‘Madam Daphne’ speaks to us about her work

Haley Cooper is one of the co-artistic directors of 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.

Cooper not only performs as Madam Daphne in the experience, but she’s also the author of the Immersology blog, where she chronicles Strange Bird Immersive’s experiments and insights from working on the frontlines of the genre — touching on topics from designing the experience, audience rules of engagement, safety and consent, acting technique, and more.

We caught up with Cooper over email and asked her our Immersive 5 questions.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

No Proscenium (NP): What does “immersive” mean to you?

Haley Cooper (HC): For me, immersive theatre needs to satisfy three distinct criteria to deliver a true immersive theatre experience (that is, not disappoint me at the end of the night):

  1. Immersive theatre surrounds the audience with the world of the story.
  2. The audience is active.
  3. It needs to be theatre: live performers telling a story.

I think #2 is the real revolution that sets this work apart from traditional theatre and is also the hardest to do well. Active participation, not sets, is what gets people really excited about this genre.

How does the audience exist to the performers? What’s their impact on the story? Just what is it that they get to do?

NP: Why (or why don’t) you think of your work as immersive?

HC: I consider The Man From Beyond: Houdini Séance Escape Room to be immersive theatre because it meets the criteria above. That’s what we set out to do from the beginning. It’s a challenge to get an escape room to deliver a complete story experience, but it can be done!

NP: What was the moment where you knew that this kind of work was for you?

HC: I’m sure you get this answer a lot, but everything changed July 3, 2013 when I first visited Sleep No More in NYC.

I’ve been acting and creating theatre since I was 10, unable to quit, but I always felt dissatisfied by its inability to create true excitement in audiences. I get a lot of personal pleasure out of my art, sure, but for me, it’s always been about the audience: this is for them. What are they getting out of it? And what I saw was how much I had to twist the arms of even my closest friends to get them to come see live theatre. Theatre has to be subsidized, has to be non-profit, has to do lame, name-recognizable shows because it’s fundamentally unpopular.

Get Kathryn Yu’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

SubscribeSubscribe

Immersive theatre changes that. It has everything I love about theatre — story-telling, imagination, suspense and surprise, catharsis — but experienced on the intimate, personal level for the audience. It’s visceral. It’s heart-pounding. And it stays with you, you dream about it. It changes you. Here is theatre for my generation, not theatre for the blue-haired intelligentsia. My friends couldn’t get enough of my Sleep No More stories, even buying tickets to NYC themselves, and I took that as a sign.

My first immersive taught me something about myself (namely, that I’m a hyper-aggressive weasel) that I hadn’t fully embraced. Now, I am that person more and more — it unleashed my potential. Traditional theatre doesn’t do that. Immersive theatre teases suprising things out of its participants, as they find themselves in a radically different world and offered the chance to act in it. Damn, I love it. I’ll give it everything. How could I possibly do anything else? I’m never going back to “the stage."

After Sleep No More, I couldn’t sleep, and I don’t think I slept peacefully again until I had opened my own original work in the genre. I never wanted to start a theatre company before in my life. But immersive theatre…now that’s a new frontier. It’s my aspiration to create theatre that’s popular enough to be for-profit. That’s what’s possible here.

NP: When designing — regarding your approach to presence, agency, safety, and consent — how do you cue the audience as to what’s expected of them and the nature of the content they might encounter?

HC: Interesting question!

The Man From Beyond benefits from belonging explicitly to the escape room genre — escape rooms set up expectations about what’s going to happen in a way that the “immersive theatre” label doesn’t. Players know they will need to explore a space and solve puzzles along the way in order to “win,” so they know the parameters of their agency before they even buy tickets.

We have a sequence early in the show known as “Rules Hall” where Madame Daphne presents “rules of etiquette for receiving the spirits.” Mostly it covers safety and best approaches to the experience. We also offer players tips for playing in a pre-game email.

Overall, Strange Bird favors the elegance of implicit guidance wherever possible. Our actors make it clear that they are in charge, and audiences pick up on the social cues. (Internally, we train our two-person cast with outs and safe words for back-up in the unlikely event of an inappropriate audience member). If we had racy content (nudity, for example, or sexual situations), we would be more explicit with the audience about how to approach our cast. For their part, our cast is also trained in picking up cues from the audience as to who is interested in eye contact and who to let be. This is especially important in one-on-one selections.

When inside the game, our strong UI (user interface) in the game design itself suggests how to engage and play with the space. We do have a warning mechanism (we dim lights, play music, and a cue card says what to stop doing), if anyone starts to endanger themselves or the set.

NP: What works — be they creative works, books, or other inspirations — have shaped your current work?

HC: Meisner acting technique is the spine of Strange Bird. We value believability in our performances; we want the audience to believe our characters are real people. And when the actors truly believe the world, the audience quickly follows us down the rabbit hole. We value responding to our audience as our scene partners, so that no scene is truly the same. We even use the Meisner technique when designing our shows to minimize self-consciousness in the audience.

All credit goes to Sleep No More for introducing us to the genre and generally blowing our minds. It’s like Mozart landed in the Stone Age. The strong emphasis on one-on-one encounters shaped our current production.

Then She Fell taught us that the genre can be just as successful on a much smaller scale and with different structures. This show in particular energized the formation of Strange Bird, since Houston hardly has a tourist population to feed a Sleep No More-scale show.

Game-design-wise, we didn’t find a lot of inspiration in escape rooms. It was 2015 when we set out, and there weren’t a lot of top-quality games around, but we could tell that the genre had enormous potential. Even when the games had flaws, we always had fun playing. So I guess I should say the genre itself inspired us greatly. It has a great mechanism for making the audience active inside a story-world. I think without the “escape room” angle for our first production, we would have closed long, long ago. As is, we’re nationally known in the escape room community, which is (unfortunately) larger and much more accessible (with multiple companies even in tiny cities) than the immersive theatre community.

Our game design is influenced by the Myst series and The Room series — we wanted puzzles that emphasized exploration and discovery in sets and props, interaction with actual objects rather than with ciphers that end up in 4-digit locks.

Scott Nicholson’s papers also gave us a confidence boost that our instincts to make an escape room make sense were going to pay off.

We did tons of Houdini research for The Man From Beyond: biographies, histories of spiritualism, television shows, movies, blogs. The show is drenched in Houdini details (we even feature some historic letters with replica letterhead), and I eagerly await a true nut coming to play one day!

The Man From Beyond is a 90–120 minute experience for 4–8 people, combining immersive threatre and an escape game in Houston, Texas. Tickets are $32–38.

View all of our Immersive 5 Interviews.

No Proscenium 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 our Facebook community Everything Immersive, and on our Slack forum.