An immersive work is never so intimate as when the experience is one-on-one. Immersivity is intimacy, and with intimacy comes other desires and necessities, such as deep trust, communication, and empathy.
So, I approached the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ Between Us with these wishes and desires (and, if I’m honest — these expectations).
Between Us consisted of three unique one-hour productions: The Deck of Cards, The Blind Date & The Whiskey Tasting.
I attended the first and third of these — and my experiences couldn’t have been more different.
‘The Deck of Cards’
I was instructed to find a man reading a newspaper on a bench inside Union Station.
We sat there together on a Friday evening, watching everyone rush onward off the tidal wave of their work day. His name was donnie (lowercase d), and he told me stories from his childhood for a few minutes before sending me off with a deck of cards, index cards, and a small map of where I was to walk, leading me to the Tattered Cover Bookstore.
The map directed me to find a woman in the easy chair in the back left corner of the store. When I arrived, Kristen was waiting for me. (In this performance, unlike The Whiskey Tasting, the actors used their real first names with me.)
She and I sat together in the corner of the bookstore, and I drew cards as she looked up their meanings.
I am no stranger to the mystical, nor using cards as a means of divination. However, I felt myself losing attention during this exercise.
I drew card after card, but there was no tying together of each new thread we created. I did a task, and simply drew another card. It felt a bit like seeing a Tarot card reader who exclusively read from a reference book, with no intuition utilized nor interpretation possible without the assistance of the book.
It was also Kristen’s lack of displayed empathy that made the exercise feel more rote than mystical.
She asked me, “When was the last time you experienced magic?” I was having a particularly magical week and time in my life, and so my answer was quite spirited. After I finished, glowing in the happiness I’d been feeling (after an incredibly rough year), she said,
“Okay. Let’s draw another card.”
There wasn’t a reflection or acknowledgement of what I’d said. At this point, I felt more reticent and began to shut off from the experience. We continued; I ended up drawing six cards.
Some cards came with tasks: We walked around and read a poem together from a book. I was instructed to write and draw several things on the index cards donnie gave me — an intention, a picture of my heart, chapter titles for my last few years.
These may have landed with me differently had I felt she was connected to my experience and hearing my answers — if she asked me a follow-up question, or told me stories about her own life. She did not.
Toward the end of our time, I was still hopeful she would connect the cards in some way I had not foreseen. This did not happen, and to close, she said:
“Well, I never really know how to end these things…”
Saying this is most definitely not how to end them, as it shattered any illusion I had of a magic circle.
As I sat with my feelings on why I didn’t resonate with The Deck of Cards, I stumbled upon Third Rail’s words for immersive actors: “The balancing act of [your own shifting experience in relationship to how you observe and shape the audience’s experience] is an essential approach to allowing our most honest and empathic selves to be seen, and to inspire genuine connection with each and every person with whom we interact.”
This essence of deep presence and inspired connection felt missing from most of my experience.
I am not an actor, but I certainly understand how easy it is to waver in moments of confidence, to let something slip that disempowers you and to not know how to take it back. I empathize, but I didn’t feel I could surrender with the actress. I felt a disconnect between her presence and the empowerment needed to be the lone guide through my experience.
There was nothing Between Us, as it were.
Thankfully, The Whiskey Tasting felt much different.
‘The Whiskey Tasting’
My friend and I were instructed to head to a specific drain on the ground, and stand on it.
Unfortunately, someone had noticed us walking around staring at the ground and yelled, “Are you looking for The Whiskey Tasting?!”
Having now encountered the drain with ease… we heard a voice call to us from the top of a set of nearby stairs. Dressed in an all-brown suit and carrying an old-fashioned brown suitcase, Sam (actor Rodney Lizcano) beckoned us to come along and stay close.
What I loved about what followed was the way Sam shifted and held space and time with us — he huddled us together and had us retrieve a secret box inside a planter, whispering and looking around for onlookers. This helped close the sense of containership around us, and made it feel like we were a team.
That is, until we got inside a dark, back room of the DCPA building, when Sam’s ability to lead us through an experience floored me.
He guided us through rituals that helped to ground us and simultaneously open us up to experience magic. We washed our hands with a cup of water at the bar, slowly and intentionally. We opened a bag of seeds from inside the box we’d retrieved and “planted” them in the soil inside. He devilishly convinced my close friend Ginger and I that it might be more fun if we pretended we didn’t know each other — and then he showed us that, in fact, there were plenty of things we hadn’t shared with each other, such as the safe spaces in nature we had when we were children.
He created for us small moments that I call “abductive” — moments that simultaneously took us out of the quotidian and brought us closer to ourselves.
His knowledge of whiskey was enthralling, he kept us on task, he was firm and held our space tightly — for me, this was the foundation of trust in an experience. The strength that I felt and the empowerment he stepped into to require our intention and direction was exactly what I had felt was lacking in Deck of Cards.
At one point, Sam split us up: Ginger reported later that he had her make a drawing of her safe childhood place. He led me into a small square room with only a full-length mirror in it, and closed the door. An audio tape began to play, and it instructed me to take the dry erase marker attached to the mirror and make dots along points of my face… when I stepped back, I had made a constellation from my own reflection.
At the end of the hour, we moved into a different room to read a childhood storybook together as we drank the final round of whiskey; Sam opened the box for us, and we saw that the seeds we planted at the beginning of the hour had “sprouted” into beautiful plants, and at the top of the box (the “sky” of the box’s universe), was a small mirror in which the constellation I had drawn of my face was recreated.
And so, I ultimately found myself between two very different places of Between Us. I found The Deck of Cards to feel isolating and disjointed (who, after all, doesn’t go into immersive not wanting to feel more connected to something?), and The Whiskey Tasting held the perfect balance of containership, presence, exploration, trust, empathy and surrender.
For immersive theater that involves only one actor, the way that actor shows up is everything. There is no refrigerator portal to another dimension, or other shiny object for us to focus on. The actor informs and shapes our entire world.
And if they are not embodying their power in a way that feels they with us, more than just physically — we can feel that, too.
Between Us was a production of the Denver Center of Performing Arts Off-Center Program. It ran from March 23—May 26, 2019.
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