honored to have been cast as Glinda, especially since Speakeasy’s version of her is much darker and more in my wheelhouse than the fluffy, pink, wand-wielding, bubble-bound good witch that we all know. With everything that happens after she encounters Dorothy, it’s no wonder she becomes the angry, militant woman that we see in the Kansas Collection, and I thoroughly enjoyed exploring the twists and turns of her journey.
Porter: A lot of times it did start from a point of an archetype. I was like, “What if the Cowardly Lion wasn’t cowardly? She just never picked a side so people call her cowardly.” I think that was even before we had cast Jess (Rosilyn, who plays the Lion) so we didn’t know it was a her at that point. It’s very much a baton pass because a lot of times, even though we know who it is. I’ll be doing a first draft and I’m imagining this person is saying this thing, but by the time the actors actually get it, and learn it, and work it, it they’ve made it their own and it becomes this unique special thing. And they’re no longer an archetype or me writing a word.
Just:
The Lion is a great example. The Lion’s accent. She came into the first read and again, she didn’t audition, we’d asked her to do it and but she came in and said, “You know, I have this idea.”
Porter: Julianne came over to me because I was sitting somewhere in this corner and she were like, “You should hear Jess read this thing. It’s very different.” And then she read it and I was like, “That’s not what I had in mind. And that’s wonderful.”
James Michael Cowan (The Tin Man): We, as a team, worked on building the lore that was a part of our universe; separating the history of the literature from the history of the film. Our version of the Tin Man is much darker and is in deep pain, which is something that delighted me as an actor because I felt that the element of grief would give the character new dimension.
I have never felt more at home and safe in developing a character. The team and I would all bring ideas to the table, but only what’s the character rose to the top. It was very much a process of letting go of what might be “cool”, in order to search for what was true and honest.
Bamberg-Johnson: One thing that I think is really different and challenging about working in an episodic format with these actors is that they are the characters. There are no understudies, right? It is their face, it is their identity. If someone gets sick, if someone books a gig, if someone moves out of town, you have to address and deal with that.
Gearhart: Obviously with casting a 10 chapter series that will take place over the course of three year scheduling and availability has been a huge issue. We’ve had people move. Our original Dorothy, she moved to Chicago and so we had to get a new Dorothy and our original Scarecrow moved to New York City.
Just: In the whole scheduling aspect, we’ve definitely made creative choices around that. There are chapters, particularly the later ones, as we’ve been driving to finish this where we would have maybe had a character show up. But because they weren’t available, we decided to bring in different character in to serve a similar function within the action of it.
Bamberg-Johnson: One thing that I think is great from an acting perspective is it affords you the possibility to have the same kind of character development that a television actor might have over a year long series. And how often do you really get the opportunity to do that in a theatrical context?
Even for the characters that are no longer with us and have died off in the series, we always invite them as test audiences for earlier versions to be able to hear the way that other characters continue to talk about them or engage with their story, it continues to be rewarding for them now.
Fryman: I’ve never performed in a serialized piece before, immersive or otherwise, so this was completely new territory for me. I’d never before had the chance to develop a character over such a long period of time, and I’d never before had to perform a show multiple times in a night, as we did for the shorter chapters, which was always a challenge, some chapters more than others.
For the shorter chapters, we didn’t always get a lot of rehearsal time in the performance space, so it usually took a few show nights for me to really settle into it. Doing those chapters so many times allowed me to absorb my character much more fully than I ever have before, which was amazing. The audience is a major X factor too, so you can’t rehearse for or anticipate every possible scenario until it happens, but the more I internalized Glinda, the easier it became to follow my impulses and improvise with the audience while staying true to character.
Headley: I have such a soft spot for Chapter One. I had absolutely no clue what was going on or the scope of the story. It really put me in a great position as an actor because I knew just as little as my character did. So I learned about the world of the play alongside the character with each new chapter.
Ed: Terence Leclere joined the production in Chapter Five and took over the role of the Scarecrow in the character’s first in-person appearance.
Terence Leclere (The Scarecrow): Learning about all the previous chapters, watching the corresponding videos, the puzzles, hearing stories about the fans of the show were all very instrumental in creating a rewarding experience for people who had been following the Kansas Collection since the beginning. When I joined the original Tension Experience (Ascension) it was already several months into the ARG so there was a similar learning process to entering that world as a performer, but most other shows I’ve done don’t have this amount of past story and audience experience to incorporate, which I personally love to play with and try to incorporate as a performer in every possible way I can.
Gearhart: As an actor I had so much fun to be able to stick with a character for that long. And I will say even though we always have moments of improv in the shows that are kind of written in, but it becomes so easy to improvise as these characters for, I think for everybody, because they’ve been sitting with them for so long and the response time is so quick and I have such a blast. Like in this last chapter working with Zan where he was in as Jo Files. It’s so much fun when we do get those moments between the two of us because he just cracks me up. He’s so good. It comes from being that character for so, so long. It’s not an opportunity that you normally get.
McCormick: The sheer length of the timeline has been unique. I’ve been performing for some of the same people for three years now and have built dynamics with recurring audience members that have informed how Oscar has evolved. It’s almost been like a three year ongoing theater lab!
Henningsen:Lyman has grown as a fully developed character over time. Most of my past theater experience lasted a month of performances and I was done with the character. With the Kansas Collection, I have been able to live with Lyman for years and really get into his head — or he got into my head. I am sure that the way I play the character in Chapter One remounts is different than how I originally played him.
Bates: In Chapter Ten, when I’m referencing events that have happened before, I’m not imagining what they may have been, or creating a backstory in my head: I have memories of those things! I was there!
Developing relationships with the material, my fellow actors in Kansas, and especially the audience has also been the gift that keeps on giving. Each chapter is like checking in with the friends Jack has made.
Harms: Theater is a blessing because you often get to ‘live’ with your character for a longer period of time…and with immersive theatre, I reeeeally get to live with Jinjur, because the audience interaction keeps each show totally fresh and unpredictable. It gave me a lot of time to readjust and change aspects of my performance that didn’t feel genuine. It also taught me to be totally flexible and treat my character like a real human — someone with multiple complexities that I can always discover more about.
The greatest challenge was finding the balance of Jinjur’s authoritative side with her vulnerable side. She loves a lot of things — Glinda, Revolt, her followers, and she is incredibly multi-faceted. So I worked a lot on finding various expressions for Jinjur. For example, I got caught in the trap of yelling a lot to rally my followers, but found that I was able to have a lot of power in my stillness and sincerity as well.
Fryman: Glinda certainly has a character baseline, how I understood and portrayed her in each separate chapter was influenced by what was happening in my own life at the time. I often found that Glinda would come along when I really needed an emotional release of some kind, which is such a blessing. Glinda became a great way to exorcise my own personal demons, and we really grew together over the years. As more characters joined the piece, I had the chance to explore Glinda even further through how she saw and related to everyone. The fantastic writing (thank you, Chris Porter!) makes it that much easier to do my job as an actor, and the slow reveal of the story and my character with each new chapter has been so exciting.
McCormick: What fascinated me is how much [Oscar’s] development has been the result of audience interaction. We realized after Chapter One that people were drawn to Oscar. Even if they didn’t trust him, they always listened to what he said. That contentious rapport gave us a lot to work with, and has made his redemptive journey all the more organic, in my mind.
Cowan: The longevity of the Kansas Collection has separated its process from other shows I have been a part of. We’ve been able to use each chapter as R&D for the one that succeeds it. We’ve been able to sink in, and let this world we have created become inhabitable.
Leclere: Thanks to how cleverly [the Scarecrow] was reimagined by Chris Porter and the whole team, the way they approached, researched and developed each character in that series, and how this Scarecrow was a ruler obsessively concerned with how he was perceived by all, made me dig deeper as well and look into all the variations and mythologies surrounding the character of the Scarecrow, not just in the world of Oz but also in all instances he’s portrayed, and think carefully on how his appearance, raison d’être and story is perceived by audiences in each instance. This also made me contemplate how a compelling story very often will carry more weight through history than facts.
Porter: And again, a huge shout out to our actors, right? Because they know and love the story and their characters. And so I’ve had so many people when we were doing Chapters One through Five who would come up to meet characters in our show and be like, “Do I die? How do I end? What is this going to be?” And so far everyone’s been very satisfied with their character’s arc. We hope to see it out well in Ten.
Chapters One through Four were remounted more frequently than the later chapters, but it gave everyone the chance to look at what was working, what wasn’t, and what needed to be in future chapters. As time passed, locations that had once been used were no longer available and the team needed to adapt.
It’s in something that’s site specific, a space that you may have been to before but now is reimagined with a completely different context, you leave that experience and you look at the whole world a little bit differently — Matthew Bamberg-Johnson
Just: Chapter One in the remount, it runs more smoothly. There’s maybe some stuff where it’s like, “Oh, that section always gets skipped. So let’s just make a choice there.” But I’d say One now versus one at the beginning is very, very close to the original.
Bamberg-Johnson: We have re-interrogated One because 2016 is very different from 2018. So we had to go back and make sure things that we were saying we meant for them to say.
Porter: The scripts were all written pre-Trump being elected president. And as soon as that happens, the meaning of the scripts took a very different connotation. We didn’t change it, we decided it was good, but we did learn from it.
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If we ever did remount One, there are a few seeds planted in One that we didn’t end up following through because it wasn’t as responsive to the characters or the audience.
Bamberg-Johnson: Some of the remounts of One are working with what we have out of necessity. Obviously as we remounted One it was in this backyard, which is our backyard, right? So, we also wanted to make sure all the spaces suggested the right things tonally. So the idea that you’re going to what feels like a fairly innocuous residential neighborhood and then you step into this world revealed in the back.
For Chapter Two, the first time that we did it, it was in, at the time a fairly raw warehouse space in east Hollywood and we were able to take advantage of that kind of industrial feel and the relative availability of it. Now that’s a very busy arts incubator run by John Henningsen (Speakeasy’s producing director). Were we to ever go back and do it again from the first we would not be able to do Chapter Two there anymore. It wouldn’t feel right because the tone of the space has changed.
So we need to figure that out and things adapt and change as we go on. In Chapter Three, it was in John’s home, he moved and we actually stumbled on a better space with more opportunities. [Ed: Chapter Three was remounted in Chinatown at the same eventual location as Chapter Nine.]
Just: I think that’s one of the things that had been one of our initial goals: the fact that we need to find a new space made us look at the idea that you’re going to different parts of the city.
Bamberg-Johnson: This is maybe a little idealistic, but I like to think that when you go to an immersive experience, and particularly when it’s a non-theatrical setting. It’s in something that’s site specific, a space that you may have been to before but now is reimagined with a completely different context, you leave that experience and you look at the whole world a little bit differently. Even if it’s just for a minute. And I think that Chinatown space in particular really offers a magical opportunity to do that with the paper lanterns and everything. It’s just a neat place to walk around and decompress after your experience.
Just: I think about Chapter Four. Coming out of Chapter Three we knew Chapter Three was very talky and a lot of information was being delivered. Part of that was we felt like we had a lot of information we wanted to give you in this story. So in Chapter Four we wanted to go back to something that felt more similar to Chapter One. So the two audience members at a time to make it very personalized, to give you space, to have one-on-one interactions with the character, to have physical activities, with the invitations and the stamping. That was very responsive to what Three turned into.
Bamberg-Johnson: I think Four, we were also interrogating again, what happens when someone comes who’s never seen it before because we had some people who came to Three with no context. And we were like, “Well, we’re fucked.” That’s a tough moment to walk into and not have any kind of background or context. So certainly we did that in a more robust way with Five.
But even with Four, I remember Michael Bates who plays Pumpkinhead told a story of [Porter interjects: “He doesn’t like the name Pumpkinhead.”], oh that’s right, dear sweet Jack, a woman sat down next to him and he’s like, “Oh, hello. Who are you following?” She’s like, “I have no idea what’s going on. This is my first time at the show.” And he said, “Oh, that’s okay. I like that you’re honest.” And then he adapted his texts to provide her with some kind of introduction to what was going on.
In some ways their texts did recap the faction allegiances and explain kind of where everyone was coming from, but that helped facilitate new audience members while at the same time providing something that was different and satisfying.
With Chapter Five, the Kansas Collection hit its midpoint and broke form, opening up into the biggest chapter yet, with a larger location, a larger audience, all of the characters in one place, and multiple tracks geared towards Oz’s various factions.
Bamberg-Johnson: Getting to Chapter Five. So we knew we wanted to, we needed to create this moment for the wedding and we were fortunate enough to have a relationship with Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church in Glendale.
We started thinking about what is this bizarro version of a wedding and the misassumptions that you could make if you were just going off the words without the context.
Just: With Chapter Three, in the remount, when it got expanded a bit, if you were with the Wizard and Phoebe in the basement, she alluded to her engagement to the Scarecrow and did talk about the topic of weddings and how weddings are done. What was exciting about that, is after the first night, people had a lot of advice about things that are done in a traditional Earth wedding.
Porter: The first night [of Chapter Three], someone told Genevieve about throwing rice and she said, “Competitively?” as her improvisation.
So we did that at the wedding. We had competitive rice throwing because we were like, “That’s hilarious.”
Just: We were really excited to take stuff that the audience had brought into Chapter Three with these suggestions about how you do a wedding. So the things that they brought up are literally there.
Bamberg-Johnson: You need to have a guest book and then it’s just textbooks that people sign.
Just: So the reception came before the wedding, the groom wears white and isn’t seen, and doesn’t come out until the actual ceremony, and doesn’t greet anyone.
That was something really important with Five as we were like, it is a wedding, so we want it to be somewhere that does feel like a wedding. That is the part of the research they got right. Jo Files had to take a note that like a lot of weddings happen in churches.
McCormick: Honestly, I’m still floored by the scope of Chapter Five. All the previous installments had been so much smaller that I had a difficult time envisioning what a BIG Kansas show would look like. Stumbling into the courtyard “drunk” and being met with an entire wedding’s worth of guests was an enormous thrill.
Bamberg-Johnson: It also provided an opportunity for the audience to get dressed up and to demonstrate their allegiance. That was really fun. So wear this color and then for people to be able to identify one another and where they stood based on that color was a lot of fun.
Henningsen: When we were first discussing the wedding I thought it would be really fun to be the priest (HA! That is my priest costume!). Since Lyman had been the first person the audience sees for the past four chapters — we purposely didn’t reveal him until after the reception. Many nights I would run into the room to a round of applause from the audience. That is incredibly fun.
I think my favorite moment of the entire collection would be the wedding. Running down the aisle, giggling, to echoing applause from the audience and then saying “I’m the priest.” That is one of the top three performance moments that I will remember forever.
Porter: We’ve mentioned our exhaustive scripts. Every character in that open sandbox had different information for every single color faction. So Jack alone would have five different responses depending on who approached him at any given time.
Just: In Chapter Five, we really wanted to honor those who are still in the Scarecrow’s Armed Militia. I think the Scarecrow, well, he’s got a very bad rap. For those who met with him, he’s actually a very likable guy.
Leclere: That’s the thing about this kind of work. I wished more people could have seen and heard this great monologue Chris and crew wrote, and I think I let that want bleed into the Scarecrow’s actions and emotions a bit; he too wanted more people to hear his side of the story, but at this point he didn’t know who to trust anymore, so who he got was who he got.
This did also however make what the devoted fans did get a much more exclusive audience with the king, which added to the special intimacy of that scene. Who wouldn’t want to be with the king in his dressing room on his big day?
The irony for Scarecrow now I suppose is that these audience members are the only people who truly know his story…and they will recount it with the details that remain in their minds or not, omitting those truths they may have forgot.
I believe that was the intention in Chapter Five for him to ‘struggle to do the right thing and be sympathetic for his struggles and to never be a monster’. Before then his actions certainly seemed reprehensible, but when you then hear (or are lucky to hear) why and how his hand was forced into making those decisions, the gray areas grow deeper and ideally you begin to question who the real “bad guy” is.
Bamberg-Johnson: We all have, not necessarily non-negotiables, but things that we really hold on to in particular chapters or particular pieces. And for me it was the sniper rifle from the balcony is going to be what takes out the Scarecrow. Before we had anything written, I was like, “You guys, this is how the Scarecrow dies and the audience member pulls the trigger.” I’m sure everyone got sick of me insisting on that. The venue was in flux for a little while and I was just saying, “No, but it has to be this, it has to be this.” And that ended up being, I would say a really very cool one-on-one experience.
Fryman: I basically ask people to murder someone on my command, and as far as I recall, no one ever refused. Everyone pulled the trigger. We had a contingency plan in case someone backed out last minute, but I never had to use it. Granted, most of the people they sent to me were committed audience/recruits who were heavily invested in the story and had solved difficult puzzles, so if they made it that far, they were already on my side and knew, to a degree, what I wanted them to do.
I only interacted with two audience members for most of the show, one with whom I spent the most significant chunk of time, both before and after the assassination. It was an amazing opportunity to interact with my “followers” one-on-one, and I always recognize my shooters when I see them in the audience.
I did get a bit of time with a larger group, as well as a brief encounter with the Lion (Jessica Rosilyn) and her audience member, so I also appreciated the opportunity to express my/Glinda’s point of view to those who’d not met me before. The new audience got a chance to vow their allegiance to a faction at the end of the show, and it always felt like a personal victory when a new recruit chose REVOLT.
Porter: We knew for a while that Chapter Five was where Scarecrow was gonna die. And talking about non-negotiables one of mine that, again, nobody argued against, is that I wanted the deaths to be important. Going forward that it wouldn’t just be like, “Oh, we don’t need this character anymore. They fall off the boat.” And that’s the end of it.
We wanted them to be impactful and obviously the Scarecrow being killed and Ozma taking over was important. But then as we went forward, it was like, “Oh, Jinjur’s death was actually very traumatic for Glinda. Oh, Dorothy’s death. It’s actually traumatic for all of these other characters.”
It’s something that we’ve held true as we have characters dying. It’s been impactful in the story.
McCormick: Chapter Five was the linchpin. If you found yourself with Oscar after the Scarecrow King’s assassination, you saw him confront his own legacy in a very tangible and final way. Oscar’s not a true villain so much as he is an opportunist, so being forced to stop grifting for a moment and ponder mortality produces a seismic shift in the character.
Bamberg-Johnson: Chapter Five, I think people responded to just how completely different the tracks were.There was a strong response to people wanting to come back multiple times in order to make sure that they are engaging those other tracks.
Just: On some level, [the tracks are] practical. We only have so many actors and given that there were groups of 10 and managing that while also wanting to reserve characters for a one-off. That was part of it where it was like, “Okay we’re going to sacrifice to have these actors for a one-off so we’re not going to necessarily have them to do a scene with.” We tried to really balance situations where you’re going to have one actor and you know that generally is a conversation or monologue versus getting to see a scene which is more active.
Porter: We also have a lot of spreadsheets. Which is a completely logistical answer for moments where there’s so many things where we have to be like, “This person’s going here and then this scene happens here so that we can know what the arc is.” Jo Files would leave a scene to go to another, but the top of his second scene, that’s where his emotion was at the top of his previous one. We could do that because the audience wasn’t shared between the two, but we had to keep track of that and tell the actor coming into the scene that you’re not at the energy level of the previous scene.
Just: A lot of it too is time, right? Like things have to time up. And so you might want to do more with these characters, you might want to do 12 minutes worth of content with those people, but you really only have a solid eight minutes of content with these other characters and that becomes a big thing. Are we going to try to fill out or build that content out even though it really doesn’t support an extra beat? I think that’s dangerous. Filler becomes filler real fast. There are times where we love this 12 minute scene, but it’s just not matching the timing of everything else. So we have to make some tough choices.
After Chapter Five, the Kansas Collection picked up speed as it headed towards its conclusion. The chapters grew longer and darker as the story began to pay off what it had set up and to establish the stakes for the ending.
Chapter Six dealt with the fallout of Chapter Five and what it meant for the inhabitants of Oz while keeping the focus on two of its longest running characters, Phil and Glinda.
Just: We did have a conversation [after Chapter Five] where it’s like we need to endgame this and there’s actually a lot of information and things that need to happen to get us to what is going to be Ten which is the real endgame. In Six through Nine a lot has been revealed and gone into play.
Porter: We knew after Five, Six was just going to be small from the get go. We knew it was just going to be three actors with a video interruption from Ozma. And we knew the things that had to happen: the reveal of Jinjur and then the reveal of good Ozma. That’s way over simplifying it. I really like that chapter.
Bamberg-Johnson: I think Six is one of my favorites. That’s my favorite moment of transition for Phil. Where he starts it at the beginning having nothing, and by the end of it, he has made a clear decision that he is coming for whatever this Ozma thing is and nothing is going to stop him from saving Phoebe.
Fryman: Chapter 6: The Witch was extremely demanding, as I had most of the text and essentially had to experience a complete emotional breakdown on repeat, six-seven times a night, three nights a weekend, two consecutive weekends. I wasn’t able to get much of a break in between cycles either, so it was pretty non-stop. Exhausting, to say the least!
Harms: The death itself was awesome, because I got to film it, but what was very exciting were the chapters after Jinjur passed. Going to dress rehearsals and hearing other characters posthumously speak about Jinjur was incredibly moving. In particular, the shrine in Chapter Six was a very surreal experience. My friends of nine years designed a shrine to a character I had helped create, complete with pictures from my real childhood experiences…it felt like what it might be like if I, Christie, were to actually pass away. It made me feel incredibly grateful for my team.
Bamberg-Johnson: While we were doing Four, we had been approached by a representative from The Row [an outdoor mall/collective near downtown Los Angeles], which is where we did Six. So we went down and we had a space all picked out and we knew what we were going to do with this whole floor. And then it turned out it was a directly above Creep.
So we changed our location, which ended up being great.
Chapter Seven saw a big shift in the shows with the death of Dorothy.
Just: [Dorothy’s death] was one thing I wanted. We have a lot of big characters and a lot of big characters that people had a stake in and it did feel like we had too many big players as we were endgaming. To have Glinda and Dorothy and Phil, it’s a lot.
I mean I’d wanted to kill Dorothy basically since the beginning.
Porter: I was at least aware enough writing the Tin Man that I want never wanted him to be in love with her. I wanted him to be obsessed with her. And at some point Julianne texted me and she were like, “What if he actually hates her?” And I was like, “That’s fine. That’s cool.”
Cowan: He wants to try to force Dorothy to love him, and when she refuses the only thing he is capable of is replacing that love with hate. He lets himself become irrational and reactive as an excuse for the actions he is afraid to take. As a way of living the part of himself that he truly fears — the one without a heart.
Tin Man’s arc comes to a close in this chapter. The question of what to do with Dorothy is answered. Tin Man’s armor, his purpose is now stripped away, and both he and the audience are left wondering what the future has in store for him.
Just: I feel like if Dorothy was still in play, there’s always going to be part of you that feels like she’s the key to this whole puzzle. And I think that was an exciting thing, that she’s not the key to all of this. She’s not the answer. She’s not the Lost Princess.
Chapter Seven is really important as we see the other side of her and the other side of that coin is the politician. It is someone who is good at talking and good at playing and manipulating. In many ways, she has the characteristics, that actually as we say it out loud, that makes me think of Phoebe/Ozma.
Bates: So much of [Jack’s] drive and motivation was to find Dorothy and restore this little family that he thought he had with Tik and and her, and to find out that that didn’t really exist was brutal.
Of course there’s a lot of heavy stuff happening for Jack in that chapter, and as rough as that is for him, being able to share that with audiences and see them be there for him was very special to me.
Chapter Eight saw the introduction of one of the last bits of Oz lore that only been talked about so far, the silver slippers.
Porter: In Chapter Eight when we finally got to bring [the slippers] back and they don’t work was actually one of our things going into it. And that moment of disappointment and hearing some people afterwards being like, “I thought that box was going to come up off the floor.”
Bamberg-Johnson: That’s dealing with physical realities. And we we talked about, “Now what are we going to do? What do we want to invest in? Do we want to buy a magician’s trick?” And then sink a lot of time and money into making this technical element work that will sometimes fail and that will ostensibly ruin the show for whoever happens to be there.
No, that’s not what we want to do. We want to create something that’s narrative driven. We want the magic to be very simple to accomplish technically, but we want it to still feel like a charged and exciting and energizing moment. So it’s great. I love that people thought the box would come off the floor. We would never have tried to make the box float. [Laughs]
Porter: I think of, in Chapter Eight where the audience gets to be like, “Dorothy’s dead.” It’s devastating to have to tell someone someone else is dead and having that moment then trigger the release of magic gives that audience member a feeling of, “I was a part of that scene.”
Chapter Nine brought Ozma back to lay out her plan for taking over Oz and Earth, err Kansas.
Just: Chapter Nine then coming out of Eight was surprisingly responsive to Eight, where a lot of action happens. But we wanted to create some real specific interaction moments.
So upstairs with Jo Files, every time you’ve met him, that’s been a chance to interact. So doing the screening upstairs, it’s a chance for some back and forth. He takes a beat with everyone, which gives you a chance to check in.
Headley: During a rehearsal we used an incomplete scanner, there were no lights or doodads. So, I jokingly did some robot noises to fill in. It got a big laugh. I couldn’t keep it straight and would crack up every time I tried to do it. I was in love with the bit and Julianne let me keep it with the caveat that I be dead serious when making the noise. It was really challenging because I found it absolutely hilarious.
Just: And then also that we always kind of knew we wanted to do an audience with the Queen. So it’s a real chance for her to connect with people. With the introducing yourself, trying to create some beats where the audience really feel like they’re heard and seen.
Gearhart: That was so much fun. Just so delightful to play with people. Especially in the beginning to get to kind of mildly torture people, you know? I like to think of myself as not a mean person. It’s so much fun to get to kind of put that on.
The opening part is always my favorite.. Because you just don’t know what people are going to bring in. They don’t know what they’re going to bring. It’s always a surprise and a lot of people are a lot of fun.
And then there were times where I would try to pull stuff out of people. I’m like, “Well, no one’s given me information in a while.” And they’re just kind of like, “I just don’t know. I don’t have anything.” And then I’m like, [in full Ozma voice] “NOTHING? INFORMATION? SOMEONE TELL ME SOMETHING.”
Just: You get to go to Nine and it is all kind of easy and she has some hubris. She’s got this figured out and isn’t too worried.
Gearhart: She’s so happy about everything. It feels good. And I think that was even one thing that we were concerned about. At some point I got a note of like, “You’re being too nice.” And I was like, “No, this is her nice moment. She thinks she’s won, and you know, this is her moment.” If you hate her, she’s going to try to turn you around and try to charm the pants off of you and maybe you’ll see it her way because she wants subjects to rule.
Headley: I really enjoy Jo’s arc in Chapter Nine. When Jo addresses the audience at the end, many of them were frustrated Jo didn’t realize he’s helping the wrong person. Moments like that really allow me to realize what we are doing is landing and resonating with the audience.
Chapter Ten looks to wrap up the Kansas Collection by bringing together many of the threads that have been established throughout the run of the series, from time dilation and portals, to the Lost Princess and the Daring twins.
Porter: So way back in Chapter One, I don’t even remember why, but the idea came out of like, “There’s time dilation and this is a problem.” I remember I was super excited about it. I was like, “You guys, we can do anything with this. It’s the new, ‘it’s magic!”
Where it actually becomes important is in Chapter Four when Jack asks audience members what version of Chapter Three they got, since we knew that there were multiple endings.
We wrote that part so that then Jack immediately realize something’s wrong. Everyone has a different memory of the same thing happening because everyone remembers Dorothy getting caught, but everyone says someone else took her and Tik immediately dismisses that.
Just: The portals, we just needed an explanation for how they got here in the first place. In Chapter One, the portal was simple, that’s how they got here somehow.
Porter: And because of the portals, there’s time dilation.
Again, with the idea of going back and finding ways of unveiling new information to the events that people already know of. This was again, Julianne’s idea, Ozma was hidden in a fold of time and when we were writing Chapter Five, Julianne was just like, “What if that’s what caused the time dilation and the portals in the first place? What if that was the origination of everything bad?” And I was like, “That’s brilliant, we’re doing that.”
So that moment of hiding the Lost Princess in the fold of time is what’s causing, again, all of the problems. Ozma was lost, she’s desperate to come back, she splits herself, time portals are causing the worlds to collapse. It all stems from the same acts, which is I think a rewarding way of continually referring back to the same point in time.
Just: We’ve had this prophecy that we introduced really early on in Chapter One and then you realize, “Oh, we’ve misunderstood the prophecy.”
But it’s always the same prophecy. You learn to see it in a new way.
Porter: “The Lost Princess will return and peace will follow in her wake.”
Everyone said it. So I’m not spoiling anything!
I will say that if you happen to text Margaret’s phone number after Chapter Three, Ozma has taken over that phone number and she plays along kind of getting you to understand who you’re speaking to because she’s like, “Margaret’s not here anymore.” At one point, I think it was during the binge last year, I was texting as Ozma to this person and the person wrote back and she said, “I know what you’re doing. This is your whole plan.”
And she literally mapped out what our whole endgame was. And I was just sitting there like, “Fuck, why are we doing this at all?!”
But we’re not going to change. We were happy with the end and we want the ending to be the same. I don’t know if they’ll be reading this, but that person guessed it correctly. Good job. You are good at what you do.
Just: I will say, if you guess our ending correctly, it means we set it up right. I’m going to say it’s a compliment. If you can guess the right thing, it means that we did introduce the right elements, that it should all come together.
Just: I think it’s worth saying too, Ten is the end.
Porter: There won’t be a season two.
As part of a teaser, I will also say that both sides of this final battle are encouraging audience members to bring any objects that they have ever received from Oz to the final chapter, for reasons that are explained inside of the chapter. So, that’s keys and bluebird tokens and quilt squares.
It has been really rewarding. The character arcs and getting to develop it. Especially for Phil and Phoebe, but for all of the characters because now that we’re working on Ten actively, we’re getting to harvest all of the seeds that we planted two years ago. It’s just really rewarding to be like, “Oh, I remember we did that for this thing. Let’s try it and now let’s bring this in and let’s bring this element in.” So that it will still be very surprising, but very satisfying.
The Kansas Collection, Chapter Ten: The Portal runs May 30 through June 8 on select dates, with an option to add on 30 additional minutes of content for those new to the series. Tickets are still available.
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