I’m not entirely sure what happened at The Green Waltz, but I had a nice time and didn’t die. Isn’t that true of so many of life’s curiosities? I think the Green Waltz—a site-specific, immersive piece set at the Heritage Square Museum— was about how Victorian-era people couldn’t stop poisoning themselves. But maybe it was about being haunted by your own flaws? Regardless, it was a grim, little tale in a lovely setting and a fine way to get a glimpse of the museum after dark.

The Heritage Square Museum is a collection of homes and buildings dating back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It serves as a living history of early California and it’s an absolutely perfect place for immersive tales to unfold. In fact, while The Green Waltz only ran July 25–28, the immersive The Assassination of Edgar Allen Poe runs through August 19.

In The Green Waltz, we started our journey in a room full of era-appropriate costumes on headless mannequins. These costumes would become important later, though I didn’t pay them much attention while waiting for the show to begin. After a few minutes of milling about, an attendant gave each of us flowers to pin to our lapels. Once we were all as festive as seniors headed to Prom night, we slipped back in time to a more Victorian era. One single, fateful night, decades upon decades ago.

We entered the home of wealthy socialites George and Tillie Stanway (Josh and Kassie Winkler). It was the night of their Floral Soiree, an insufferably precious affair they threw each year in which guests assembled to judge an assortment of flora grown by the Stanways’ friends and family. The flowers we’d pinned to our shirts earlier determined which flower we were to judge that night.

I had daffodils, grown by Mr. Sinjin Bennett (Jacob Miller), a pompous medical student obsessed with his anatomical studies. Other entrants included Alma Deeson (Sheer Aviram), a medium who claimed the air was restless; Minnie Moran (Misha Reeves Bybee), a vaudeville actress; her brother Harold (Andrew Frank), a poet; and the Stanways’ ward, Charity Perkins (Kylee Thurman). It was clear they didn’t all get along very well, the tension an electric specter in the home. Or, if you listened to Alma, perhaps it was just a real ghost.

After some singing, dancing, and light refreshments in the Stanways’ parlor (during which Charity became feverish and began coughing blood onto her white gloves), we split up into smaller groups of twos and threes. We followed our respective flower grower into their own home.

I can’t speak for the other gardeners, but Mr. Bennett was a real piece of work. (Bonus: He’s played by actor Jacob Miller, who is so, so good at being a creep. If you’ve seen him playing Cousin Conrad at JFI’s The Willows, then you know what I mean.)

Bennett’s table was covered in anatomy books, one conspicuously open to illustrations of venereal diseases. He snorted strychnine, huffed ether, and bragged about how he’d recently acquired a cadaver to practice dissection on by digging up a fresh grave. (That, actually, was a pretty common practice among medical students at the time. They’d either dig them up themselves or buy them off body snatchers to pursue their research.)

Bennett seemed at home in his borrowed house and made us feel at home there, too. It didn’t really feel like we were in a museum at all, which I appreciated. Even Bennett’s Frankenstein-esque lab room felt like it belonged to him.

It was in Bennett’s lab that it seemed like the high-as-a-kite doctor-to-be was considering donating our bodies to science, whether we wanted to or not. Luckily, we were saved by Tillie who burst in with a tirade of gossip.

From there, it was off to judge the flowers. Now, I’m not sure how we would have actually accomplished this task, considering each of us had only seen one flower. I decided to cast my vote for Charity, since she seemed ill and Bennett wanted to murder us. Who won the competition? I couldn’t tell you because that’s when all hell broke loose. The undercurrent of tension became a deluge. We were driven away from the scene of the flower judging and into the home we started in. Here a dark-robed phantom waited for us.

Remember those costumes I mentioned? They were more than fabric on mannequins at this point. Each one represented one of the characters at the Stanways’ party.

The phantom fired up the phonograph. Tchaikovsky’s Valse Sentimentale began to play. (It might have been the version performed by Clara Rockmore on the theremin, but I couldn’t tell you. I can tell you that this is a creepy song and you should listen to it.)

As the waltz played, so did a voiceover that explained the aftermath of each character. Victorians were, as it turns out, pretty bad at determining what was a poison and what wasn’t. Arsenic, lead, cocaine, strychnine, mercury: all things that can kill you that we once used to put in household objects or take as medicine. Whoops.

It’s hard to review The Green Waltz, I must admit. After we split up into smaller groups, we were taken into separate homes, leaving the backstories of the other characters a mystery. In that way, there’s a lot of replay value, though The Green Waltz only ran for three nights. It also means I’m not really sure what was going on.

But even if my desire for a complete narrative was left unsatisfied, I had a lot of fun. I enjoyed Bennett’s antics and the allusions to the very real and morbid history of body snatching he presented. I loved when he boasted that, as a studious pupil of science, he even knew all four humors of the body. For one, it’s funny because we modern folks know that’s all bullshit. For two, it’s funny because that’s pretty basic knowledge for his time.

I also have to give props to the Heritage Square Museum for allowing immersive theater to bring the property to life. This is a truly engaging way to expose people to a living history museum — especially people who might not otherwise sign up for a daytime tour. There’s something very special about the marriage of immersive theater and historic places. (Shows hosted at the Mountain View Mortuary come to mind).

If I have a critique of The Green Waltz, it’s that I just really couldn’t wrap my mind around the story. It started off like a ghost story, but then there were no ghosts. The ghostly occurrences ultimately went unexplained, and six of the seven characters remained almost a complete mystery to me. I think it might be fun to re-stage a longer version of the show that gives guests a little more time with more than one character so that when we get to the judging portion, we have some metrics to consider. But if I’m gonna spend the bulk of my time with someone, let it be a creepy doctor.

The Green Waltz has concluded its run at the Heritage Square Museum, 3800 Homer Street Los Angeles. Tickets were $35.

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