Valley Road Theatre Co. has been creating theatre in cities along the Long Island Sound since 2022. In the last two years the company has transformed work from George Orwell, Nikolai Gogol, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Sherwood Anderson, and more into the sort of immersive installations one rarely finds outside of major cities. If Valley Road Theatre Co.'s recent production of their original piece Sheffield Scientific is any indication, Artistic Director Alex Gross and his company speak the vocabulary of immersive theater fluently. The company began their impressive journey as high school students, who are now carrying their work into young adulthood.
Sheffield Scientific, directed by Alex Gross and written by Ryann Shaffer, begins with an urgent invitation into a bomb shelter. The bombs have been launched. The end is nigh. Once inside the bomb shelter, audience members mill around a section of Trinity Lutheran Church in New Haven, Connecticut. The church's massive sublevel has been transformed into a bomb shelter of shadows, haunted by lilting vintage tunes. From the music and costumes, one gets the sense that we are in an uncanny version of the American past. The audience peruses telegrams, letters, and news articles alluding to a strange invention created by Professor Sheffield.
Characters wove through the crowd, chatting with the audience, offering more clues as to the nature of Sheffield Scientific. After a strange, haunting dance from the company, the Professor (Abram Knott) welcomes us to the shelter. Abram Knott doesn't quite look the part of an avuncular professor, but his astonishing basso profundo voice fills the space with arrogance and regret. The Professor tells us that in order to make our interminable future in the shelter bearable, we are invited to use his unique process to extract memories and dreams, so that we can live in them forever. If you are disturbed by the Professor treating memories and dreams as if they are the same thing, then you already have a grasp on how his plans for life in the bomb shelter go wrong.
After the Professor's welcome, two Docents split up the audience into groups and lead them on separate journeys through looped scenes. What follows might be old hat to those experienced with guided immersive storytelling of the sort pioneered by Then She Fell. One on ones, movement based scenes, and sound cues for transitions all come into play. Some may be tempted to accuse the show of lacking innovation, but it is rare to see an immersive piece that wields the fundamentals with such skill. Valley Road Theatre Co. makes difficult things look easy, and they should not be faulted for their formal expertise.
The basic situation in the shelter is clear: the Professor's process of memory and dream extraction has disturbing consequences, but the exact nature of everything that the audience witnesses doesn't all necessarily come together. But the story details matter less than how real the world of Sheffield Scientific feels, and it feels deeply and disturbingly real. That is the greatest accomplishment of the piece: it goes as deep as you are willing to follow.
Most of the scenes in Sheffield Scientific are movement-based. Dance, touch, and play show us who the characters are and what haunts them. In one scene early in our journey, the Daughter stands up and playfully tosses a paper airplane across a dining table at the Housewife. With a grin, the Housewife tosses a plane back. The Daughter enlists the help of the audience, and soon flying paper airplanes fill the dining room. Then, suddenly, the Housewife, played with a palpable, distant pain by Abigail Murphy, seems suddenly overwhelmed. She falls down in her seat, against a wall. The planes are a great time, until you remember that planes drop bombs, and then you remember that the world has ended, and then even the sweetest memories open up to darkness.
The scripted scenes hold just as much depth. In one of the more harrowing scenes, the Daughter urges the audience to join her as she listens to her father's recorded voice. He guides her through the process of memory extraction. As the Daughter performs the increasingly discomforting steps, the father's voice transforms from doctorly description to fatherly desperation as he tries to save her with a process that seems to cause as much trauma as it aims to prevent.
As the scenes of Sheffield Scientific accumulate, it becomes clear that the extraction of memories and dreams has deformed the minds and bodies of those living in the shelter. At times I wonder if any of the characters are real at all. Is the audience witnessing externalized memories, escaped dreams? What are the consequences of non-consensual memory extraction? Does extracting memories from a child, who may not hold enough memories to have a fully populated psyche, do some terminal damage to their development? The style of immersive theater Valley Road Theatre Co. expertly wields in Sheffield Scientific traps the audience in its world of haunted memories and dying dreams.
Even though Sheffield Scientific is set, seemingly, in the past, its concerns feel achingly contemporary. In a moment of deep regret, the Professor suggests that the end of the world comes when "we stop caring about what happens next and start worshipping what happened before." This thought seems less like one a person might have back in the dusty old middle of the 20th century, and more like a thought we might have today. Part of the power of Sheffield Scientific comes from its astute recognition that the end of the world feels as if it has already happened, and will haunt all of our dreams and memories, no matter how hard we might try to escape.
Sheffield Scientific is a beautiful, disturbing, thematically rich production. Should the piece ever be re-mounted, we recommend it without hesitation. If it is any indication of what they are capable of, Valley Road Theatre Co. is reason to celebrate for immersive theatre aficionados from New Haven to New Rochelle.
Sheffield Scientific ran April 1-4, 2026 in New Haven, CT. Tickets were $20.
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