Tying Together Haunts, Theatre, Museum Design, and Puppets: A Q&A with the Creators of ‘H.T.

Go inside the cabinet of curiosities with Submersive Productions

Husband and wife team Glenn Ricci and Ursula Marcum are the co-artistic directors of Submersive Productions in Baltimore. In a few weeks, they’ll bring back their popular production of H.T. Darling’s Incredible Musaeum Presents: The Treasures of New Galapagos, Astonishing Aquisitions from the Perisphere to the historic Peale Center in Baltimore.

No Proscenium spoke to them over email about how Submersive Productions got started, their work on haunted houses, their love of Sleep No More and Then She Fell, and how they’re using a historic building to bring their work to life.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

No Proscenium: For those may not know, what is Submersive Productions? How did it get started?

Glenn Ricci (GR): Submersive Productions is a collaborative artworks company that combines artistic disciplines to create memorable and profound audience experiences. All our work so far would fit the No Proscenium description of “immersive theatre” but we reserve the right to do other things in the future!

I came into this world via ScareHouse in Pittsburgh where I did sound design, music composition, and world-building. I’ve actually been doing this kind of work since I was 12 years old when my friends and I started building haunted houses in our parents’ basements. Then we graduated to making them for the local YMCA, and so on. I learned a lot from working on ScareHouse which is one of the best haunted houses in the country.

Ursula Marcum (UM): My undergraduate degree is in Theatre, then I went on to get a graduate degree in Museum Exhibition Design. I suppose you could say that both of these areas of practice are about making “worlds.” I worked in the exhibition design field for several years before focusing exclusively on the visual arts.

GR: Around 2011–2012, I dragged a bunch of ScareHouse staff to see Sleep No More in New York City. Then in 2013, Ursula and I helped create The Basement, a separate attraction below ScareHouse, which is a series one-to-one encounters with a horror theme. Having that experience gave us the confidence to do something in Baltimore. We were looking at all the talent in the arts scene in Baltimore and wondering why we had to keep going to New York City and Pittsburgh to see immersive theatre.

UM: We formed Submersive Productions formally in 2015 when we were remounting our first show The Mesmeric Revelations! of Edgar Allan Poe and realized that we had over 30 people working for us. We are always trying to keep the company as lean as possible and focused on the art (as opposed to building an institution). We have a core team for everything we do; for each individual project we build a specific team and create a plan to fit that particular work.

GR: We’re often labeled a “theatre” company. We do work mostly with people from the fringes of the theatre community. But the more traditional theatre work I see, the more I feel like we’re doing something else at Submersive. Coming from outside of the theatre world also lets me ask,“Why do we have to do it this way?” There’s a process to putting on a play and a lot of groups here are doing it very well, so I see no reason to replicate that.

NP: How has your background working on haunted houses like ScareHouse influenced your approach to creating immersive theatre?

GR: When I heard that an early incarnation of Then She Fell started as a haunted house, it really got my attention. When I saw the show in 2012, it was inspiring to see what they could pull off in such a small space, whereas Sleep No More was also inspiring but also too big to think about doing anything similar.

That said, Third Rail Projects took on the haunt format to explore the idea of world-making. In comparison, I think most ‘haunters’ get into haunted houses because they just think haunts are cool and they want to scare people. But you end up spending so much time in this other world, it starts to feel like it’s home in a weird way. I came to realize that is what I love most about haunted houses: the escape to another place.

ScareHouse had always involved theming and world-making; it eventually became a big part of what they do. This got me thinking about other ways to use an environment to tell a story. I kept wanting to push the ScareHouse folks to go deeper into story details and start layering all sorts of nuance. They do this more than a lot of other haunts, but there’s always a limit. They know their audience well: people come to ScareHouse to get scared. Once a person is scared, the whole fear response kicks in: you get tunnel vision, you want to flee, and you are not capable of taking in nuance, narrative, or detail. Rifling through a desk to discover hidden pieces of a story and also being chased by a monster are not compatible experiences.

What you’ll find in our work are the basic building blocks of any good haunt: you have a character and an environment that is an extension of who they are. That makes for a great starting point. In some of our work, like H.T. Darling’s Musaeum or The Mesmeric Revelations! of Edgar Allan Poe, you get to see that character travel a larger path through a two-hour story arc. In another one of our works, Plunge, it was all one-on-ones. So the “room-plus-character” idea was the entire show but fleshed out more than you would do for a haunt.

NP: What else brings haunted houses and immersive theatre together?

GR: In addition to what I said above, there’s something special about the month of October that gets people into the mood for themed experiences. They let themselves role-play. They become a little bolder and want to confront fear directly. Even though our shows are not haunted houses, immersive theatre requires people to push past their fear of the unknown to even walk in the door. I would love to do a show every October, but schedules conspired against us this year.

UM: As you might expect, there is quite a bit of overlap between the theatrical community and the haunt community. Haunted houses are a great opportunity for people to make things that are out of the ordinary, or technically challenging. Haunts are especially alluring to people who are into makeup and special effects.

NP: Without giving too much away, how do you describe H.T. Darling’s Incredible Musaeum?

UM: You’ve been invited to the opening night of H.T. Darling’s latest exhibition of artifacts he basically pilfered from another planet. It is set loosely in the Belle Epoch era with alien embellishments. There are eight or nine characters, depending on the night, and many paths through the evening’s events. As you might guess, things go awry.

GR: Also, there are puppets! There was a lot of skepticism at first about incorporating puppetry into an immersive show, but we had such a great response the first time that we are doubling down and adding two more puppeteers and more puppets for the remount.

We’re also trying to push the ways that you can have a “main” narrative, different perspectives on that “main” narrative, and then also completely upend that narrative. In HT Darling’s Incredible Musaeum, different guests may not just see different scenes, but different versions of the same story that conflict in interesting ways.

NP: What is the Peale Center? How did you come to stage an immersive production in a historic but closed and vacant museum?

UM: One of our artistic associates, Lisi Stoessel (set designer, co-director, and performer in Musaeum), had the idea of doing a show that took place inside a cabinet of curiosities; she had already developed some of the puppets. The Peale Museum was also the first building in the country built specifically to be a museum. Its first exhibitions were very much in the wunderkammer spirit we were looking for. And this gem of a building is located in Baltimore, where we live and work. While the building has been closed to the public for some time, there is a coalition of people interested in making it a contemporary museum and creative hub. The site is in good, usable shape, but needs some upgrades. So, while the group is fundraising and renovating, we asked permission to use the building for the show.

GR: I honestly can’t think of a better match of location and material. This project is truly site-specific.

NP: What should audience members expect from H.T. Darling’s Incredible Musaeum?

GR: As with our previous work in Mesmeric Revelations, we wanted to create an experience that combines the intimacy of a show like Then She Fell with the open exploration of a show like Sleep No More. For Musaeum, we also clue you into where the “big” scenes are, so you can see those or skip them as you wish. Most audience members have not been to an experience like this before, so we try to give lots of cues for how it works without actually holding hands or annoying the regulars.

With an audience of around 40 spread out over a dozen rooms, there’s nothing stopping you from getting close to the characters, but there is also space to hang back, examine all the details, and reap rewards from that as well. There are so many one-on-ones that it’s impossible to get them all, but anyone with a little immersive theatre experience should be able to find their way into one.

Our first run of Musaeum had many repeat visitors. Some people even came over ten times in 6 weeks. Those who came a second time reported they saw a completely different show — to the extent that attendees thought that we had changed the show. There is some room for improvisation, but our show follows the same course every night. We worked hard to create a world that feels alive, one that’s bigger than you can take in through a single visit.

NP: Bonus question: what work (theatre, art, dance, film, music, etc.) do you wish you had created?

UM: Anything and everything made by Laurie Anderson.

GR: Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves.

The remount of H.T. Darling’s Incredible Musaeum Presents: The Treasures of New Galapagos, Astonishing Aquisitions from the Perisphere runs November 16— December 17 at the Peale Center in Baltimore. Tickets are $25–75.

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