The morning before I saw The Republic, I received a lengthy email with the address and some instructions. It ended:
I have created The Republic for you. And inside, you will only get out of it what you put in. Interact. Engage. Move. Do not hesitate or hold back. We certainly won’t. Our citizens are ready for you.
Salutations,
Sir.
Everything I knew about this evening told me to jump into the fray, be bold, make choices and talk to the actors.
So I did. I’m usually happy in my role as a passive theatre watcher -so long as it’s good- but I decided to take advantage of the experience that The Republic advertised. Hell, I’d just moved to Orlando. What did I have to lose?
It begins the way I imagine most theaters would prefer to do business: the audience filed inside in a line, divided into who was “worthy” or not. They yelled at us a bit for not taking the whole procedure seriously and finally, our worldly possessions, including phones, were locked in a file cabinet. We were told in the email this would happen, and although I was initially skeptical, ultimately I think it was a good plan. With my phone on me, I would have been tempted to refer back to the welcome email or take photos of some of the clues as we were thrown into this adventure.
Clues to what? That’s the first problem with this immersive experience. I learned there is The Republic, and The Office, and people thrown into The Labyrinth. I was one of the latter people, starting as a servant then quickly being tossed out to fend for ourselves. Although the Greek mythology geek in me was happy to be in the Labyrinth, we were given no reason as to why we were left to die in there. Our guide Alexander made it absolutely clear that we were to die. He explained to the small group that we were lowest of the low and he had been sexually tortured before becoming part of the caste system. There were other details as we traveled through the Labyrinth, but way too many, so many that none seemed vital. When someone else in our group asked him to elaborate on his early life — he said he was born in the Labyrinth — he had nothing more to say. We thought maybe something he remembered could help us survive. He got flustered and I could tell he just wasn’t good enough at the needed improvisation to satisfy what we requested and move us to the next part of the story.
It felt like those Choose Your Own Adventure books when you turn the page and they kill you off in two sentences. Turn the Page, Dead End.
Alexander clearly had to bring us to Medusa’s lair. Well, I wanted to see the rest of the Labyrinth, and that welcome email told me to not to hesitate. So I read a scroll I found in a planter that explained how Medusa got to be in her present form. I kept that for a while but it lead nowhere. I think Alexander then found me and made me see Medusa.
I learned nothing from Medusa. She mostly rehashed things we knew and offered vague ominous tidings, but she did bring us to Daedalus. Yes! I love him, even though his son has much better name recognition: Icarus. At last I had something to ask: “Is your son here?”
Cue dramatic pause. He made it clear that his family was of great heartache to him. Then he continued plodding through the plot as though I’d never mentioned it.
Turn the Page. Dead End.
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There was a Weapon, and I knew we didn’t want anyone to use it. Daedalus asked us to learn what our enemies knew about the Weapon. We learned they needed plans to make the Weapon work. Neither Alexander nor Daedalus cared when I told them that, even though the plans were clearly what was on the walls of Daedalus’s room. So another member of my group and I just tore all the plans down and hid them in a suitcase.
No one noticed. We did it in full view of a group of people including Daedalus and nothing happened.
Turn the Page. Dead End.
After that, I just went wandering. I found a few rooms that no one seemed to inhabit at all. There was a conference room with red folders at each chair and I looked through them. Everything, including posters plastered all over the playing area, told us we were being watched. I kept expecting someone to find me and do something. I purposely unplugged props that seemed important and left traces to try to make something happen, or to learn anything more about the meaning behind it all.
Nothing happened. Dead End.
Even in the climax, a cohort from my group found an interesting clue and we decided to throw it to Daedalus while he spent about ten minutes explaining why everyone was dying in front of us (I had missed the beginning and couldn’t hear most of it, nor did I care about anyone anyway). Daedalus didn’t even look at it, just made a pithy remark and tossed it aside, continuing on with the plot he needed to get through before we could all leave.
Turn the Page. Dead End.
I lingered in the post show room and talked to some strangers, asking about their experience. Some people showed us objects they were told were of the utmost importance, but once found were tossed aside or never used.
If the point of this experience was to make a ‘citizen’ of The Republic feel like nothing they do will ever matter and they’ll never get answers to any of their questions or know why anything they are told is important matters in the slightest, then well done.
That is not the experience they advertised. A quote now, from their home page: “Your decisions control the ending.”
Now, frustrated though I was, I talked to quite a few people I knew who had seen it before me and we all had the same general experience, but very different ideas on what the storyline was. We talked about it a lot afterwards, and I appreciate that aspect of this production. Besides my frustration that nothing I or any other audience member did mattered, there are two other problems that need to be addressed before I’d experience this again. (Their website says it will return in 2016).
Their backstory needs a better delivery medium than an email and the actors. A friend suggested a private video where we meet our guide or simply get a better sense of the overall world. Either that or make it simpler.
I love it when a seeming cluster of randomness all converge into one storyline, but we never got enough clues to piece anything together, never mind learn what happened at the end. (This sentiment was repeated to me by other members of my group). After seeing it, I scrolled down to the very bottom of the home page on their website and read a description of The Office, The Republic and The Labyrinth.
That’s great that they posted the information there. Guess what? Not everyone attending the show is going to read that. Before buying my ticket, I personally searched their Twitter and Facebook feeds for more information to no avail. Reiterate it in the welcome email and send it in a video. Some people prefer reading and some prefer video, or will be limited to one or the other based on the situation when they get the email.
Although the performers were extremely dedicated and many even handled the heavy-handed language eloquently, they need people who can do more than improvise to varying degrees in character. They need writers talking into their ear, or backstory to answer questions they should have known by their last weekend, or performers talented enough to tie their threads together convincingly. This is a similar challenge that a 2010 RSC production had, called Such Tweet Sorrow; even with writers and a director guiding the storylines, the actors simply didn’t have the enough writing talent to pull off such an ambitiously improvised endeavor. That is not the fault of the actors. That is something structural with the creative team and process.
I hope they fix these things before remounting. I am not a person who needs to know all the answers to a story in order to enjoy it. It was just disappointing that nothing I experienced or did actually made a difference in the story when they explicitly told me it would. It felt like each character who guided us had their particular plot points to hit and we were supposed to go along with it. If our actions did affect the storyline, then I didn’t see it and few people in my group seemed to feel it.
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