Awards are a tricksy thing.
More than once in the past few years I’ve been asked about NoPro giving out awards. The thought being that awards — and the attendant awards ceremonies — through a spotlight on deserving work and generate audiences that might otherwise not take a risk on a produciton.
There’s truth to that argument, yet we still find oursleves in 2017 as an overall community that is simultaneously small and geographically diverse. Any award that tried to embrace the whole of a year’s worth of work would inevitably be deeply flawed. In short: we’re just not there yet.
There’s is one exception: Fringe.
Specifically the Hollywood Fringe, which had an offical Immersive Theatre category for the first time this year. While it didn’t take much to talk Festival Director Ben Hill into giving us the label, when he did we didn’t know if we’d be able to field the required four shows to fill out the category. Little did we know there’d be a land rush, and in the end EIGHTEEN shows claimed the label of “immersive.”
Later today an audience award will be given out, one determined by balloting of the whole of the Fringe audience. The numbers favor productions with a high through-put, which means that deeply immersive work — which has restricted audience capacity — can easily be overlooked.
To counterbalance this we polled reviewers from the following other publications — HorrorBuzz, My Haunt Life, Nightmarish Conjurings, See It or Skip It LA — all of whom have been covering immersive work. (We also spoke informally after the poll with Ashley Steed, who has been writing for Stage Raw, and that conversation firmed up our already sure confidence in the poll’s results.)
The aim here is to put the spotlight on the work that those of us who are survey the whole field think deserve it. Nothing more, nothing less.
With that in mind, here is the Immersive Critics’ Circle Awards for the 2017 Hollywood Fringe Festival.
BEST OVERALL IMMERSIVE WORK
Red Flags/A(partment 8) (Tie)
These two pieces share a lot in common: both are exclusively one-on-one experiences driven by virtuoso performances — Lauren Flans in Red Flags and Keight Leighn in A(partment 8). They are the work of small production companies driven by women — Lauren Ludwig and Monica Miklas of Capital W for Red Flags and Annie Lesser of the ABC Project for A(partment 8).
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In other ways their aims cannot be more different.
Red Flags lures you into an all-too-believable encounter drawn from the depths of LA’s dating anxiety ridden nightmares. A marathon of a piece, Flans maintains the illusion of Emma — the world’s most subtley tragic first date — over the steady course of an hour. Underneath it all is text from Ludwig that blurs the line between scripted fiction and real conversation with a trickster’s ear for details.
A(partment 8) is a gut punch that builds and shatters a world in under 15 minutes. Individual audience members are dropped into a scenario straight out of an entirely darker kind of nightmare, then held fast under the spell of the supernatural seeming Leighn.
Both pieces resonate with audiences long after they leave the scene: often becoming memories not of a thing they watched, but of “that time when…”
Which is, above all else, the highest aim of immersive work.
Honorable Mention for Best Work:
The Kansas Collection Parts 1&2 from The Speakeasy Society
BEST DEBUT IMMERSIVE WORK
Sweet Dreams: The Prologue
Director Marlee Delia and writer Anna Mavromati are the duo behind Shine On Collective, which made its own debut at the 2016 Hollywood Fringe with an audio driven piece called The Truth. In the year since the pair have produced a stunning amount of work, the highlight of which was the cycle of pieces put together under the name Devoted.
That piece was born of a particular brand of psychological horror, and touches of that are present in Sweet Dreams: The Prologue, a stand-alone experience that is building up to a full-length show in the Fall. With this new work the pair have delved into the darker sides of fairy tales to draw forth a dream-like piece that unfolds for the most part in the back of a box truck. Inventive and full of promise, Sweet Dreams: The Prologue is a perfect expression of what Fringe is for: the announcement of daring new work from rising voices.
Honorable Mention for Best Debut Work:
Fire & Light from the Firelight Collective
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