Haley E.R. Cooper and J. Cameron Cooper are the co-artistic directors of Houston’s Strange Bird Immersive, best known for its award-winning The Man From Beyond: Houdini Séance Escape Room, a unique hybrid of immersive theatre and escape room. However, the couple closed the show’s doors last summer and vacated their previous space. So over the past year, Haley and Cameron have been very hard at work at bringing The Man From Beyond back. And now, 12 months later, the production is finally back up and running in a new, larger permanent home with space for additional experiences.
We spoke to Haley over email to learn more about version two of The Man From Beyond, what their second production might look like, and what it’s like to move your escape room venue to another location.
No Proscenium (NP): Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
Haley ER Cooper (HEC): I’ve been a theatre artist since the age of 10, with a passion for audience engagement — I’ve always wanted to deliver something meaningful for others. I naturally caught the immersive bug in 2013, when Sleep No More showed me how theatre could be intensely personal for audiences. It also showed me a way to make a career. I…haven’t slept since.
My husband Cameron and I founded Strange Bird Immersive to bring the immersive thrill to audiences in Houston. We opened in 2017 with an escape room, because Houston had actually heard of escape rooms, and we felt that theatre was the element that escape rooms were missing. According to players and critics, it’s a brilliant genre-marriage, and we look forward to creating more stories in this form.
NP: What is The Man From Beyond all about? How is it different from your typical escape room?
HEC: You’ve arrived to attend one of Madame Daphne’s famous Houdini séances, but not everything goes according to plan. In the end, it’s a story about love, loss, and the power of illusion.
The Man From Beyond is about as different from a typical escape room as can be, while still qualifying. We feature all the tropes — clock ticking down, access to hints, players need to complete a series of challenges by exploring the room — but present them as realistically as possible. The game for us is a means to an end with a full emotional arc for our players as its end. With live actors, the immersion goes deeper and the stakes get stronger.
For most escape rooms, the story is just the premise on the website. For Strange Bird Immersive, the premise on the website is just the beginning.
NP: Can you catch us up on what’s been happening the last several months with Strange Bird Immersive?
HEC: Manual labor from the owners. I think I spent two months painting? In our previous location, we had 2 doors. Our new expansion location has 18 doors. We’ve gone big.
We’ve been working hard on rebuilding The Man From Beyond, and building from scratch what we call the Overworld (don’t call it a lobby!). Our previous space didn’t have a “Strange Bird” lobby — the door opened directly into Madame Daphne’s Tarot Reading Room. So we had a brand new canvas to work with. Our new spaces will allow curious guests to discover the meta-story of Strange Bird. Even our twin ADA restrooms are part of that experience.
We also have a completed design for our second immersive theatre escape room, ‘Lucidity,’ and are now transitioning to construction on that. And then there’s still space for more experiences, and we have no idea what we’re going to do with it!
NP: What’s involved in moving your escape room to a new location? How long did it take?
HEC: Oh man, that’s a story. About two years, all told, is the short answer.
It began by finding the right real estate. We decided we needed more experiences to attract the Houston market around September 2017. We found our dream expansion space by November 2017. That was the easy part.
Getting legal was the hard part. It’s 90% about not killing people in a fire, which is something I absolutely support, but about 10% of it is murky or bonkers or both, and whatever it is they think you need to add to the plans will cost an additional $12,000.
We met with the city permitting office on four separate occasions before signing the lease, just to make sure that we could open an escape room in the space we found.
We worked with an architect and MEP, submitted official plans to the city July 2018, began demolition and construction in November 2018, had to firespray the ceilings in March, dealt with AWOL electricians for 2 months, then passed plumbing, electrical, mechanical, and structural inspections and got the official Certificate of Occupancy late June 2019. And that’s when we could move in our furniture.
The nightmare wasn’t all the city — it took us months to negotiate general contractors’ quotes, to research the firespray needs, to kick electrician butt, etc. Not to mention that we hung all 18 doors ourselves just to save money.
Thing is, I don’t think our story is unique. Anyone doing an escape room remodel on our scale would go through the same experience — or worse. In Houston, there’s no zoning laws, for example.
NP: Have you made any changes or improvements to the experience? What can repeat visitors expect?
HEC: The Overworld is an all-new experience. I’m excited to test it — we’re doing at least one Very Daring Thing, and I wonder how people will react? Like in our previous incarnation, we never mention the phrase “escape room” on site. We really want the immersion to begin right after you book a ticket.
For The Man From Beyond, we rebuilt the séance parlor to exact specifications. Moving even one piece of furniture would throw the whole balance off!
But we have made upgrades on just about everything in favor of elegance, both on and backstage. Strange Bird believes that players have more fun when they stay in a state of flow — which doesn’t mean the challenges in the game are a breeze. It just means everything works consistently team after team, and if you pay attention, you’ll have an incredible time.
For example, there was one thing that you could discover in two separate ways — one amazing way, one kinda lame way. We’ve made a mechanism so that you can’t discover it the lame way anymore. Everyone should discover it the amazing way.
NP: What aspect of moving the experience was the most surprising to you?
HEC: The time! The expense! It’s five-times the space from our previous location, but it was way more than five-times the price to build. And perhaps unsurprisingly, every stage of the process met with unnecessary delays. I finally understand the “mad” in “madness.”
But the really surprising part? The number of people who called us every weekend hoping beyond hope that the website was wrong, we’re secretly running games, and could you please let us in? It’s good to be saying yes again.
NP: What challenges do escape room owners face in getting their rooms up and running in terms of permits, inspections, and more?
HEC: Escape rooms (and immersive theatre) are not in the International Building Code that guides occupancy requirements. Twice we were told we couldn’t make the space work, until we found the structural supervisor who had worked with escape rooms before and understood how to calculate our occupancy size correctly. Instead of hosting 227 guests at once, as was initially calculated, the city calculated that we’ll host about 47. I’d doubt we’ll ever see 47 people in our space at once, so that seems like a more realistic scenario than needing to evacuate 227 people.
Escape rooms need to get accepted into the International Building Code as a unique business type. I heard China has done this recently, which is great!
Some other issues to be aware of: what floor are you on? Does the space have sprinklers? Is it a new building? What was the previous occupancy group for the space? What’s the furthest distance to exit the building in your plans? You’ll need to be literate on these issues and ready to fight back with the code — we had more than one false interpretation thrown our way that would have been devastating if we hadn’t won in the appeal process. Also, there isn’t really an appeal process, but I think we made one up.
NP: What advice would you give to anybody who wants to open their own escape room?
HEC: First: do you play escape rooms all the time? You need to love them and know them — they’re about to become your life, and players are growing wise to the escape rooms that don’t provide quality experiences. Be sure you have a team that excels at everything: mechanical and electrical engineering, coding, carpentry, scenic design, set dressing, painting, light and sound, puzzle design, screenwriting, directing, management, cheerleading, and customer service.
Research your market. Do you think you can break into the top five of Yelp or TripAdvisor in your area? It will be almost impossible to catch up with the companies who opened before you, even if you offer a better product. Most cities are flooded at this point with many look-alike escape rooms: no photos on the website, generic room themes, BOOK NOW!! What will you make you stand out? You need to differentiate if you want to make a real business out of it.
Now estimate the time and money it will take to open — not to design the games or fund them, just the resources to do the construction part. Great. Now multiply those estimates by four. That’s the realistic estimate. Can you take that on?
All that being said, I highly encourage immersive theatre designers to enter this market. Thanks to escape rooms, demand for immersive entertainment is in every city now, not just NYC or LA. That amazes me. Let’s show them how transformative a story can be.
The Man From Beyond officially reopens on July 18 in its brand new location in Houston, TX. Tickets are $42.
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