It was a dark and stormy night.

No, literally.

Thunder and lightning punctuated sudden downpours that flooded gutters and the patrons of Theatre Macabre, the latest from the team that unleashed the alternate reality anarchy of The Tension Experience and its follow-up The Lust Experience on Los Angeles.

With two years of deliriously elaborate immersive myth-making under their belts, the team — a core of Darren Lynn Bousman, Clint Sears, and Gordon Bijelonic — have bent their wills to creating the same level of immersive world-building density and narrative agency into a production that’s as accessible as Tension and Lust were daunting. While the latter two had an elaborate long-running storyline, Macabre is plug-and-play: all you need to do is read the emails you get before the show and pay attention.

Pay close attention.

But before we get started, two things for the record. First: my tracks got borked. It’s almost a tradition. My run on The Tension Experience was marred by a missed email and cue that then dropped me slightly off the rails. This time, however, it felt more like I was given a plethora of narrative options that would lead to necessary trade-offs. It wasn’t until creator Bousman pulled me aside at the end of the show and told me there had been a snafu that I knew something had actually gone wrong.

Well, aside from the second thing.

During the show’s climax, an overprotective actor physically stopped a patron from interfering with the action, which brought them both to the ground and caused our entire audience group to shift focus from the scene at hand to the accidental action. That it happened in the context of a scene where the audience generally felt helpless to change the course of events added another layer of confusion. I followed up with the production to learn that the patron is enamored of the show and that the actor has been let go. Bousman and company are dead serious about actual safety even as they cultivate an “anything goes” air of chaos.

Like their other productions, Theatre Macabre is a high wire act of narrative layering and participant agency. It’s not always clear when that agency is in full bloom — and in Tension and Lust I found myself both less familiar and more frustrated with the ambiguity around the agency. Macabre is a step forward on two fronts: choice points feel more clear and the underlying storyline about a theatre company with dubious morals and business practices that has been the site of a string of possible murders is punctuated by grisly vignettes in the theatre space. While still darkly fantastic, it’s a more straightforward backstory than the elaborate Tension mythology, which enthralled some audience members while keeping others at arm’s-length.

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As such, even with the snafu that led me to getting about half of one track and half of another (according to the team, at least), I still got that visceral thrill of stepping into another world where the rules — morally and otherwise — are a few clicks different from our own. In plain English: I had fun. Sleazy, grizzly, melodramatic fun.

Very Mild Spoilers Follow

The show is organized into three acts, with an extended on-boarding in the first act where the rules are laid out and the rhythm of being taken away from the small group of attendees to learn some the secrets of the theatre, only to be returned to the others, is established.

Once that happens, the group is ushered into the theatre itself, where the “dark ride” paradigm gives way to a sandbox structure. Here’s a pro-tip: you really can go anywhere except behind closed doors at this point. The proscenium is fully broken, even the literal one that frames the grand guignol where the performers play out the show within the show.

The theatre forms the hub of the action, with vignettes playing out, and performers swooping down from the stage to catch you up into their storylines by taking you to side rooms, then returning to the stage. Interactions might be fleeting — like when the stage manager approached me while a man I had poisoned (I was in a mood) was dying, struggling to get to me and deliveringthe line of the night: “This isn’t fake. It’s real. Real. Really artistic!” Or they can be as involved as the series of events that led me to poisoning that man. You may find yourself listening to a confession, sharing secrets in a bathroom, or being asked to mule illicit substances around the building.

And that’s just the level of interaction that happens if you just go along for the ride.

The puzzle piece that the team is still figuring out is how to convey the scope of agency to the audience. Bousman and company have always rewarded those who are willing to take initiative, and that’s still present in Macabre. Yet the desire to expand the audience for the work to those who aren’t boundary-pushing immersive enthusiasts is there. Indeed, it’s needed if the dream of an open-ended run is to be achieved. The production company is eager for audiences to make choices and find the hidden depths, but teaching folks how remains a puzzle. Once again the Tension vets find themselves on the bleeding edge of immersive’s biggest challenge.

To that end, some of the on-boarding time in the first act could be used to show — and not just tell — patrons how the interaction mechanics of the world work. The good news is that the show has the space for this in its structure already, and so this becomes more of a fine-tuning thing and not a major rework. The show, after all, works great on the level of tone and individual moments, so there’s no need to run back to the drawing board.

While my tracks were fractured — I’m not entirely sure if there was more to me poisoning that man than my own pent-up 2018 bloodlust — the overall tone was not. And immersive is best when there is a clear tone.

The theatre feels like it is tucked into dimensional space that exists between The Black Lodge and Halloweentown, with some of the actors even resembling Tim Burton sketches come to life. It’s a testament to the casting process and Bousman’s skill as a director that the heightened reality feels lived in. There’s an archness here that never descends into camp. Tone is something that the production company has always excelled at, but while the Tension cycle used their skill to create a sense of unease, Theatre Macabre is oddly welcoming — a playground for your darker impulses. (Just, you know, don’t touch the actors without them indicating you should, or they will throw you the fuck out.)

The show as a whole is still clearly coming together — opening week jitters, as my broken tracks can attest. Yet all the ingredients are here for a long, barnstorming run.

Theatre Macabre is now playing in an open ended run at an undisclosed location near Downtown Los Angeles. Tickets are $150.

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