A great piece of immersive theatre can leave you with a tiny little existential crisis.
Let me back up a bit here.
And The Drum is a dance-theatre piece based on the poetry of Martha Marion, a performer and poet here in Los Angeles. It is also a dinner party that happens inside Marion’s Koreatown home, one of the classic Craftsman’s that still dot the sprawling neighborhood. These two realities are mixed expertly by the troupe of actors assembled by director Lauren Ludwig, who adapted Marion’s poems for the piece.
Ludwig was the creative ringleader of last year’s Hamlet-Mobile, which was up there with The Day Shall Declare It, Star Wars, and my birthday as my favorite things of last year. If that line reads as flippant you should know that I take my birthday very, very seriously. This one even had at least one “zero” in it. All of this is another way of saying that while I had no idea what to expect when Ludwig told me that she was adapting a collection of poems entitled The Second Bush Administration into an immersive I agreed to see the show immediately.
What’s blissfully beguiling here is that something that should feel pretentious — POETRY! DANCE! AUDIENCE INTERACTION! — winds up feeling natural and effortless. We teeter-totter between perfectly mundane moments of a dinner party and the heightened reality of dance and poetry. These sequences come on like sudden storms, arresting the conventional motion of the party and then accelerating the guests onto separate side tracks with individual performers.
As this is an exploration of poetry there is less an attempt to create a narrative through-line as there is a fervid desire to forge memories. I played “Fuck, Marry, Kill” with a room full of strangers — most of whom were the Texan family of one of the dancers. I drank whiskey on a rooftop while a girl danced, coming dangerously close to the edge as the glowing visage of Colonel Sanders watched over us. I wound up being wittier than I usually am at a dinner party, making me wonder what would happen if I had dinner with strangers more often.
What I can’t necessarily do is tell you what And The Drum is about. Not in a conventional sense. There are themes that run deep: about rediscovering who you are after a break-up, trying to be friends with exes, wanderlust, and the way that the threads of desire both bind and stretch us in ways that deeply define us. Or, at least, this is what I found as I got to inhabit Marion’s poems.
This is theatre as ritual. Both the pedestrian ritual of dinner and the high ritual of dance. With a dash of the hidden ritual of strangers navigating the unknown together.
Get Noah J Nelson’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
SubscribeSubscribe
What works so well here is that the performers invite the audience in. Okay, so maybe there’s some compulsion. We wear name tags so they can identify us and call us from one point to another. This compulsion is gentle, and after the first hand off or two it becomes anticipated.
Ludwig based her framework on Third Rail Project’s Then She Fell, which puts audience members on different tracks as the night progresses. It’s a smart way of working when the ratio of audience to actors is small and the overall population is low. And The Drum is a piece for just twelve audience members. There are only five performers, including Marion herself. Somehow, thanks to the audience, it feels like there are more.
After the show Ludwig showed me the flow chart she used to shape the work. The routes that we were set on. Unlike Then She Fell there were multiple “break points” where the entire audience was reassembled and it was possible to be pulled on to a new track. From the inside it felt completely organic, the way that someone at a house party might take interest in you and drag you off to an empty corner somewhere. If you’re that lucky.
We’re all that lucky at And The Drum.
I’ve been following Ludwig’s directing career since before either of us started formally dipping our toes into the immersive theatre waters. She’s the principle director of Lost Moon Radio, a sketch comedy troupe here in Los Angeles that has been a Hollywood Fringe Festival favorite with its own following and a TV show that debuts this week. As much as I’ve enjoyed Lost Moon Radio over the years, nothing in that work prepared me for how much I’d be blown away by Hamlet-Mobile.
That piece set a high bar, and this work carries that standard on.
Let’s not undercut the team put together here by Ludwig and her producing partner Monica Miklas. The ensemble — Marion, Eli Weinberg, Cloie Wyatt Taylor, Tailor Lee, and Nell Rutledge-Leverenz — -navigate the tightrope between the two realities gracefully. The design team transforms Marion’s house through light, sound, and grace notes of scenic design that facilitate the shifting between the poetic and the conversational.
The conversational aspect of the piece is one I haven’t dived too deeply into, but it’s what I was referring to at the start of this write up. Late in the game there was a simple conversational piece between Nell, myself and two other audience members. I’ll save the details of that, it’s a kind of spoiler from a certain point of view, but I found myself thinking about the implications of my answers the next day. Journaling about it. Trying to wrap my head around what it was that I said in that conversation.
So if you want to think about how to make something participatory and immersive I’d suggest aiming for that kind of reaction, as opposed to superficial interactions that carry a little narrative weight. Think of it as designing a box for interaction, the way a director might position two actors in a reversal improvisation in order to create sparks. Only here the audiences are also the actors. When it works: magick.
And then there’s the way in which reality itself can play it’s own numinous tricks on us. After the show, as the “fake” house party morphed into a “real” house party Marion came in from the porch with news: the monthly puppet show that happens down the street was on. We all — performers and lingering audience members alike — dashed out into the Koreatown night, chasing after another bit of wonder. As if the show never really ended.
And The Drum is currently scheduled to run Friday and Saturday nights through March 19th. Tickets are just $30 and include dinner.
Discussion