4PLAY is a very misleading title. Taken by the title and the marketing, you would think that you’d be stepping into an erotic tale of love and lust. While there is some of that, this show is by far and away more of a romantic comedy.

Which isn’t bad. The show is quite spectacular, actually.

trip.LA creates for the audience a fluidity of a show that I wouldn’t call immersive, per say, rather more interactive. But this distinction never detracts from the quality of the show and the questions of love and sexuality it addresses. It presents answers and thoughtful exposition on the state of love in the 21st century while also encapsulating the work in a meta-narrative structure that uplifts a cliched love story.

The show revolves around three New York couples navigating their way through the modern trenches of love. The company describes it as a “not-so-simple story of boy meets girl, boy meets boy, girl meets girl — and all the little things that can ruin a perfectly good dinner party,” and they’re right. Underneath its simple exterior the show deals with the complexities of love in the modern era when heterosexuality is no longer the norm. What doors open up, what doors close, and what new spins of drama can be seen through these sexual intersections?

Strictly as a play, the work is expertly done. Acting in such a small space I can imagine is a difficult task — dodging between the intimacy and theatricality that shows like this demand — with a cast that is more than up to the task. Structurally, the writers have taken a spin on the meta-narrative genre that keeps the audience particularly confused, but equally engrossed right through to the end, where everything is revealed.

Though, as a reviewer for an immersive publication, I found it particularly hard to review a piece like this. On the one hand, it’s not particularly immersive. There’s no exploration, no game mechanics. You couldn’t even really call it site-specific, as the audience is taken to dinner parties, nightclubs, living rooms, offices and back, with no attempt at creating spaces of realism.

Instead, you enter into a small warehouse space setup with a bar, cocktail tables, and stools with a couple of small stages strewn about. You look around and see there are no curtains, nothing really resembling a traditional theatre. No proscenium, you could say. As trip.LA’s artistic director, Graham Brown, describes it: “We do the play in the audience. …[Think] about theatre in the round — but the audience is actually in the round. [The] audience will influence the tone of the show.”

And in that way, you could say that this piece is immersive.

What’s presented here is a fascinating work that places the audience at the same playing field as the actors and the players. At one moment I would be seated next to a woman to find at the next that she’s an actor in the piece.

And that’s just about as interactive as it got — until the climactic dinner party.

As the party commenced, actors walked through the audience with hors d’oeuvres and free beer. As we all grabbed some, the actors on stage started playing “Never Have I Ever”, and subtly invited the audience to join in. Here is where I think the event became a great piece of immersive.

For every moment (ie — never have I ever been rock climbing) the audience was offered to take a drink if they, the person, ever has done the action.

The actors never verbally acknowledged the audience participation, but they invited them with looks and cheers.

Without the pressure that usually comes along with interactive immersive, though, the event became much more internal within each friend group with each individual never being afraid to offer up their secrets. They were drinking, after all. The only ones who would seemingly notice their secrets was the friend group around them: the actors never put any of the audience on the spot.

And since the audience never became a part of the show, the audience acted on their own. 4PLAY created a safe space for the audience to have fun within their own friend group without the added pressure of a stage, as some immersive works do. As the game progressed to the more racey and ‘unspeakable’ (as games like this generally do) it was fun to look around and see each friend group poke fun at each other at each prompt.

And this was genuinely fun. It was interactive and participatory in a way that just wouldn’t work in a proscenium show. It made us feel a part of the fun — which was further compounded when the fun took an abrupt halt as the story took a turn for the worst.

In this way, trip.LA used their non-proscenium style to further the dramatic turn of their climax. By bringing the audience in on the fun, we also became victims to the drama when all secrets were revealed. One moment I was laughing, the next I was witnessing a fight that was literally happening an arms length away.

And this was interesting emotionally. Where in most works you would acknowledge proscenium plays as an intellectual exercise (as many are becoming these days) the immersive points created for me a far more emotional reaction — like I had been a guest at the dinner party — and by witnessing the play I had been in on the secrets and somehow contributed to the seedy gossip.

To conclude, 4PLAY is a fascinating work that is not immersive by any means. But I do believe that as audiences have become more addicted to screens, traditional theater works need to think of new ways to present traditionally scripted material. That’s exactly what trip.LA gives us — a new work that’s built around a new staging that engrossed audiences in a new manor that’s fun, slightly interactive, and interesting that gives you emotional touch points that move beyond our Netflix-style entertainment.

And that’s a type of theatre that I can be into.

4PLAY ran from Feb 14th to March 17th at The Actors Company
916 A North Formosa Ave., Los Angeles. Tickets were $25-$60.

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