The latest participatory piece from Shinbone Theatre Company takes the concept of an addiction recovery meeting and turns it into a seriocomic romp about ghosts who just can’t give up terrifying mortals.
After checking in outside with “The Ferryman” — who does double duty as in-world rules-giver and box office attendant — our group of recently, and one not so recently, departed made our way into a room set up like any given 12-step meeting: folding chairs, lukewarm coffee, and a sense of awkward unease. But with some spooky cobwebs thrown in for good measure.
Major production value isn’t what Shinbone is swinging here for, however. The piece rests upon the backs of the actors who play our fellow specters: the Victorian-era lady, the child-like weirdo, the couple who died in a car accident in the mid-fifties, the freshly dead lawyer who refuses to accept her fate, and the overly cheerful group leader who just wants to see someone let go of their fetters and make it to the Other Side.
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Of course, we all have our own tales, of a sort. Upon arrival The Ferryman equipped each of us with a pamphlet that had both the important group details — like the steps to haunting recovery and the pledge — and personal notes about how each of us died. (I went because of extreme food poisoning. Unpleasant.) Group introductions let each of us share our stories with the rest of the group, but it isn’t until the final third of the show, when everything has gone off the rails, that opportunities to really play along come up.
While a recovery group format might seem like a perfect container for an interactive piece, the structure actually lends itself more to performance than connection. That’s the main reason why it takes Afterlife Anonymous time to get going, and the core parts of the narrative really rest with the characters. The good news is that the cast is open and game, keeping the piece entertaining.
Clocking in at around an hour, Afterlife Anonymous doesn’t have much time to anchor the character’s personal stakes deeply enough with the audience to turn the ending into the semi-comic catharsis that the plot presents. Yet this piece is far more grounded than Shinbone’s Welcome Back, Woodchucks, which leaned heavily on improv and character melodrama in a similar fashion but failed to stick the landing.
As a company Shinbone keeps iterating on this formula of light roleplaying with roughly three participant to one actor ratio in single rooms. The economics of it are somewhat more sound than your one-to-one ratio or multi-room affairs. Yet it puts a hell of a lot of stress on the writing and scenario design to really hook people in. That emotional on-boarding is something I haven’t quite seen Shinbone crack yet, but there are glimmers both here and in the work they produced for the Immersive Invitational this summer. It’s not an easy formula to crack, but there’s enough charm in what the company does to keep me coming back to see them get a little closer each time.
Afterlife Anonymous, created by Leland Frankel and Jonny Perl, completed its spooky season run at Thymele Arts in LA.
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Office facilities provided by Thymele Arts, in Los Angeles, CA.
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