After a quick preview run in December, Finnegan's Wake: An Immersive Irish Ghost Story will once again haunt the Historic Mint in San Francisco’s SoMa district.
Brought to The City by 13th Floor Theater, who have been carrying the torch for immersive theatre in the Bay as part of their decade-plus tenure as a company, the show is billed as “a raucous Irish wake where the past won't stay buried, the wrong ghost appears, and a magical river reunites the living with the lost.”
Nor is this the first time 13th Floor has tackled James Joyce’s Finnegan's Wake, having previously taken on the famously non-linear stream-of-consciousness experimental novel in 2014’s A Wake.
We checked in with Writer/Director Jenny McAllister, about her company’s latest journey into the mythic landscape of Finnegan's Wake, with a run from Jan 22-30th.
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No Proscenium: Tell us a little bit about your experience! What’s it about? What makes it immersive?
Jenny McAllister: Upon arrival at the wake, guests are asked to choose which side of the family they hail from: the sea-faring Irish Finnegans, or the magical witchy Plurabelle line. Scraps of questionable family lore are printed on the back of each program; if you want all the pieces, you may have to ask someone from the other side of the family.
The audience travels across 10 rooms of the Historic San Francisco Mint, following 10 characters/family members as a mystery unfolds in multiple directions. Darkness, comedy, and Irish myth swirl through the story, twisting perspectives on the past - selkies, sea captains, and enchanted cranes seep into family legends, challenging memory vs. truth. Siblings fight, search, and reconnect as scenes spill from room to room, asking the characters and audience to question their place in the timeline of their family history. Detailed, interactive set dressing allows the ambitious to dive deeper into character and background.
NP: What was the inspiration for your upcoming experience?
JM: Tangled branches and family secrets; growing up in a large Irish Catholic family; the wordplay, circular nature, and lovely poetic concepts in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (the mother as a river), magical (and sometimes terrifying) tales of selkies, banshees and ghosts told to me as a child by my grandparents; the intersection of joy and grief, magic and science, Catholic and Pagan rites; early memories of my uncles throwing punches at each other on the lawn at my grandmother’s wake, while others danced and cried and laughed inside the house.
NP: What do you think fans of immersive will find most interesting about this latest experience?
JM: I think they’ll enjoy exploring the 4 Finnegan adult children's bedrooms - the experience of coming home as an adult in your 30’s to find your room looking almost exactly as it did when you were 16 is somewhat universal in its cringy delight. And, the experience of being inside a ghost story is really fun.
NP: Once you started designing and testing what did you discover about this experience that was unexpected?
JM: The empathy and connection people felt with the characters. I was wondering if I’d made the story too strange, too personal, too weirdly magical - but everyone became part of the family in their own way, latching onto one of the characters they identified with and diving in deep. Also the fact that it’s a long show (2 ½ hours, w/an intermission), but people were surprised at the end to see how much time had passed. “I was lost inside the story, I had no idea what time it was…” A theme of the show is questioning the accuracy of our family memories and sense of time as we grow from children to adults. Having people actually experience that as part of the…experience…was lovely.
NP: What can fans who are coming to this, or thinking about coming to this, do to get into the mood of the experience?
JM: We encourage people to dress as if they’re coming to an Irish Wake in the 1990’s or 1980’s - 80’s/90’s fashion, gothic funeral attire, dress like an Irish fisherman, a banshee, or a selkie, or just come as you are. Listen to traditional Irish music like The Rocky Road to Dublin and Finnegan’s Wake, or Irish punk bands like The Pogues or Flogging Molly. Read up on Irish lore, especially banshees and selkies/roans. Don’t read James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake because it will take forever, but maybe read the first and last paragraph because it’s lovely and it all circles back around, like our story.
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