We spend a lot of time here at No Proscenium trying to get under the skin of immersive theatre as an art form. We’re often drawn to difficult, challenging work — work that can be considered diamonds in the rough, or that are underdogs punching above their weight. This invigorates us, even if it means that we often have to do more than our share of creating the consensual hallucination that immersion calls for.
Yet we wouldn’t endure all of this if deep down, immersive and interactive work wasn’t capable of being fun.
Delusion: His Crimson Queen is a hell of a lot of fun. I can say without reservation that it is one of the most fun experiences I’ve had all year — and I’ve had a lot of fun experiences.
The interactive play is the brainchild and passion of writer-director Jon Braver whose Haunted Play Theater Company put the first Delusion up in 2011. After that the show came back each Halloween — save for last year, when they were holding out for a year-round home. More on that in a moment.
Up until this year Delusion has eluded me. The show sells out long before it opens, and I was fairly convinced that Spooky Season wasn’t really my thing. The work of Screenshot Productions, The Tension Experience and the “bad influence” that is Juliet Rennet Rylah has softened that stance and it felt right to make a run on Delusion this year, even if Braver and company didn’t need our attention.
Dread dark lords of undeath, I am so glad I did.
Mild Spoilers Ahead
This year’s Delusion is a vampire story and for all my relative indifference for horror I love vampires. I love them so much I believe that every copy of Twilight in any form should be sailed out to the Marianas Trench and dumped overboard. Give me Stoker, Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, the World of Darkness, Buffy… hell give me the Underworld movies. Drown me in scarlet dreams while Siouxsie Sioux sings off this mortal coil for me.
Of course, this is a double edged stake: if Delusion was a clumsily constructed piece of work that confused site-responsive with interactive and invited us to watch amateur theatrics inside a West Adams mansion that is mid-restoration I would have been sorely disappointed.
Luckily Delusion is a polished, linear, dark-ride style immersive that is executed with professional aplomb at every level. The show knows exactly what it is: a classic, Hammer-horror melodrama brought to life. It also knows exactly what to do with the audience, casting us in the first scene as the adult children of a doomed couple: the offspring of a mortal and a vampire. By framing our collective identity inside the play and giving us a clear goal right from the start — save our mother from the evil within the house — the show is free to indulge in its own mythos without ever getting the audience lost.
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The quick framing, which is done through a story that is unveiled along with a series of paintings, acts as an invitation into the melodramatic tone of the story’s world. Much of the group I was in — strangers to me all — stood back from the edge of the action even when directly questioned by the actors. But I was all in. The more I let myself get caught up in the tone and the simple goal I was given, the more rewarding my interactions with the cast were.
Here is a show where I’m not being asked to confront some dark part of my nature, or question my relationship to some emotional state of being. I dig that kind of work, but too much of it can start to turn this work into a drag. Sometimes you need to get away from your day to day persona in order to remember who you really are.
The closest analog I have to Delusion are Telltale’s adventure games. These are narrative-driven video games that most consist of a series of dramatic choices which then influence the outcome of the story, along with a few puzzles. There’s only ever one ending, and there’s only ever one solution to the puzzles, but that oddly doesn’t make the games seem on rails. The choices you make color the narrative, and the solution to the puzzles can be derived from the environment around you.
There’s less authorial agency for the audience in Delusion than in those games, but each piece of the story requires active participation. I never felt cheated out of authorial agency because as characters we are offered the chance to participate in iconic moments. The phrase “I’ve always wanted to do this” popped up more than once over the course of the night.
All of this is supported by a fine cast of actors and stunt people. To a person the set of actors I got to interact with were excellent at this breed of work: it takes a certain kind of something to get this right. An actor needs to be able to give what they would to a scene partner to someone who might be blank-faced or just damn confused by what’s being emotionally asked of them. Yet if you give back a reinforcement loop begins that ratchets up the melodrama.
It probably didn’t hurt that the critical character of Selene was played in my rotation by actress Dasha Kittredge, a Delusion veteran who also performed in Getting To Know You, the 2015 debut of immersive dramatist Annie Lesser. Ms. Kittredge is an ace at this kind of work and is always fun to play opposite whether that means sitting across from in a chair or following down a dark set of stairs into the unknown.
Even though there’s nothing profound about Delusion’s story — the aim is firmly to entertain — the piece nevertheless excels at what the great immersives do. It creates space for moments between actors and audience. Moments that are rooted in the reality of the play; that are then filled in by the creative energy of cast and participant dancing together, if you will, to form a very real moment in a very unreal place.
The only thing that struck me as odd about the whole experience was being told in a pre-check-in speech by the box office manager that we were not to heckle the actors. I couldn’t imagine why we would ever do such a thing, and then I remembered that some folks head out into Spooky Season looking to be above it all. But a “too cool for school” mentality won’t pay off here.
The secret to Delusion is letting yourself fall for it’s melodramatic charm from the get-go. The set — in which I’m told the eagle eyed may recognize a few pieces rescued from The Day Shall Declare It — will do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to suspension of disbelief, and the actors will carry you the rest of the way if you let them.
If we’re lucky Delusion: His Crimson Queen will get an extension. Some of that depends on the behavior of the audience. Parking is an issue in the West Adams neighborhood in which the show takes place, and the neighbors get testy about cars eating up all the spaces. So if you are going please use the valet or get dropped off by your method of choice. It’s the one thing you can do to give others a chance to see the show. Permits to put this kind of work up remain difficult to secure here in Los Angeles, an endless theme of our podcast, and it are these kinds of bureaucratic hurdles that are getting in the way of us having Delusion as our constant immersive companion.
That needs to change, because we’ve certainly earned it.
Delusion: His Crimson Queen is currently scheduled through November 13th. We are all eagerly anticipating an extension.
(Full disclosure: some of our Patreon backers are members of the company, but we were blissfully ignorant of that — in part thanks to a memory like a sieve — before doing the final round of fact checking on this. Good work, gang!)
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