A troubled woman, a janitor on his nightly rounds — two immersive theatre productions explore isolation

The term “immersive” is used in so many contexts — from advertising to virtual reality to COVID-era art exhibitions (van Gogh, Klimt, Kahlo and so forth) — that it can be hard to nail down exactly what it means.

Two theatrical productions now playing in unusual Toronto locations use immersive techniques to create a personal relationship between viewers and performers, and to explore the experience of isolation, something that became all too familiar during the pandemic.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper” at the Campbell House Museum, the audience hears the voice and sees images of a solo female actor but never shares physical space with her. And in “Le Concierge,” the audience spends 80 nighttime minutes in an empty high school with a lone actor playing the school caretaker.

Immersive theatre has been a huge trend of the past 20 years, although aspects of this kind of theatre-making have existed for centuries: at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, for example, the groundlings stood right below the stage with the actors acknowledging their presence.

One of the best-known contemporary immersive companies is London, England’s Punchdrunk. In its “Sleep No More,” playing at New York City’s McKittrick Hotel since 2011, audience members walk around different rooms engaging with a film noir-inflected adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.”

Here in Toronto, spectators of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” produced by Bygone Theatre, walk around Campbell House and interact with the story. Emily Dix, artistic executive director of Bygone, believes immersive theatre has the potential to draw in new audiences with “something that feels like an experience.”

To Daniele Bartolini, meanwhile, founder of DopoLavoro Teatrale, “Le Concierge” is “probably the most immersive show we’ve made” because it draws the spectator deeply into the location and experience.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is based on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story about a woman on a rest cure at a country estate following the birth of her child. Her mental health deteriorates and she starts to obsess about the wallpaper in her room, imagining it to contain secret patterns.

“We first came up with this idea in the early COVID days when we weren’t allowed to leave our houses,” said Dix, who is writer, director and producer of the show. Lead performer Kate McArthur had roommates who moved out during the pandemic, “so she actually spent a lot of the time totally alone,” said Dixon. Gilman’s story “seemed like a very appropriate story for what was happening now.”

McArthur performs the hour-long piece in a room in Campbell House with four live cameras trained on her. Audience members move around four other rooms watching a projected live feed of her and hearing her voice speaking the text. An image of her lying on a bed is projected onto the dining room table, for example, so that “it almost looks like a medical dissection table,” said Dix.

“It’s incredibly poignant to experience a person and to have the knowledge that she is somewhere in the house, but we can’t go there and be with her,” said Bria Cole, the show’s media producer and projection designer. “This woman is fragmented in these different spaces.”

There are headphones in each room through which audience members hear conversations between other characters mentioned in the story.

“We purposely didn’t want anyone to be able to get a full story explaining everything,” said Dix. It’s meant to further reflect the experience of isolation in our era of social media in which “we get more connected online, but we’re also more distant than we’ve ever been.”

For those unable to see the show in person, there’s a live digital version every night using technology by Blackmagic Design.

“I cut through the different (camera) angles so that people who are watching online will see visually a more linear story” than those in Campbell House, said Cole. Another special feature for streaming audiences is the capacity to vote on elements of content they want to hear.

“Le Concierge” is the co-creation of performer Vincent Leblanc-Beaudoin and director Bartolini, and takes place at the Saint-Frère-André Catholic Secondary School. Leblanc-Beaudoin plays the caretaker, a character inspired by his two grandfathers and informed by interviews with 35 essential workers including janitors and hotel cleaners.

“Both my grandpas are blue-collar, one of them was a butcher and one was a master pipefitter,” said Leblanc-Beaudoin. “So that’s where I come from … and there’s also just a general curiosity toward these mysterious, almost ghostlike people in our society who are essential to our well-being and to the way things work.”

There are a maximum of 15 spectators at each performance. Before the show they’re given blue coveralls to wear over their street clothes and then they follow the caretaker through his nightly rounds.

Putting on the same uniform as the character creates “an augmented sense of connection,” said Bartolini. “This is like becoming a chorus, to try to be together, to be in tune.”

The show is co-produced by Leblanc-Beaudoin and the Théâtre français de Toronto in collaboration with Bartolini’s company, DopoLavoro Teatrale, but non-French speakers don’t need to worry about comprehension as the show has no spoken dialogue.

“There was never a question of words,” said Leblanc-Beaudoin, who’s been working on the show with Bartolini since 2017. “We only allow ourselves to be silent with people we love who are near and dear to our hearts … in the show actor and audience are silent for 80 minutes and there’s something really intimate about that,” he said.

Bartolini founded DopoLavoro Teatrale in 2006 in his native Florence, Italy, and brought the company to Toronto in 2012. Its shows take place in unconventional locations and usually involve direct actor/spectator interaction, a mode that Bartolini calls “audience-specific.”

In “Le Concierge,” he said, “People are going to probably lose track of time. When you are immersed, you’re not fully in control. You are in an incredibly close relationship with something.”

SHARE: