It’s 9:24 pm on a Friday night, and we’re standing on an LA sidewalk just outside of the shadow of Dodger Stadium waiting for our contact to arrive. Her name is Emma G. Nation, hacker and friend to Mike Stone, a reporter that’s gone missing — kidnapped — and she’s determined to get him back alive.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg for Captivated: You, the final chapter of a series that has been building up to this for over a year — a show that has dealt with raising the dead, obsession, grief, identity and one or two dead bodies.
Our little group huddles in an alley as Emma (Katie Conrad) brings us up to speed on the events that have brought us together: Mike has been following the dark trio of Dr. Victoria Polidori (Stepy Kamei), Ely (Erik Blair) and their henchman, Henry (Josh Ritz). The three of them have been throwing parties to introduce Ely’s new wife, Justine (Sarah Morris) —it’s just that Justine has been a series of about a dozen different women with the same face — different hair and body type, but always the same face. Meanwhile, a dozen women’s disappearances can be traced back to Henry and Ely.
This is how we end up at the world’s most surreal and uncomfortable party inside of Frankenstein lab, complete with weird machinery and organ filled specimen jars. Now the show begins in earnest in grand James Bond-villain style: with an expository speech, a threat, and a promise — that tonight we would witness the culmination of Ely and Victoria’s collaboration and finish the work he’s been doing with Justine and the bodies of the missing women.
While they prepare for this final transformation, we are split up into smaller groups and given the opportunity to have some questions answered, speak with some of the characters, and dig a little deeper into the story.
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This is where this show, and to a larger extent, the Captivated series has shined — in these smaller intimate moments with the various personalities, where we get to play, and jab, and interact more deeply. In my case, this was getting “locked” into a room with Mike (Glenn David) and Emma and playing out a failed rescue scene — with some escape room elements. In the heat of the moment and with mounting time pressure (artfully pressed upon us by David and Conrad), we’re hit with our first of several choices: we only have time to unlock one person, so who do we release from their bonds, Mike or Emma?
The driving idea behind Captivated: You is that the audience has the ultimate agency, and can make decisions that change the flow of things — not just a couple of moments here and there but the fate of the characters. Captivated touts that there are forty different possible endings, as they remind us throughout the evening that “your actions have consequences.”
This elevated level of agency is on par with some of the better parlor LARPs, and anyone that has been to either of the previous shows is armed with great character information that, when used correctly, can elicit some satisfying responses if you’re willing to speak up at appropriate moments.
However, in the larger group moments, your actions (or inaction) from prior scenes can be overshadowed by the choices of the rest of the audience, and because of the sense of urgency, you don’t really have a real moment to confer and possibly change tack — something that the earlier shows left breathing room to do.
This is further exacerbated by the larger, more theatrical moments of the show. Reminiscent of video game cut scenes, there’s high melodrama and action that is borne out of the audience’s machinations; and even though you have the power to interact, unlike most cut scenes, it seems wrong to do so.
During the ending of our iteration of the show there were two murders, quickly followed by a major reveal, on the heels of which was another big twist; these occurred so rapidly that we had little time to react or absorb the ramifications to the story. While it seemed the show was trying to build a sense of chaos and urgency, our ending felt a little rushed, if almost unearned.
What is earned, however, is a nod to the creation of a theatrical experience with a largely LARP sensibility with a daunting number of possible endings; this is a difficult feat to pull off — let alone pull off well. They’ve created a show that rewards those that have invested time in the series lore, and I find myself a little tempted to play out a different path. Like Victoria’s and Ely’s in-show experiments, Captivated is clearly a labor of love, ambition, and more than a little hubris.
Captivated: You continues through May 19 at a secret address near Riverside Drive and Allesandro Street in Los Angeles. Tickets are $60 , and can be purchased here.
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