Rogue Artist Ensemble made a splash last Spooky Season with Kaidan Project: Walls Grow Thin, an elaborate, multi-story (in multiple senses) immersive show that brought their skills with puppetry and projections together with the immersive format.
This year they’ve got an entirely different kind of immersive show: Señor Plummer’s Final Fiesta, which tells a story of Eugene Plummer, whose name graces Plummer Park in West Hollywood.
We asked director Sean T. Cawelti, via the magic of email, to tell us about the Rogue’s latest immersive venture.
No Proscenium: You’ve been working on Señor Plummer for a while, how did the project first come about?
Sean T. Cawelti: We have had a long relationship with the City of West Hollywood and the Arts Division. They have helped Rogue to present a few different performances for free in the community which has been wonderful. About three years ago the Arts Division shared a book called Señor Plummer the Life and Laughter of an Old Californian which includes interviews documented between John Buschlen (an LA Times reporter) and Eugene Plummer, the namesake of Plummer Park in West Hollywood.
We passed the book around the company and everyone that read it fell in love with it. Even though we had done many projects in Plummer Park we were unaware of the history of the land and the story of Eugene’s life. The book is a real tall tale in the style of Paul Bunyan or Jonny Appleseed. Eugene’s life is epic, full of shark riding, bandits, court battles and full of the most incredible characters, many of which are people you can google and learn about today.
Eugene’s family immigrated to Los Angeles and at one point owned a huge ranch which even included the Hollywood Bowl land. Through twists and turns and surviving the Great Depression Eugenio ended up with just a small parcel of land which eventually became Plummer Park. Eugene’s family, real historic figures like Mulholland and the bandit Tibercio Vazquez (of the famed Vazquez caves) all figure heavily into the book and became the rich jumping off point for adapting the text.
Through the last three years Rogue has been researching in archives at the Natural History Museum and the Adobe Leonis Museum in Calabasas which is the place that Eugene’s home exists now. We have developed a dreamy surreal vocabulary where animals and people intermingle and the lines of good and evil are blurred. We selected our favorite stories from the book and worked with three incredible Los Angeles playwrights to adapt the stories for a live performance. Over the years Rogue has done a few readings of the text and a staged workshop last year which taught us a lot and helped us to further define the vocabulary for the show.
The City of West Hollywood and Rogue Artists Ensemble have partnered to create this project and thanks to support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Angel City Brewery, MedMen, Dazien and many others, we are gearing up for out opening this week.
Through the process we were able to discover that the original book the play is based on is now in the public domain and so have re-printed the book especially for this production with a special additional chapter about this project. The book is on sale at the event and you can get it signed by the character ‘Don Juan’ which was the author’s pen name when writing the book. We believe the scene of the book release party in our production may be taking place in the same location as the original book release party back in 1942.
NoPro: What makes this story resonate now?
SC: This story is about the complex nature of Los Angeles as an ever shifting morphing community. The problems we face of owning land, having a voice in government, understanding one another and finding a community are the same things Plummer wrestled with a hundred years ago.
Get Noah J Nelson’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
SubscribeSubscribe
Eugene came to Los Angeles when the primary language was Spanish and the roads were not paved and land was being ‘owned’ for the first time. Eugene lives in LA during the point when Los Angeles was the most dangerous city in America and yet he had love for it and he had a deep community connection. Eugene was a court translator and used his language ability to prevent people from going to jail unnecessarily.
The experience of being a part of Señor Plummer’s Final Fiesta is specific and individual and each of the nearly twenty cast members intertwine into a complex dance of story, music and nightmares. Each audience member who comes will have a unique experience based on the path they select which is just how Eugene I think would have wanted it.
NoPro: What did the company learn on Kaidan Project that you’re applying here?
SC: Kaidan Project: Walls Grow Thin was the company’s first large scale immersive experience and many things were learned. We have taken our knowledge of space design, audience flow and storytelling to new levels in Señor Plummer’s Final Fiesta. We also have a new mode for which the experience is driven based on an idea we ended abandoning for Kaidan. In Plummer the audience will begin together as a group before selecting various paths to begin their journey out of 1942 Los Angeles and into Eugene’s memory.
NoPro: Is there a unique challenge to creating immersive/interactive work in a public space? This is a lot different from having full control over a few floors of a building.
SC: The City of West Hollywood has provided a historic landmark space within Plummer Park that is comprised of many different rooms of varying sizes and a glorious giant courtyard with antique tile work to create our performance within. Rogue has been working closely with the city to ensure that we always are following all city guidelines. We have been so fortunate to have great flexibility in transforming spaces and indeed audiences will experience multiple locals from a cave, saloon (where you can get a beer), citrus grove, ranch and a church where Eugene’s Mother is honored. This is a very different project Kaidan and part of the challenge was creating spaces in a way that sometimes incorporated what exists in the space. Sometimes that was easy and other times very challenging, requiring tricky design elements to help us shift to a new locale.
NoPro: Who is the ideal audience member for Señor Plummer?
SC: Señor Plummer’s Final Fiesta is intended for an audience of adventure seekers who want to learn more about the history of Los Angeles and the story of Eugenio’s incredible life. There are moments within that experience that can get dark and scary and for those in particular warnings will be provided. The experience can be approached many ways and you could choose to remain in a single space or follow characters on their paths. Overall it would take three viewing of the performance to see all of the stories so there is a lot of content to uncover. Puppets, masks, giant murals that come alive, pitch dark corridors, miniatures and much more all await for people to discover.
NoPro: Is immersive becoming part of Rogue Artist Ensemble’s DNA?
SC: Rogue Artists Ensemble has long been creating immersive experiences for well over ten years but usually as smaller components within shows staged in a proscenium theater. We have created many many immersive pre-show experiences, sometimes putting audiences through different rooms before the main performance starts and often staging work in non-traditional spaces using the environments to tell the story. We have never branded ourselves as an immersive theater company but I guess we should be doing that now more. I think every Rogue project is immersive in it’s own way with some being more holistically immersive by a traditional definition like Señor Plummer’s Final Fiesta.
Looking ahead Rogue has plans for a few other highly immersive works, so I guess at this point it’s something we’re keen on continuing to explore. The challenge of telling a story in this format is something worth tackling and we’re excited that some projects are labeled as ‘Large scale immersive’ on our multi year plan looking ahead. More on that another time……
NoPro is a labor of love made possible by:
…and our generous Patreon backers: join them today!
In addition to the No Proscenium web site, our podcast, and our newsletters, you can find NoPro on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, in the Facebook community Everything Immersive, and on our Slack forum.
Discussion