Bay Area based immersive experience company Enemies of Time is taking part in La Jolla Playhouse’s Without Walls Festival this week with not one but two offerings.

First up is the free Message in a Bauble, which features a toy vending machine that asks for a favor and will send the curious on an adventure around the festival grounds.

Then there is the development workshops for Molly Went Missing, where the premise is that the “ghost of a scared kid takes over a local haunted history tour.”

The bad news is that tickets for Molly Went Missing are gone, but Message in a Bauble is a walk up by design. Both are free, with Message running April 23-26.

We learned more about the upcoming festival run from one of the Enemies, Lyra Levin.

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NO PROSCENIUM: Tell us a little bit about your experiences! What are they about? What makes them immersive?


Lyra Levin: Molly Went Missing invites guests to gentle parent a poltergeist on a surprisingly successful ghost hunt. Guests meet a young girl in need of assistance, while being confronted by the frightening impacts of her ghostly nature.

Message in a Bauble puts you in the center of a story told through text messages and phone calls as you get caught between an emergent consciousness who needs your help and those who fear it.

Both shows center your experience as you choose how to show up for entities in trouble. At Enemies of Time, we write stories that offer you a fictional container in which to rehearse being the people you’d like to be in real life.

Promotional Image for Enemies of Time's Molly Went Missing (Credit: Lyra Levin)

NP: What was the inspiration for your upcoming experiences?


LL: Molly Went Missing is inspired by our love for ghost stories and hunger for ones that balance frightening elements with meaningful human interaction. The aesthetic image that birthed Molly was a memory of a scared child mistaking one of us for their parent and grabbing our leg, then feeling utterly betrayed upon realizing the truth.

Message in a Bauble has its roots in The Latitude Society and The Jejune Institute. Those pieces introduced us to stories that place a fictional overlay onto the real world through phone calls and text messages, following along with an unfolding narrative. Message in a Bauble takes a step toward placing the audience in the middle of present-tense drama, where they must choose how to treat a character who is both scary and scared.

Production Image of Enemies of Time's Message in a Bauble at the Edinburgh Fringe. (Photo Credit: Michael Feldman)

NP: What do you think fans of immersive will find most interesting about Message in a Bauble?


LL: Message in a Bauble is in a small cohort of self-paced, walkabout shows. Inspired by games like Firewatch and Myst, Michael likes to describe this emerging micro-genre as “walking simulators where the walking isn’t simulated.” High stakes play out in real time based on your choices.

NP: Molly Went Missing is an in-development work at WOW, what are you hoping to discover in the process?


LL: Molly Went Missing is our most ambitious show yet, due to both the interactive, responsive story, and the technical magic it takes to bring a ghost to life within an intimate audience. By inviting us as a workshop piece, La Jolla Playhouse has given us the platform and resources to develop this show further and faster than we could have if its first public audience expected a finalized product. Across this run, we’ll build a robust vocabulary of responses to the ways our guests show up to the moment presented, and we hope our guests are excited to be invited a little “behind the veil,” as well.

Enemies of Time (from left: Karen, Michael, Lyra) (Photo Credit: Dresden Blue)

NP: What can fans who are coming to this, or thinking about coming to this, do to get into the mood of Message in a Bauble?


LL: The basics: comfy walking shoes, charged cell phone with headphones, and sunscreen! To level up, bring your playful curiosity, any familiarity with speculative fiction, and a sense of adventure.

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