Los Angeles-based themed entertainment impresario and artistic director David Ruzicka (who we’ve had on the NoPro podcast before) has teamed up with fellow Just Fix It Productions collaborator and event producer extraordinaire Eric Vosmeier for the project of their dreams, er… nightmares.

The upcoming I want to live in your mouth. is a “dark fantasy” experience for one participant at a time, as it whisks audience members away into the fears of an unnamed narrator. Audience members are asked “to relive one person’s vivid looping memory of the day that new visitors came calling to their childhood home.”

Oh, and there’s puppets. (Yes, you read that right.)

We spoke to David and Eric over email to ask about the experience, creature puppets, and exactly what’s making that sound under the bed.

No Proscenium (NP): Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background in the immersive arts?

David Ruzicka (DR): I started out with a teenage hobby creating haunted attractions, and ended up consulting for haunts around the world. After getting a degree in Dramatic Writing, I threw myself into the themed entertainment industry, which is still my main “day job.” I gained some real world park experience at Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando, mostly in entertainment management, then switched back into the creative field.

Since then, I’ve served as an independent Creative Director and Writer for companies like Disney, Mycotoo, The Bezark Company, and Weta Workshop. But moving to LA was the trigger to get involved in immersive theatre. I’m fortunate, in addition to this project, to be a Co-Artistic Director with JFI Productions (Creep LA and The Willows).

Eric Vosmeier (EV): I have a thoroughly theatrical background. After getting a degree in playwriting, I promptly abandoned that and started working on the business side of theatre running box office operations for several Broadway Across America markets, running booking and presenting operations at a number of theaters across the country before becoming Producing Artistic Director for Know Theatre of Cincinnati and the Cincinnati Fringe Festival, where I stayed for nearly 8 years. It here I first encountered the excitement of the immersive performance — specifically through the Cincy Fringe.

After moving to LA, I randomly reached out to Annie Saunders of Wilderness and Justin Fix at JFI Productions and jumped head first into the immersive/site specific scene here by producing for both. When I’m not producing with them, I primarily work with OA Experiential — a full service creative and production agency. Through them I’ve produced events across the country for NBC, FX, AMC, CLIF Bars, Two Bit Circus, and more.

NP: What, in a nutshell, is this project about?

DR: The periphery, the shadows, and childlike imagination. This is a dark fantasy experience with horror elements for one audience member at a time. Within our walls, they are called to relive the traumatic, fragmented memories of an unnamed narrator. We’re attempting to reawaken dormant fears our visitors may have, fears from their childhood. In the end, it’s about taking guests somewhere strange on the tattered fringes of our current reality.

NP: What made you want to tell this story in this way in this moment?

DR: It was really that old thing about making the kind of work you’d want to see as an audience member. I love pieces that have a social mission or hope for audience transformation, but sometimes you just want to get lost in an adventure (although there is a little more beneath the surface here, if you know where to look). Delusion and Creep were big touchstones, but I personally found some magic in the cinematic approach of single guest extreme horror experiences. Then the last missing piece was the puppetry, which I’ve long wanted to involve.

With so much serious stuff happening in our personal and national lives, we’re hoping this formula of individual adventure and imaginative creature effects will be welcome.

EV: When David asked me to come on board as producer, I was most excited about the possibilities for up close guest interactions with creature puppets. The childhood nightmare themes in the show lent themselves so well to the incorporation of this element. We’ve only had a handful of test audience through at this point, but the sheer joy they’ve expressed with these interactions gives me great hope that we’re onto something special with this idea.

NP: Why did you create this experience? What inspired you?

DR: The experience asked to be made. I didn’t have much of a choice. It’s composed of bits and pieces of nightmares, daydreams, and things that seemed impossible which we wanted to figure out how to make real. We were driven by a desire to explore the single visitor experience and see what it can be — perhaps this is only the beginning of the exploration. In terms of inspiration, beyond other immersive theatrical work and dark fantasy films, much of the show comes from my own childhood “bumps in the night” and shapes in the dark.

NP: How is the venue incorporated into the experience?

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DR: Zombie Joe’s Underground is a fantastic platform for us to tell this tale. I like to think even before this show I was pretty familiar with its various rooms as an audience member, but we’re hoping it will be rendered happily unrecognizable during I want to live in your mouth. Zombie has been such a gracious host, and the space itself is iconic — there’s a palpable feeling of all the screams, tears, and laughter that have filled this place.

EV: We are so grateful that Zombie Joe’s is hosting us. Not only does the venue and company have a legacy of creating exciting work in the same sphere that in your mouth lives, but the venue is perfect for the show. One of the fun parts of the design process was figuring out how to layout the scenes to maximize the space we have to play in, while simultaneously transforming the venue in a way that is (hopefully) unlike how it’s been used in the past.

NP: You’ve teased that there are puppets in the experience, can you tell us a little more?

DR: No.

EV: We’ve consulted with the puppets and they — by unanimous vote — have decided to opt out of any comment on this matter.

NP: What films from the ‘80s and ‘90s helped inspire this show?

DR: The Dark Crystal. Mulholland Drive. Jacob’s Ladder. Videodrome. Insidious.

NP: How is the audience incorporated into the work? What kinds of choices can the participants make?

DR: The audience plays a very important role in the story: they must help our main character to relive a dark memory. They will be very active as they move through these moments from the past, but this visit is pointedly without choice. Our protagonist felt terribly, unavoidably compelled forward through the events inside, so much of the horror here is about that inevitability.

NP: How are you designing around audience agency, consent, and safety?

DR: While this visit is not really about agency as mentioned, I can say that creating a safe space — especially in this literally and figuratively dark place — is hugely important to every single one of us. We constantly check in with our cast and crew to ensure moments are staying safe. That’s my Disney training; redundancies and measures invisibly in place for all kinds of unexpected scenarios. Safety is not just a filter. Filters are too easy to cut or scale back when you’re in a hurry to make stuff happen. Safety for us is designed into the very structure of the experience. We want people to feel safe enough that they allow themselves to get fully lost in our weird world.

EV: We started safety discussions almost as soon as we started partnering discussions. We are both very cognizant of the potential pitfalls of audience interactions, especially when evoking feelings of fear and dread in our guests. In addition to being unsafe and unethical, an experience such as ours is ruined if these considerations are not the top priority. Storytelling relies upon the guest’s suspension of disbelief and engaging their full self in the moment. If safety and consent are not requisite, how could we ever hope to achieve that?

NP: What do you hope participants take away from the experience?

DR: It would be wonderful if they puzzle a little over the things in the darkness we offered them, and that puzzling in turn recharges their own imagination and sense of adventure.

EV: For me, I think this piece creates a sense of “almost memory” — that feeling of when you wake up from a childhood dream or nightmare with only snippets of the images, landscapes, and characters. But you know there was something weird, off-putting, sensational about what you’d experienced. I hope to awaken those sensations in our guests.

NP: The title is one of those perfectly creepy/weird/gross things, how’d you come up with it?

DR: It’s another thing that came from out of the mist; strange voices in my brain. I was partially inspired by Harlan Ellison’s amazing short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” There’s something so odd and intriguing about a sentence-long title. It doesn’t seem like it should happen.

I want to live in your mouth. runs Thursdays-Sundays through May 5. Tickets are $48 including fees.

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