This winter has seen a little renaissance of improvised immersive experiences here in LA. First there was Paulie’s Polymers Office Holiday Party and now there’s Welcome Back, Woodchucks — a high school reunion in themed show.
There’s a lot to recommend the basic form of an improvised, participatory comedy. For starters, it can be a breath of fresh air to not have life and death stakes in a show. The funny thing about life and death stakes is that while they seem like a shortcut to engagement, they actually create a higher degree of difficulty. At least, after you’ve been doing this for a while the prospect of saving someone you’ve just met from a mortal threat gets to be old hat.
How about getting a couple back together or finding out who is holding the molly? Low stakes, but it’s something different.
Welcome Back, Woodchucks uses a LARP-lite structure to cast the audience as the returning class of West Hollywood High. Upon stepping through the doors to the reunion, you’re given a name tag with your role’s name and what you were voted most likely to be. I’ll admit I was a little disappointed to find myself assigned a role, as I’d spent a little time (very little, to be certain) deciding on who I was going to be and had picked out a name that would be a wink and a nod to fellow Riverdale fans. You know. In case I got stuck in awkward conversations and needed a back door.
But that night I was destined to be Benjy, most likely to win the lottery and then lose the ticket. So I strip-mined my character concept, stapled “Benjy” to it, and carried on. Along with the name tag we were each given an “ice breaker bingo” card, with each square representing a life experience that you needed to go find someone who fit the bill and get them to sign off on. I wasn’t sure if this was something where you had to find a *character* who had experienced it, and thus this was a story point, or if anyone could just bullshit their way through it. That didn’t sound like fun, so I skipped it, and hoped that something else would come along and that if it was integral to the story there would be an exposition dump some other way.
A sandbox LARP structure puts a lot of onus on the audience to participate, and that’s not everyone’s bag. One person walked out once they had gotten a sense of what it was the show was asking of them. The opening minutes, when you need to get oriented to the world, felt rudderless. For long minutes there it seemed that we might very well just be stuck making things up at other audience members for an hour.
Luckily that fear was laid to rest when two characters approached and quickly established that Benjy was one of the bad kids, and they were ready for some shenanigans. Was I picked out because I was just standing there? Because one of the actors knows me? Or because I was wearing a name tag written with a black marker? My assumption is the later: that every name tag is keyed to a clique, and that clique has a loose track. At the very least what played out for the rest of the hour seemed to confirm my suspicions.
Get Noah J Nelson’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
SubscribeSubscribe
The very good news is that Welcome Back, Woodchucks’ cast is so very game and welcoming. In quick conversations with “Mike” and “Ike” I learned a lot about who the hell I was. (“You’re a legend, man.”) Learned of our long standing enmity for the class valedictorian who we called “Scantron.” And found out that one of our friends had committed suicide three weeks before.
Which is where I stepped off the track.
Let me be blunt: I didn’t need to tap out of the whole show because of this thread, but I’ve also lost enough people to suicide that I don’t get anything out of it being toyed with in this kind of context. That the details of the fictional death — defenestration — line up with an actual death in my own college community that’s just a year old certainly doesn’t help. Look: if you’re going to touch a third rail topic in a participatory comedy, maybe go for the full absurd and not something remotely realistic. It didn’t make me leave the show, but that thread with those characters lost all interest for me in a heartbeat. Because you gotta earn moments of pathos, or they just end up bathetic.
Shame, too, because I was having fun with those guys and if we had stuck together I might have led them to my secret stash of really good beer. (A thing not usually possible, but when the venue is your co-working space, there are advantages. And it’s *really* good beer you guys.)
After jumping off track — if indeed there was a track to jump off of, but let’s assume there was — I found myself doing little fetch quests around the room. I was warmed up by then, ready to “yes, and” or just stroll up to a mascot and ask if they were holding drugs. (They weren’t. It wasn’t Dan in the costume. Dan was always holding. That’s what made him awesome.) My willingness to mix it up got me little encounters left and right, and when the DJ started impromptu karaoke to The Killer’s ‘Mr. Brightside’ (one of my actual karaoke standards) I miiiiight have found myself running around the dance floor getting people to sing into the mic with me. (Then again, I’ve done almost the exact same thing in that room before. It’s just something I do in Thymele’s Common Room.)
In short: the Woodchucks’ team built a perfectly good sandbox to play — truly play — in. It’s the on boarding and some clunky forced drama notes that are at issue. At $40 for an hour’s worth of play it feels maybe a *little* dear, and I’m not sure what the extra $10 for the “cool kids” package buys (other than a drink, which is actually a fair price for a drink). Maybe I got the cool kid’s package without knowing it.
With some tweaks to the on-boarding, and some deep thinking about how to handle dramatic elements — the aforementioned suicide becomes a dramatic plot point in the meta-story, but it landed at an odd angle — they could end up with a hit that entertains from start to finish.
Shinbone Theatre’s Welcome Back, Woodchucks: An Immersive High School Reunion plays at Thymele Arts 5481 Santa Monica Blvd. through Saturday Jan 26th. Tickets start at $40.
NoPro is a labor of love made possible by 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.
Office facilities provided by Thymele Arts, in Los Angeles, CA.
Discussion