The Gypsy Machine is Pop-Up Theatre LA’s latest site-responsive piece, a drawing room play — if you will — produced with the intent of being made available for-hire. That is, Pop-Up will bring The Gypsy Machine to your place of residence and stage it for you as opposed to you coming to them. That’s the Pop-Up part of Pop-Up Theatre.

For this production of The Gypsy Machine, however, the audience came to the company, which had taken up residence in a rec room of one of the big apartment buildings on Bunker Hill. This stood in for an apartment, which is the setting of a one-act supernatural thriller which turns on… well, that’s part of the fun.

Fun is a watchword, because The Gypsy Machine was definitely entertaining. Some miscommunication about time and some liberal use of the “I-word” (see mini rant below) had the show in a karmic deficit by the time action started, but the piece itself is a fun, poppy ride. The kind of thing I could see inviting a troupe of actors into my home to play out, if that damned Powerball would only yield to my will.

In brief: Molly (Danielle Larson) has come to an apartment filled with creepy mannequins with her boyfriend Graham (Philip Orazio) in search of her missing — and possibly dead — sister Natalie. In a fun little twist the mannequins are us — the audience — which is the sum total of the effort to create a role for the audience in the world of the play. It’s a nice little twist of justification, and there’s a fun beat that Orazio gets to play, but the focus here is on the play and the close up work.

What’s exciting about intimate theatre — and I’m not talking 99-seat but the kind of “good lord, they are practically in our laps” kind of staging — is that it leaves no room for your grosser theatrical impulse. Playing to the back of the house means playing for about 12 feet of space. Or at least it would in most people’s living rooms. The inside of the Bunker Hill Tower Room leant itself to something more like the energy you’d find in a storefront theatre space.

Which meant that at the times the cast would find themselves playing at a 9 it read like a 12 leaving them no where to go when they wanted to push it to 11. In other words: there were more than a few moments, particularly at the top of the show, when the energy jumped out of the intimate-cinematic and into that of the the-eh-tah.

This is unfortunate, given that the liminality of the text’s supernatural elements could benefit from a more restrained take. As such I couldn’t tell if the two teenage girls who were seated next to me in the front row were averting their heads at certain scenes because of the intensity of the story or the wattage of some of the acting. Either is possible in the context of a thriller, but the story drew me deeper in.

Now any thriller worth its ink hinges on twists, but the smart thriller will also deploy the anticipation of twists to befuddle the audience and add tension. Meghan Brown has written a smart thriller. The world-building might be a little thin in places — a lot more fun could be had with the kind of uncanny revulsion that the titular “gypsy machines” might produce in the seemingly normal characters in the cast, for instance — but there was just enough of the “wait, but wouldn’t that mean…” plot machinations to keep me giddily devouring the scenes.

Director Daniel Korth’s staging is naturalistic and clean, although I would have loved to have seen this in a more claustrophobic environment. I suspect the actors and Korth have it in them to really work the close-up action. In particular it would have been fun to be able to observe Emilly Thomas, who has dual roles in a sense, up close. There’s a chameleon like quality to her work that genuinely surprised me. Her energy read one way, and suddenly spiked in the other direction. Designer Matthew Johns’ AV work impresses, providing a tonal guide that Korth has the actors smartly play off of and with.

Pop-Up Theatre LA is running the show a few more times before tucking it into their roadshow portfolio. A brief check with the producers pegs a typical Pop-Up production at $2500 for booking an hour long production, although that “varies depending on clients needs.” Which means that the $15 dollar tickets to this incarnation of The Gypsy Machine are a steal.

And now, a brief burst of frustration…

About The I-word

Let me make this clear: The Gypsy Machine is not immersive in the sense that we think of here at No Proscenium.

As mentioned above: in the bounds of our conversation this is a site-responsive piece. The marketing material and a director’s note uses the “i-word” in the colloquial sense. While we strongly urge producers and publicity folks to avoid the word when the focus of the piece isn’t on 360-degree, processional staging or some manner of participation that provides agency to the audience.

Experience teaches us that’s tricky as all hell to parse out, but when an audience weaned on Sleep No More, The Speakeasy Society, or The Day Shall Declare It shows up to a site-specific play that bills itself as “immersive” the difficulty level of winning over that audience goes up exponentially. Using the word becomes something like the Dark Side of the Force: quicker, easier, more seductive. As a colloquialism “immersive” is legit: but there’s a technical aspect to the term now.

Resist the temptation to treat it like bacon. Don’t put it on everything.

Back To The Review

Let’s close on a positive note: I dug The Gypsy Machine. Given that the “oh, there are chairs” thing happened as I walked in the door my digging the show is a small feat. This is fun, site-adaptive theatre. I wish more site-adaptive theatre was just plain fun. Heck, if this was a Hollywood Fringe show in a black box I would be probably be giddily recommending it to festival-goers as a fun stop on the circuit. It is suspenseful, and thus not necessarily for anyone who doesn’t dig the threat of violence looming over the action.

For those of us who can handle that kind of thing it’s a neat way to spend an hour behind doors we might otherwise never have reason to pass through.

The Gyspsy Machine plays again on May 31, June 1 and 2nd in Downtown LA. Tickets are $15.