My Time at Temple Studios, Part 6

Show #6

Tuesday, September 17: 7 pm

This was it. The last hurrah. Five shows in three days, a single night off, and now, my very last trip to Temple Studios. I wasn't ready to leave. I didn't know how to handle the idea that I would never again return. So I started doing what I always do in high stress situations, and what proved to, in some ways, be my downfall. I started over-planning.

Long before I even got on the plane, I had made a particular decision about my strategy – I was going to devote a loop at my last show to revisiting my favorite character loop from the rest of the weekend. I imagine (Romola) that I don't (Romola) need to explain who (Romola) that was, if you (Romola) have been reading my other recaps (not Faye, although I can see where one might get that idea).  But there was a potential snag in the plan: After my talk with some of the actors after the show on Sunday, and the revelation of just how aware they are of the audience as individuals, I just didn't feel comfortable following Romola if she was going to be played by Sonya Cullingford again. After all, I had seen nearly all of her Romola loop (just not all at once) and done a mostly complete Faye loop with her as well, both of which involved direct interaction (a 1:1 and a dance after the murder, respectively). Might it seem kind of weird and stalkerish if I showed up with her again in such a short timeframe? Maybe, maybe not, but I didn't want to risk it. I had similar, but lesser concerns about Katie Mcguinness, since I had only seen her on the first night – but again, as Romola. I basically just had to hope that she would be played by Katie Lusby or even Miranda Mac Letten, who did not play Romola according to the National Theater or spoiler group cast lists, but who had told me she would be starting soon. I figured that gave me a 50-50 shot.

I arrived and anxiously checked the cast list. Sonya was Romola. So there was that plan, scuppered. My next thought was to follow Wendy instead – it would be a shame to go six times and never do a full loop with one of the leads. Of course, that's just the way I am, to some degree. Eleven times at Sleep No More and I've never done a full, start to finish run with either of the Macbeths. I just have such a fascination with the side characters. But Shawn had already claimed her for the first loop, so I would have to go somewhere else.

Thus, I wound up entering the show in a state of confusion, with no idea what I was going to do. I was let off in the basement and immediately rushed up to the ground floor, hoping to just find. . . something. I didn't know what. I found Dolores (Jane Leaney), watched her briefly, took in a brief bit of Wendy (Sophie Bortolussi) and Marshall's fight, and wandered a bit more, eventually finding myself in the dressing room for a moment between Wendy and Andrea (Fania Grigoriou). I started thinking that perhaps I would take up with Andrea, but when she left the room, Shawn went with her. Apparently, I was free to follow Wendy after all.

That idea only stuck briefly, though, because I was finally presented with what I was hoping for – a moment that made my decision for me, something so perfectly enticing that I had no choice but to go along with it, completely divorced from my over-taxed decision making process. That moment was the arrival of a flame-haired demonic imp, rising out of the darkness above the mirror like a horrible, yet beautiful gargoyle. I nearly let out an evil cackle at the sight. It was the PA (Kirsty Arnold), a character who was the highlight of my first show, played by an actress who had made quite the impression on me at the same show, and somehow I had caught her during that brief period of the loop that I had missed the first time around. It was perfect. I could do Wendy on the second loop.

Kirsty's take on the PA is miles apart from Fania's. Where Fania was aloof and otherworldy, Kirsty was sassy and mischievous, even playful. At one point, while perfuming herself, she gave me a puff right in the face. I feel, in the end, that Fania's version is the more definitive, or appropriate, one – but I can't deny the sheer fun of watching Kirsty's PA run around the studio, wreaking havoc on everyone's lives. She just takes so much pleasure in being evil that it's infectious.

For the most part, the action played out very similarly both times, as it should, but there was one big change that threw me for a loop. It was just after the reset, heading for the 1:1 in the basement. When we arrived, the door was shut and locked. Very surprising. The PA unlocked it and pulled me inside, where it was pitch black (also surprising). That's as far as I'm going to describe it here, but suffice to say, this 1:1 was so completely and utterly different from what I experienced the first time that I don't even know if I would call it a repeat.

Afterward, we didn't wind up picking up any more white masks on the way to her office, so I was the only one there when the watch made its appearance. I was kind of looking forward to watching someone else help her out, just to see how they reacted to things, but that obviously wasn't going to happen. Still, I'm not going to complain about getting to play assistant a second time.

The watch procedure was a little different from the first time. There was less of a performance aspect to it, with no seeds or chanting. On the other hand, I felt a little more intimately tied to the process here. Looking back, I think it's a tremendous example of the effect that positioning and body language can have on interactions. Fania's PA took me by the hand and led me upstairs to Studio 4, making me feel like the assistant to the assistant. Kirsty hooked her arm around mine and walked up beside me, making me feel more like a co-conspirator. The whole process also came to an end slightly earlier; instead of having me hold the watch box through the ice dance, she took it from me as soon as we closed it up, whispering “Mr. Stanford thanks you for your assistance” in my ear.

Sometime during the ice dance, we were joined by a new, but clearly experienced white mask. He showed up out of the blue, but each time we moved to a new location, he deposited himself in exactly the right spot to be noticed. I wouldn't necessarily be bothered by this, normally – someone watching me might make the same claim – except that, having been here before, I knew were were but moments from a 1:1 selection, which meant he was probably there for one reason and one reason only. Sure enough, when the PA headed for the hallway where she would make her choice, he was in motion before she was, managed to stop any of the rest of us from getting too close, and got taken inside.

I was a little disappointed missing out on this 1:1 a second time, but not tremendously so. It's just the way things go, and if I was being honest, I had gotten more than my share already. That said, I was considerably more frustrated about losing out to that guy, specifically. But what was done was done, and I tried to put it out of my mind. It was time to make good on my earlier plan and go find Wendy.

I didn't have to go far – just over to Studio 2. Wendy and Marshall were just concluding their fight over the watch. As she headed over to the forest for her tree dance, I was struck by how different the experience was from the first time I had seen her do it. The room was packed – incredibly so. It seemed like there were almost as many people in there as there were during the finale of the other shows. Thus began a new theme for the night – for the first time, the audience was affecting my ability to enjoy the show.

Fortunately, I had a rough idea of where she would be going throughout the loop, and was able to position myself for travel so that, barring an incident right after the Infidelity Ballet, I never actually lost her (In that case, I was able to reconnect not long after). I have no idea what made this crowd so different from the other nights – perhaps it was simply the fact that I was following a main character for the first time. But some of the things I witnessed, including some girls holding hands three-across, several clumps of people with masks off having conversations in the stairwells, and the massive difficulty the black masks had creating enough space for Wendy and Marshall to fight in the bedroom suggest to me that there really was something different about that night.

But enough about the crowds (for now). How was Sophie's Wendy? In a word, magnificent. Completely heartbreaking. I nearly lost it again, watching her excitement as she dressed and got made up for the executive party, thinking that this would be her chance to show Marshall what she was made of and win him back (or show him what he's giving up, but the romantic in me votes for the former). The way she danced and skipped down to the basement, stopping to twirl in each of the spotlights on the way. . . it just tore me up inside. It was an almost perfect analogue to the most painfully sad scene of Mulholland Drive, Diane and Camilla's long walk up the hill to the party – except so much more powerful. I had seen Wendy's arrival at the party/orgy at least a half-dozen times already, but I had never seen it from her point of view, never heard her nearly inhuman shriek of Marshall's name, never noticed the way she bounded across the room and leapt onto the table where he had been a moment before like an animal. Everything is different when you look at it from Wendy's perspective. I caught a glimpse of the PA and, for the first time, I hated her.  I was ashamed of helping her with the watch.

I've learned an important lesson here. Main characters are people too.

The rest of the loop pretty much flew by, although I found myself getting more and more frustrated with the audience again. By the time we reached the birthday party, it was impossible to even see inside the tent. I eventually retreated to the stage, positioning myself to catch Wendy on the way out, and from there, I managed to see about half of the small stage inside the tent. This also put me in a prime position for that terrifying moment when the Doctor (Tomislav English) catches her on her way out. For some reason, in my mind, this scene takes place in a thunderstorm, although that's clearly impossible.  Go figure.  This was the first time (first show, anyway – he took part in my 1:1 earlier in the evening) I had seen a Doctor other than Francois Testory, and it definitely felt strange. I didn't see enough of him to get a strong feel for his interpretation, but he's certainly much less intimidating.

As we left the Doctor's office, we passed Studio 5, where Bulldog was just about to start. I did a quick mental calculation – Wendy was most likely heading down for the watch fight, which meant I had completed the loop. Probably. If I was right. But by now, you all know how I am about Bulldog.

First, however – a moment of panic. As I watched Wendy leave, my eye was drawn to Romola's shrine at the end of the hall. A shrine with an unfamiliar photo above it. I rushed over – whoever this photo represented, it wasn't Sonya. Had the cast list been wrong? Could I have done a full loop with a completely new (to me) Romola after all? I immediately started trying to calculate where she would be, so that I could track her down for the remaining half-loop. Once I reached the shrine, though, I saw that there were actually two photos above the shrine. I pulled off the unfamiliar woman's face to find Sonya's photo. It was then that I realized where I had seen the mystery photo before – it was one of the ones that Alice and Claude looked at in the secretary's office. Someone must have taken it and hung it up over Romola for some reason.

Stupid Tuesday audience will be the death of me. I swear.

One thing that episode did accomplish was to remind me of just how little time was left – only a half hour or so. I couldn't believe it, the night had slipped out from under me when I wasn't looking. How had I been in there for two and a half hours already?

This is the point where I did something bad. I was so frustrated with the crowd, so keenly aware of the time slipping away from me, so afraid that the whole thing might end on a sour note, that I committed the cardinal sin of Punchdrunk shows: I retreated into the familiar. I went back to something I knew would end well, that would guarantee that I left my final show on a high note. Can you guess what I did?

I watched the back half of Faye's (Katie Lusby) loop again. And you know, it was great. It was basically the same as the night before (except without tears, on my part). Watching Faye and Harry excitedly rush down to the finale warmed my heart just as before. Considered in a vacuum, it was a wonderful way to end my six shows journey.

But.

There is so much more I could have seen. I could have headed back to town and followed Miguel, or Andy (actually, I did see a lot of Miguel in Faye's loop. But still). I could have taken another stab at the Doctor or the Seamstress, or tried to get a better handle on the Dust Witch. I could have followed Frankie down to the initiation and then picked up Claude for a while. Or, hell, I could have just stuck with Frankie. I could have hung out with the Barman. But I didn't. So much still to see, and I watched essentially the same character for the third time. I hang my head in shame.

After the show, I spoke briefly with Sophie again in the bar, and she confirmed that I had left her loop at the correct point, as well as made mention of the fact that I did the first loop with the PA. See? I told you they know everything. It's spooky.

I want to reiterate that, other than my extreme frustration with the crowd, particularly during my Wendy loop, and my initial bout of analysis paralysis, I enjoyed every minute of the final show. And I'm only really bothered by my final choice in retrospect, thinking of all the missed opportunities. Still, it seems I've managed to end this chronicle on a bit of a down note, so let's see what I can do about that. I've heard it said that no story is inherently happy or sad; it's just a matter of when you end it. If we extend the timeline a bit, what do we find?

Redemption (hopefully). As I write this, I am just over a week away from making my triumphant return to Temple Studios for another concentrated, intense, six-show experience. This will be my chance to get to know all of those characters that I only glimpsed the first time around, not to mention a few who didn't even exist back in September (hello, Phoebe and Mr. Tuttle!). Who knows, maybe I'll even be able to make myself spend some time in Studio 3. 

Eh, let's not go overboard.

So thanks for reading, and if you've enjoyed it, stay tuned for a whole new batch of adventures come January, same Stanford-time, same Stanford-channel.

My Time at Temple Studios, Part 5

Show #5

Sunday, September 15: 5 pm

My target for the day was the fool. After hearing Shawn go on and on about him (almost as much as I had gone on about Romola), I knew I had to devote a loop – especially since he was very nearly a blank slate for me. To this point I had seen only a single scene with him, and it was a brief one at that. Since my time was growing short (only two shows to go!), I did a bit more pre-planning than before, using spoiler group info to try to work out where he would be at the start of the show. My best guess was the birthday tent in Studio 2, so as soon as I was let off in the basement, I made for the stairs.

The benefit of this plan was immediately evident, even disregarding the specific matter of the fool – since the elevator let people off only at the basement and the first floor, the ground floor was almost entirely deserted. My world was, for these few amazing moments, entirely free of fellow white masks.

On entering Studio 2, my plan immediately began to fall apart – someone apparently forgot to tell the fool I was planning to meet him there. Instead, I found Wendy (Sophie Bortolussi) and Marshall (er. . . I don't know why I can never identify the Marshalls) engaged in a dramatic, dance-infused quarrel in front of (and on top of) their trailers, for an audience of no one.

Now, if you read my write-up for the previous show, you know what I think of Sophie. And here she was, playing what is arguably the lead role of the entire show, and no one was watching? THIS SHALL NOT STAND! After only a moment of reluctance to abandon my original plan, I settled in to watch the fight, followed by two magical back-to-back bits in the same room: her angry, backlit dance in the trees and her retrieval (guided by Stanford's voice) of the murder scissors from the pond. If there was ever an argument for not forcing yourself into a preset plan, this is it. Circling through the trees while Wendy climbed them was one of those perfect moments that are impossible to manufacture deliberately.

By the time she pulled the scissors out of the water, a few more spectators had gathered, and lo and behold, one of them wore clown's makeup and carried a brown suitcase – it was the Fool (Paul Zivkovich). I had the right idea, I was just early. Of course, this presented a dilemma – return to the plan, or stay with Wendy? I decided on the Fool, and was pleased to see that I probably made the right decision, as nearly everyone else went with her when we parted ways.

The Fool's story is one of the more bizarre ones, with whiplash-inducing swings from the sinister to the almost quaintly amusing. He's an angry guy (sad, too, but there's a lot of anger) - I saw an incredible rage in him after Lila tried to drown him in the sound room, which he just managed to bottle up. He's also a very aware character, with a sense of the manipulation going on – the rage was not directed at Lila. This is probably because he also seems to be the one who is most under the studio's control, to the point of literal possession at times.

Speaking of the drowning – that was an incredibly horrifying scene from my perspective (that is to say, the Fool's), but I suspect it would be even more so from Lila's. Part of it is that there's just something about the conceit of having Stanford's voice guide the characters – every scene where that happens gives me the same chill down my spine.

That may have been the most horrifying scene in the Fool's loop (although, now that I think about it, the way he directed Marshall to Studio 2 for the murder is a close second) but the most impressive was definitely his collapse in the dressing room. With his legs completely limp, he did an amazing sort of dance, along the way managing to pull himself up into a hand stand, walk around on his hands, and climb a large metal scaffolding (again, without his legs!). As a display of simple strength and athleticism, it easily outstripped anything else I saw at any of my shows.

After he recovered the use of his legs, he sat down at one of the mirrors, had me sit next to him, and guided me in re-applying his makeup. It seemed like all of the anger I had seen in him, which reached its fever pitch around the time that he sent Marshall to his doom, was gone - expelled or consumed. Now there was just tenderness and regret. After the makeup was completed to his satisfaction, he took my hand and led me to Studio 8, nestled in an unseen corner of Studio 2, where the infamously epic 1:1 commenced. That's all I'll say about that, other than to relate my first thought upon leaving it (which, I suspect, is the first thing most people think): “Am I in the basement? How am I in the basement?”

My Fool loop completed, I headed to the Doctor's office, hoping to find – well, the Doctor. At the first four shows he had been consistently played by Francois Testory, who had managed to make a very strong impression on me, even though I had only seen him for about two minutes at a time. He was a scene stealer, and creepy as hell. Frankly, I was a little nervous about approaching him. There was a strongly intimidating air about him, but different from the way the PA or Stanford intimidated me. They felt larger than life, beyond a mere mortal such as myself. The Doctor, on the other hand was just such a mere mortal – but in his presence, I felt like something less than that.

This is all to say that, while a part of me really wanted to see more of Francois's Doctor, there was another part of me that was so afraid of him that it hoped for a different actor. As it turned out, the first part of me got it's way – but only briefly. Francois Testory was indeed the Doctor again, but within moments of my arrival at his exam room, he disappeared into a 1:1. Drat. As I've mentioned before, I don't like waiting around in these situations, especially since you can't always count on people coming back out of 1:1's the way they went in. After what I went though with the Fool, for all I knew the Doctor might re-emerge in the top floor desert, somewhere. So I put my Doctor plans on hold and moved down to the next name on my list of people I wanted to know more about. That name? Badlands Jack.

I found Jack (David Essing) wandering around town, throwing his weight around and reminding people that he owns everything. At one point (this may have been the very first thing I saw him do. . . timeline is fuzzy), he delivered the package to the Gatekeeper (Oliver Hornsby-Sayer). You know, THE package. The one that the Gatekeeper passed on to Romola, who delivered it to Stanford, who turned it into magic orgy juice. It's tremendously satisfying when pieces of the story that you see out of order sync up, like pieces of a puzzle. Someday I might see how Jack gets it in the first place.

Ultimately, though, I didn't manage to learn much about Jack's story because, after chasing Andy (Rob McNeill) around with a knife for a while, he took me into his trailer for a 1:1, and didn't emerge with me afterward. No telling when or where he'd come out, so I took this as a sign that it was time to give the Doctor another try.

Short version of Doctor attempt #2: No. Long version: This time I got to see a full scene (a repeat of the first time I ever saw him, as he gave Dolores (Jane Leaney) an injection), but as soon as Dolores was gone, he took someone in for a 1:1. Drat again.

I didn't have an alternative plan this time, but I found something worthwhile just one room over, in Claude's office, where Faye (Katie Lusby) was preparing to audition for him (River Carmalt) and Stanford (Sam Booth). Earlier, Shawn had told me that there was a second, creepier audition right after this one, so I decided to stick around, even though I had seen Faye's audition twice before, and watch them both. The second audition featured Andrea (Fania Grigoriou) and William (who was played by Omar Gordon and who, to this point, I had never seen within the walls of the studio. .. surprise, surprise). It was everything I expected and more, with interesting echoes of Stanford and Romola's only scene together.

After the auditions, I decided to take one last stab at the Doctor. As before, no sooner had I settled into his examination room area than he took someone in for a 1:1. There was one key difference, though – this time, that someone was me. He leaned back on the table, scanned the room, and his gaze settled on me. He arched an eyebrow, so I arched mine back – and his expression hardened. Trying to envision what I looked like from the outside, I realized that, rather than a kinship or connection, he probably read my expression as something along the lines of “Well? You going to pick me this time, ya jerk?” I felt like quite the asshole. But, like I said, he did indeed pick me, perhaps in the hope that I would stop hanging around and go bother someone else.

This is how belittled I feel around Francois's Doctor. Epic levels of second-guessing and momentary self-loathing. I still feel embarrassed, and I didn't even actually do anything wrong.

Anyhow, I was actually more excited coming out of the 1:1 than going in, because I was finally going to get to see his story. We returned to the exam room, he scribbled a few notes on a clipboard. . . and then he grabbed someone else for a 1:1. Seriously, that man is a 1:1 machine.

So I gave up on the Doctor. Just down the hall, Bulldog was in full swing, and as soon as I heard it, I was unable to resist its siren call. When it ended, I wound up following Faye out again, for three reasons. First, I wanted to revisit the back half of her loop and see how it really ends, since my previous experience concluded with the truncated “happy ending.” Second, I still regretted having to skip out on Katie's Romola during the fourth show, so I wanted to see what she did with Faye. Third, I knew that Harry would be around at the end of the loop, so it would put me in a good position to pick him up from the beginning of the story.

As much as I loved Sonya Cullingford's performance as Faye, I think Katie is a better fit for the role, with a different look that works to her benefit. Where Sonya is beautiful, Katie is cute, and that makes a huge difference. It gives her more of a sense of youth and naivety, like a little girl playing at being a grownup, and makes some of her more questionable actions feel much more sympathetic. A lot of that came from Katie's performance as well, of course – but it does give her a leg up and makes her, if not necessarily a better Faye, at least a more effective one.

As we approached the end of the loop, shortly before the point where the story had ended for me the night before, something amazing happened. Faye took the stage to sing “Walking in the Sand,” and I suddenly became acutely aware of William and Mary on the other side of the bar, even without seeing them. As you may recall, the first time I heard the song, I was watching them. The second time I was with Sonya's Faye, and while I hadn't forgotten that they were over there, I was really buried in Faye's world, and they didn't really register. This time, both halves of the scene – theirs and Faye's, crashed into me, and I was unable to weather the impact. Big, rolling tears welled up in my eyes and began to pour down my face. The harder I tried to contain it, the more violently my shoulders heaved. I was completely exposed, standing in the middle of the room, sobbing like a baby (almost; I did manage to avoid vocalizing). Everyone could see what was happening. Faye could DEFINITELY see what was happening.

I want to be clear about one thing: This. Does. Not. Happen. To. Me. I've cried at movies before, sure – but the count is in the single digits, and it's never been like this. A public emotional and physical reaction of that nature and intensity was completely beyond my experience. And it was magnificent. That emotional release, coupled with the cathartic rush that naturally followed, would have justified every penny I spent flying halfway across the world to see this show, even if everything else I had experienced was of no value to me (which was most certainly not the case).

Afterward, Harry (James Sobol Kelly) showed up and tried to comfort his daughter. This time, without the wrap party, it didn't really work. He took her back to their motel room and put her to bed, but couldn't get her to smile. Then it was reset time. Uncharacteristically, I think I prefer the happy ending.

I was tempted to stick with Faye for a bit longer, since I had not yet scene the very beginning of her loop, but I had already planned on switching to Harry, so I suffered through one of my typical bouts of analysis paralysis for a few moments before following Harry out the door. He headed over to the Drugstore for a brief bit of reset housekeeping, then went. . . . right back to the hotel room, where I rejoined the crowds of people who had stayed with Faye. There's probably a lesson here about wasting time overthinking things.

Faye and Harry's first scene, as they get ready to start their respective days, is a wonderful antidote to the misery I had just witnessed. There's a warmth to their interactions that is unlike anything else I've seen in the show. It makes me smile every time I think back to the way he can't (or won't) stop singing “Codfish Ball,” even though she hates it (but doesn't, really). I love the Greeners, I really do.

Sadly, once Harry left the motel room, I actually only managed two scenes with him before I lost him. Happily, one of them was a 1:1 – but still, when he sent me out of the room alone, I was quite disappointed. I have since been told that he just left out the other door, and if I had merely taken a quick jog around the motel I would have found him again, but a fat lot of good that does me now.

Instead, I wandered back through the studio gates and found Romola (Sonya) familiarizing herself with the office. This is one of the few Romola scenes that I had not seen Sonya do, so why not stick around? To be honest, it really wasn't much different from Katie Mcguinness's version, with the notable exception that Sonya actually typed out the entire Grandmother's Story and gave it to a white mask.

When Romola left to deliver the package to Stanford, I refrained from following her (somehow) and headed back outside for some quality time with the Gatekeeper (Oliver Hornsby-Sayer). Oliver's Gatekeeper was similar to Francois's Doctor, in that he had already made a very strong impression on me through very limited contact. He's a creepy, creepy dude, and quite imposing – as Oliver is kind of a giant beast of a man. He's probably got a good six inches on me. This provides me with much amusement anytime I look at the cast photos on the spoiler group, which make him look like some tiny, elfin thing.

Unfortunately, while the Gatekeeper is very cool in small doses, there's not much to him in in the long-term. He reads a lot. That's about it. I never really got much of a sense of him as a person, beyond “creepy, doesn't talk,” but perhaps that's by design. It also didn't help that I had already seen nearly every interaction with other characters that came up – perhaps my experience with him at the earlier shows was not as limited as it felt. By the time we got to the point where he recruited Harry for the studio, I was more than ready to move on - so I hitched my wagon back on to Harry. Only for a moment, though, as I knew he was heading back to that strange, unnatural place where people talk and don't wear masks. I just let him lead me downstairs, then took off in search of something new and exciting, even though we were but a few short minutes from the end of the show.

Unfortunately, all I could find on the ground floor were things that I had already seen – this was well-trodden ground for me. It would probably have been best if I had managed to work past my odd hangups about Studio 3 and stuck with Harry, but c'est la vie. I wound up back in the company of the Fool, but hey - there are far worse things to repeat than his outburst and (possibly) possession in Studio 4. A few more minutes after that, and it was finale time.

My night may have hit a bit of a snag toward the end, but that was all forgotten shortly after the show, when I had the opportunity to speak at length with Sophie, Paul, and David – an ideal trio, given my close encounters with two of them earlier in the night, and the extensive time spent with the third the night before. They were all very friendly and generous with their time, and while I won't recount everything they had to say, there was one thing that struck me as particularly notable. You know that whole idea of masked anonymity? Uh-uh. Nope. Not even a little bit. The actors know EVERYTHING.

My Time at Temple Studios, Part 4

Show #4

Saturday, September 14: 9 pm

While waiting in line for the late show, I couldn't stop thinking about the Grocer. I'm a sucker for metatextual horror, so a story about a man who possesses a script outlining his future, which he must obey against his will, draws me like a moth to a flame. I found myself wishing I had found the patience to wait for the 1:1 to end so I could continue his story, and resolved to remedy the situation first thing.

Well, second thing, actually. First, I needed to lead Shawn to Romola, because he insisted that he was incapable of finding her on his own, and I really wanted to be able to talk about her. So straight out of the lift, I led him to the saloon, where she was talking to the barman. This time, she was played by Katie Lusby, and the prospect of seeing a third version of Romola was a very enticing one – but we had a semi-unspoken agreement to never follow the same character at the same time, so I left. Besides, I had a Grocer to catch.

I found the Grocer (Julian Stolzenberg, same as the previous show) in his store, polishing cans of peas. It wasn't long before Romola (with Shawn in tow) wandered in, which threw me for a loop. This didn't happen before – we went straight from the saloon to the gates. But no matter – I get to follow the grocer and see a new Romola scene. I'm a happy guy.

Shortly thereafter, I became slightly less happy. Badlands Jack came in and tried to steal the script, and I realized that I was at the exact point I had come in a couple of hours earlier, with the same actor playing the role. It was all going to be a repeat. But I still wanted to see how it continued, so I stuck around. When he brought me to the drugstore, I was pleased to see that Sophie Bortolussi was playing Drugstore Girl. I've been a fan of her since Sleep No More, where she played the definitive Lady Macbeth, so I was quite excited to see her. I made the decision that I was going to do a full loop with her that show, but not just yet – it was still Grocer time.

Soon we reached the 1:1, and this time he took me. It was, like so many of them, suitably horrifying and devastating. Afterward, however, when he sent me back out into the store, he didn't follow me, instead remaining in the locked back room. All of that repeating, and I wound up leaving him at essentially the same spot. At least I got the 1:1 out of it.

I wasn't ready to return to the Drugstore Girl yet, as I wanted to catch her loop in order, starting at the reset, so I wandered back around through the trailer park. At this point, the hoedown was in full swing, and Dwayne (Oliver Hornsby-Sayer) and Mary (Kate Jackson) were getting it on against the window. Having seen the scene from inside, I stuck around with them, then followed Mary to the woods, where she stripped to a negligee and did a tragic dance of contrition. This introduced a major wrinkle to how I viewed the murders. Before, they seemed almost abstract – both the victims and the murderers were pawns, and I viewed them from the perspective of the manipulators, appreciating the machinations that brought them to that point. Now, suddenly, they were people, and I no longer wanted the story to play out the way I knew it had to. When Mary and William (Paul Zivkovich) reunited, I felt a flood of relief. When they danced in the saloon to Faye's rendition of “Walking in the Sand,” I was overwhelmed by the beauty and tenderness of it.

Then I remembered where things were going. As William picked Mary up and carried her to the stairs leading to the desert, the song suddenly felt like a dirge, and as I followed them, I was part of a funeral procession. The murder itself stands in stark contrast to Wendy's murder of Marshall; where that was harsh and brutal, this was tender and, dare I say it, lyrical. The final moment, as Mary's body slips out of her negligee and disappears into the sand, leaving William with nothing but that scrap of fragile cloth in his hands, is perhaps the most heartwrenching of the show.

I followed William back down to the gates, where he encounters Wendy for the first and only time as the reset music swells. I was contemplating sticking with him instead of moving on to the Drugstore Girl, but when Mary showed up alive and well, the spell was broken, and I felt free to return to the drugstore.

Sophie's Drugstore Girl is quite different from Miranda's. She feels much younger and more energetic, even sprightly. Following her story is. . . well, not like following a story at all, really. She doesn't really have a real narrative arc, and, outside of a left-field twist at the end of her loop, doesn't really change at all. Instead, a loop with the Drugstore Girl is like hanging out with your fun, charming friend who likes to wander around and show you cool things. She poured me a glass of lemonade that magically turned bright red when it hit the glass. She introduced me to the “Bulldog” number, which I love, despite my general disdain for Grease, Bye Bye Birdie, and similar. Admittedly, my opinion may have been swayed by the fact that the performance featured my three favorite ladies (Sophie, Sonya Cullingford as Faye, and Kirsty Arnold as Andrea) all in one place. She even roller skated around the town. That last bit turned out to be a little dangerous – while toying with the gatekeeper, she nearly took a tumble, and only avoided it by catching my arm – very nearly pulling me down in the process.

This is not to say that she's clumsy – in fact, one of the things I remember most is how incredibly smoothly she could move, like a cat. I never got a sense for that at Sleep No More, because the choreography for Lady Macbeth tended to be a lot more aggressive and herky-jerky, but as the Drugstore Girl, Sophie was inhumanly fluid. At one point, she leapt on to the counter only a couple of feet from me, and I couldn't even hear her land. I was, and am, in awe. All in all, hanging out with Drugstore Girl was really all just a fun, low-pressure time.

But then it came to an end. The grocer arrived, and led her to her death at the hands of. . . I don't even know what. Poison? A magic phone call? At least she died laughing. This was also the scene that really sold me on Julian's grocer, even more so than the 1:1. I could feel the tension he brought to the room even before I turned and saw him, and it was his quiet desperation and sheer misery that tipped the moment from horrifying to tragic.

Of course, no one stays dead for long at The Drowned Man, and come the reset, Drugstore Girl was revived with a simple “Wake up, sleepyhead” from Harry Greener (James Sobol Kelly). She spent the next chunk of time in, essentially, housekeeping mode, moving props and costume pieces around for the new loop. Sophie played this portion of the loop as a sort of zombie, moving silently and simply around the set, and even walking backwards at times, as if living out pre-programmed commands. I didn't make the connection at the time, but it was remarkably similar to how Harry responded to the Gatekeeper reviving him in Show #3. Is it possible that he died out on the street, and the Gatekeeper brought him back to life, rather than just waking him up? But back to Drugstore Girl - it was suprisingly difficult to watch her - a pale shadow of her former self wandering around, a body without a soul. Finally, her work done, she sprung to life mid-stride with a literal snap of her fingers. Drugstore Girl was restored, and I could move on.

The very next character I came across was Faye, who I had seen almost nothing of outside of the large group scenes. That was a strong argument for taking up with her. The fact that Sonya Cullingford was playing her was a plus, because she's terrific, but also a minus, since I had spent a decent chunk of time with her as Romola, including a 1:1, just a few hours earlier – and it might seem weird to her if I showed up again so soon. Still, that's two points for and only one against, so off I went.

Faye's story is essentially a parade of rejection. No matter what she does, in the end, no one wants what she has to offer. Even her great triumph at the audition is tinged with rejection (she gets A part, not THE part). She lacks the supernatural creepiness or mythical overtones of some of the other stories, but there's something to be said for the power of simple, human pain – not to mention the mention the fascinating tragedy of watching Faye dig her hole even deeper by trying to mimic the game-playing and manipulation she caught a glimpse of inside the studio (I may be stretching a bit on that last point, but I feel like that's part of what's going on). For me, the enduring image of Sonya's Faye is just before “Bulldog”, when she's on stage, in her green dress and black leather jacket, looking up at Stanford's voice coming out of the speakers. There's so much hope and excitement in that moment, that when I saw her later in her motel room, chugging booze straight from the bottle, or in the saloon, singing “Walking in the Sand,” it was hard to believe I was looking at the same person.

On a side note, vis-a-vis the aftermath of Faye's dance in the desert: running at full speed on sand is really difficult.

This being the third loop of the night, the story was cut short so that we could transition into the finale. On the previous nights, these truncated third loops ended with characters essentially just abandoning their stories to go watch the final murder, but Faye was in such a state at that point that it would be hard to pull it off – so I got to see something entirely unexpected: A happy ending. After Faye completed her devastating rendition of “Walking in the Sand,” her father, Harry, showed up to invite her to the Temple Studio's wrap party. They rushed down the stairs to the finale, and I stuck close to their heels, listening to them excitedly babble on to each other about all of the famous movie stars that would be there. Shallow, perhaps, but it felt wonderful to see them both smiling.

Once we reached Studio 2, Faye looked back and grabbed my hand, then pulled me in and held me during the murder, just as Andrea had at my first show. Afterward, though, she didn't immediately drop me off somewhere to watch the final number – she dragged me on stage, where we danced. Or, more accurately, she danced, and I moved around with something vaguely (very vaguely) approximating rhythm. When she raised my hand above our heads, it took two attempts for me to realize I was supposed to twirl. At least all of the other characters were in the process of joining us on stage, so presumably very few, if any, people were actually watching me. A few moments later, she dropped me off at the edge of the stage with a warm “enjoy the show,” and our time together was finished. She didn't come back for me, like Andrea had – perhaps she prefers to spread the love around, or perhaps I scared her off with my atrocious performance as a dance partner. Either way, it left me with the opportunity to stop off at the murder pools again on my way out, which was already starting to feel like an integral part of the show for me.

My Time at Temple Studios, Part 3

Show #3 

Saturday, September 14: 5 pm

All through the day, I was replaying the first two shows in my head, and one thought kept popping up: “Hey, remember how you were going to follow Stanford way back during that first loop, and you didn't? Yeah. You should do something about that.” Not to mention his connection to Romola, which made him all the more fascinating. I had to see just what kind of monster he really was. Thus was born my plan: I would exit in the basement and latch on to Stanford at the first opportunity. I wasn't sure where he would be, but I knew it wouldn't be too long before the initiation, and I could grab him then.

We queued up early, around 4:25, and were the first ones through the red shutters, but somehow, still wound up behind a young couple in the lift queue. One member of said couple looked awfully familiar, and after several minutes, I concluded that she looked an awful lot like the Drugstore Girl from the end of the previous night (Miranda Mac Letten). Before I could ask her, though, we were sent into the maze. As I had done during the first show, I made sure I was the last one on the lift, but I stood too far to the side. The lift operator released just three people into the basement, and I was not one of them. Stymied! Once I was let outside the town, I made a beeline for the first stairwell I could find and booked it down to the basement. There, I found Stanford (Sam Booth, as usual) standing in the room with the checkerboard floor, staring motionless at the stage where I had first seen him. There were three other people in the room – the lucky few who got off first, including Miranda and her companion. Suddenly, Stanford grabbed the third person's hand and took her off to a 1:1. Ah, if only I had gotten there sooner. Still, my plan was not to get a 1:1, it was to see Stanford's loop - so I waited around for the initiation, hoping to follow him after that.

The next scene after the initiation was the scene with Romola, played by Sonya Cullingford - who I immediately rejected, mentally. All wrong for Romola. Too tall. Too pretty. But she played the part with such delicacy, and more importantly, such fragility, that by the end of the scene, I had completely reversed my opinion. Over the course of five minutes, she went from an also-ran to the ideal incarnation.

Then came the rolling desk dance, another of my favorite bits (I have many), where I saw that the purpose of Romola's package and the source of the magic goblet in the orgy were one and the same. Stanford took a sip from the goblet, set it back on the table, and collapsed on the floor. Seemingly in great pain, he motioned me over and I leaned down, slightly, to hear what he had to say – instead of talking, though, he grabbed the back of my head and pulled me sharply to the ground. Then he spoke.

“You are the camera. Record everything. I'm going to blow this whole thing sky high.” Each word was spat out as if it took every ounce of strength in him. I was already doing my best to comply. After he let me go, Alice and the PA came in and pulled him into his motorized wheelchair, and the second they let him go, the Pink Room music started up (love the timing of that moment). The two of us wound up leaving the orgy quite a bit early (no big deal, this was my fifth time), on account of Stanford needing to drive his wheelchair ever. . . . . . so. . . . . . . . slowly. . . . . . into the hall in order to catch Wendy and Andrea on their way out. Moments later, Lila stumbled past with her entourage of white masks, disappearing into another room. Then: heartbreak. Stanford motioned for me to follow Lila. I had no idea what to do. I didn't want to disobey him (this is not a man you want to let down), but I also didn't want to leave him. I shot him a quizzical look and he motioned again, more emphatically. Broken inside, I did as I was told. So much for my Stanford loop. It's you and me now, Lila.

Of course as any of you who have seen the “Lila's Discovery” scene can attest, Stanford and I were reunited almost immediately. I suppose he was trying to give me a better show, as the scene is much better when seen from her perspective. He also may have remembered our awkward hallway encounter the night before, and figured I didn't need to see it again (or didn't need to get in his way again). Either way, I'm very grateful that he directed me the way he did, because that scene is probably the creepiest in the whole show, and I'm thrilled to death that I got to see the whole thing.

I still wasn't entirely sure if he was trying to ditch me or not, but then he held the door for me as we left

and shut it right behind me. Woo-hoo, back on Team Stanford. He grabbed my arm and ran me down the hallway, into a small room at the end, where I experienced his second 1:1. Shortly after that came the reset, and his demeanor changed significantly. The fire that had been steadily growing in him ever since the initiation (growing so steadily that I didn't even recognize it until it was suddenly gone) was replaced by a calmer, more dignified poise. He was all business, and seemed less aware of the audience (including, thankfully, the woman who walked right up to him and asked him what his name was. Seriously?). If one were to experience his loop from the chronological start, ending with the 1:1, that sense of building momentum would surely be incredible. As it was, these early scenes were mostly a little less compelling than what I had already seen, although I would like to make special mention of the time I spent sitting with him in the movie theater, watching Wendy undress in the Doctor's office. It was skeezy enough that I could actually feel my skin crawl.

Finally, we came full circle, but this time, he took me in for that first 1:1 that I had missed an hour earlier. Then came the initiation. I stuck around to see it again, because I didn't want to bail on Stanford immediately after the 1:1 – but I stood at the back of the crowd, so newcomers could get a better view. Nonetheless, he managed to find me during the scene and fix me with an incredibly intense, evil sneer – a fitting final image for our time together.  I gave him a slow, tiny nod and took my leave.

I walked away from Stanford's loop feeling much more sympathetic toward him than I expected. Going in, I assumed he was the evil mastermind behind everything, but now, I don't think he has any more control than anyone else. Perhaps Romola was wrong about him, or perhaps he did hurt her, but now regrets it. Those of you in the spoiler group know where this train of thought eventually took me.

I figured I should try to find someone a little more low-key, and decided to see what the seamstress was all about. I found her (played by Kate Jackson) in Studio 5, just as Romola was entering. I made a point to shut out what was happening with Romola (harder than it sounds) and focus on the seamstress, and soon I was helping her carry costumes back to her office and watching her design Romola's car crash makeup. Romola rejoined us a moment later, and I was again struck by how spectacular Sonya is in the role. There was no way I was willing to follow the same character two shows in a row, though, and I had already committed to the seamstress. Despite these facts, I still had to fight the urge to follow her out.

Not long after that, the seamstress pulled me into the wig room for another creepy-yet-touching 1:1. Unfortunately, when we were finished, she didn't follow me back out of the room. I was alone, and Operation: Follow the Seamstress had failed. At least I got the great 1:1 out of it.

I headed into town and once again stumbled across Romola. She was in the car, dead. Alone. That was the final straw. She picked some guy to protect her, took him into the car with her, and he abandoned her? That bastard! My resolve was broken. I couldn't leave her like that, with no one around. I waited outside the car for her to wake up, and from there, I picked Romola's story back up from only a few moments before I had left it the last time. This was the first time that I really noticed how malleable the action in the show is – Romola's interactions (or lack thereof) with the townspeople played out differently from the previous show. In particular, I saw the brief encounter with Miguel occur both in the trailer park and in the woods. Soon we were at the trailer, where the first Romola had rejected me. Not this time, though – She looked right at me, reached out her hand, and said, “Mommy?”

I didn't get it. But I wasn't going to argue. Once the 1:1 got underway, I realized she was actually calling me “Bobby,” which made (slightly) more sense. I can't really say which of Romola's 1:1's hit me harder. The one in the motel office was more intense, and had the force of her entire story behind it. This one felt more standalone, but it was also so much more intimate – and the look on her face when she handed me the shot of whisky, an impossible combination of terror, hope, and relief, haunts me to this day.

After that, I watched the remainder of the scenes I had missed the first time around. To his credit, the guy who had abandoned her earlier came back when she was starting up a new page in her notebook and tried to hand her the old page, as if to help her remember. Misguided, but at least it was something. When she finally left to see the barman, bringing things back to the start of my first Romola loop during show #2, I silently said my goodbyes and stuck around to explore her trailer, which was a heartbreaking mess of gossip magazine cutouts and paranoid (or perhaps simply self-aware) scribbled notes.

After a bit of aimless wandering, I found myself in the grocer (Julian Stolzenberg)'s store. Nothing much seemed to be happening at first, but then Badlands Jack showed up to scuffle with him over a sheaf of papers. After he left, I scooped them up and started to read – and what I saw turned my opinion around completely. The papers were a script, and the script described all of the Grocer's interactions with the townspeople, including the one I had just witnessed. All of a sudden, this boring fellow became unbearably fascinating. He took the script from me and started rehearsing a scene, then went to the drugstore to borrow some napkins, delivering all of the lines he had prepared. We returned to the Grocery, where he exploded into a rage, slamming the script against the counter. So he's not happy about following the script? I like where this is going. After a brief return to the drugstore, however, he disappeared into a locked room behind the counter with another white mask. Disappointing, but hey – she was there first. Not being one to wait around an empty room, I left, vowing to return.

The next person I saw was Harry Greener (James Sobol Kelly), drunk, stumbling through town and carrying a sign. Harry was my favorite character from Day of the Locust, so I was pleased to have finally found him. I watched him pass out near the gates, and that was pretty much the last I saw of Harry as a character. The gatekeeper shined a light on him, and Harry woke up. . . sort of. He was like a zombie, blank-faced, slow moving, and obedient. The gatekeeper directed him to change into a white suit and descend into the bowels of Temple Studios. . . and poor Harry was gone. I followed him down until it was clear that he was heading to the bar in studio 3, at which point I was torn – I wanted to stick with Harry, but I wasn't ready to go back to the bar. With a heavy heart, I left him to his fate and returned to the town.

When I got back upstairs, the hoedown was well underway, and I knew I didn't have much time left; certainly not enough to really delve into a character. Rather than latch on to someone new for a few brief moments, I wandered the town, taking the opportunity to briefly examine some of the shops that I had largely ignored up to that point. In the end, I found myself back in the drugstore, watching a different Drugstore Girl (Margarita Zafrilla Olayo, my Dust Witch from the second show) go through the same events that I had ended the previous night on. It was an inauspicious conclusion to an otherwise spectacular show.

However, being left to my own devices at/after the finale, I noticed for the first time that Wendy, Marshall, William, and Mary remained in their pools on stage, collapsed and motionless, as we shuffled out past them.  It was a striking contrast to the mood of the room as whole, and hit me very hard.  Thus began a habit that I maintained for the rest of the shows: Before exiting to the bar, I would stop at each pool and silently pay my respects to those who suffered so that we might drink and be merry.   

After the finale, walking back into Studio 3, I found myself right behind Miranda and her companion again. I realized that I still wasn't 100% sure it was her, but with the noise and the chaos, I decided against bothering them. Later still, however, when I exited the building and prepared to re-queue for the late show, they were there again, standing against the wall. This time, I decided to talk to her. After she confirmed her identity, I explained that I recognized her because I had seen her as the Drugstore Girl the night before. She studied my face for half of a second, then exclaimed, “That's right!  I was going to do the walkout with you but David stole you from me! I was so mad!”

Hah.

My Time at Temple Studios, Part 2

Show #2

Friday, September 13: 9 pm

Turns out there were tickets available for the late show, so I went ahead and bought one, bringing my total count to six. While I re-queued, Shawn wandered off to find somewhere to get drunk, since he already felt like five would be two too many.

This time, I got on the lift first, so that I would be dropped off outside of the studio. I still couldn't believe that after three hours of The Drowned Man, I hadn't even gotten as far as the gates. Beyond that, I wasn't sure what to do. I knew a lot of people said Romola was great, but I also thought I might be better off just sticking with the first person I saw. By the time I stepped out into the town, I had settled on the latter.

The first person I saw turned out to be a tiny girl in glasses (Katie Mcguinness), wandering through the trailer park, looking confused. I followed her to the bar, where she asked the barman how to get to Temple Studios, showing him her pass for emphasis. The name on the pass? Romola Martin.

You see this? This is my cake. Not only do I have it, but I'm eating it too.

The next thing I know, I'm following Romola back into the studios. So much for exploring outside the gates – but whatever. Romola. She puttered about the secretary's office (that is to say, her office) for a bit, signing a couple of letters and handing one to me without looking. Then the gatekeeper showed up and handed her a package – and the fun really began.

From that moment forward, Romola's story became a straight descent into a nightmare. Every room she visited, every person she met, was more horrifying than the last. By the time the doctor told her she had been in a car accident, even though there had been no real accident (or so I thought), I was nearly in a state of full-fledged sympathetic panic. I wanted nothing more than to scoop poor, tiny Romola up in my arms and escape out the emergency exit with her. As much as I loved what I saw during the early show, nothing there prepared me for how invested I was in her story. We had moved to a whole other level.

Back in the town, Romola had that classic Punchdrunk moment where she realized, to her horror, that she was being pursued by a mass of silent specters (us). But there was one that she wasn't afraid of (me). She grabbed my hand and we ran into the motel office, where I barricaded the door while she searched for the key. At least I could do this one, small thing to protect her. As before, I'll skip over the rest of this 1:1, but I left the office even more determined to save her from the man whose name she had unknowingly been writing all night. But it was not to be. She took me to a car sitting just outside the studio gates. She tried to drive us to safety, but as her hand approached the ignition, she seemed to drift off. Snapping awake, she pleaded with me not to let her fall asleep. She tried to start the car again, drifted off again, and I shook her awake. Then it happened again. And again. Each time, it was harder to wake her up, until finally, she was gone, and the radio sprang to life, announcing her death. I don't know how long I sat in the car after that, wanting on the one hand to go find a new character and unable on the other to make myself leave her.

Eventually, she woke up and climbed into the back seat, hiding from the gatekeeper as he searched the car. She wandered back to the trailer park, but things were different now. I had failed her, and she had forgotten me. When she disappeared into Dwayne's trailer with another white mask, I knew it was finally time to move on. My next destination: the last floor I had not yet visited. Top floor, the desert.

The desert is, all things being equal, the creepiest area of the building. It's dark, there's not a lot of movement, and most of all, it's vast. It isn't subdivided into rooms, there are almost no doors and very few walls with which to orient yourself. You just have to take it all in. I love it. The first thing I saw when I arrived was the funeral setup, fully attended by scarecrows/strawmen. After looking everything over, I moved on – but a few seconds later, when I looked back, one of the seats was empty. Had it been empty the whole time, and I just didn't notice?

Deeper in the desert, I found a small chapel, and inside, the ever-elusive Dust Witch (Margarita Zafrilla Olayo). During my time with her, she didn't do much – but every action she took had a weight to it, and the entire space was infused with her presence. There were a couple of other white masks in there when I arrived, but they soon wandered off, presumably bored with the lack of action. So much the better.

My alone time with the Dust Witch didn't last long, however, as she left the chapel to attend to Miguel and his swarm of eager followers. After their scene together, she headed off into the desert, and I was shocked to see that not a single person (other than me) was following. Was Miguel really that much more interesting? Not that I'm complaining; the fewer white masks hanging around, the happier I am. In this case, it was especially fortuitous, because she headed straight for a nearly invisible door and pulled me in for a 1:1, which, while it couldn't match the emotional impact of Romola's, was still my most exciting, fascinating, and frightening experience at the show to that point. When it was over, she sent me back out to the desert, and I turned to see if she was coming as well, so that I could continue her loop. Instead, she looked at me, put her hand to her chest, and bowed slightly, which I found tremendously comforting. I returned the gesture, and she disappeared behind the wall.

I wound up with Alice (Emily Mytton, as usual) next, although I don't recall where I found her or why I decided to go with her. She turned out to be the perfect choice after the emotionally draining Romola loop and my languid but edgy Dust Witch experience, because she introduced me to an aspect of the show that I had only seen momentary glimmers of before: humor. Alice is HILARIOUS. From the silly things she says to the way she toys with unsuspecting audience members to the general amusement she seems to take in everything that she does, every moment spent with Emily's Alice is a blast.

I did have a brief moment of panic when, very shortly after I started following her, she took my hand and told me she was going to show me Temple Studios' greatest achievement, and took me to see the murder. The show couldn't be over already, could it? Not so soon! But then, the murder was sparsely attended, and Stanford didn't call “cut,” and I realized there was still a loop to go. Phew. Crisis averted.

Other than that, the most memorable thing that happened with Alice was an unplanned event – we were walking back toward the lower levels of the studio, and passing through the doctor's office, which was empty save for a single white mask (a younger girl). A couple of pairs of scissors were laid out on the overhead projector, casting shadows on the wall, and the girl was looking through some notes on the table right next to it. As we passed, Alice snatched the scissors up, making a horrible clattering sound. The girl, who must not have seen us come in, screamed and flung her hands in the air, knocking her mask clean off of her head. Alice paid her no mind until we reached the door, at which point she turned back to the girl and said “thank you,” in that wonderfully condescending tone of hers.

Alas, my time with Alice also included my first instance of audience-related frustration, as I got caught in the crowd after Frankie's audition in Studio 5, and by the time I make it down to the basement, Alice is nowhere to be seen. There's a lot of talk out there about not crowding actors, which is totally reasonable in stationary scenes, but I think when you're traveling, those who are at the front of the pack have an obligation to keep as close as possible. Otherwise, everyone else runs the risk of losing their character. Fortunately, I knew that we were heading for the initiation (since Alice told Frankie they were going to meet Mr. Stanford), so I knew if I just followed Frankie for a few minutes, I would find her again – but after the initiation was over, she disappeared behind a locked door (I've since heard that this is where her 1:1 happens, but she didn't take anyone), and I knew it was time to move on.

At this point, I realized that I had still only barely scratched the surface of the town, so I headed back there, just in time for the hoedown – which was full of characters I was completely unfamiliar with. My eye was immediately drawn to a cute redhead in cowboy boots and a red and white checked shirt (Miranda Mac Letten), who I later learned was the Drugstore Girl. I decided that when the hoedown ended, I would follow her out. This isn't how I make all of my decisions, incidentally, but when presented with a room full of cyphers, with no other reason to pick one over the other, why not?

Miranda's Drugstore Girl reminds me very much of the classic boxcar diner waitress: kind of tired and frazzled, but with a sort of resigned warmth. It's an old archetype, and it makes her a very comforting presence to spend time with. It also adds to the impact when you see her youthful energy start to reassert itself anytime Andy (or his jacket) is around. I spent the rest of the night hanging out in the drugstore, and she poured me a lemonade and shared a couple of Jelly Babies with me. I knew we were getting close to the end, and I started to wonder if/hope she was going to take me to the murder and do the walkout with me. We certainly seemed to have developed a rapport. Then came Badlands Jack (David Essing).

Jack had been to the drugstore earlier, and I really didn't know anything about him, other than he seemed like kind of a dick. This time, he seemed to have softened a bit, and the Drugstore Girl seemed more tolerant of him as well. He retrieved a couple of roses from behind the counter and did a bit of business with her, after which they each took one, and I knew the moment was coming. Would she pick me?

As it turned out, she never got the chance, because almost immediately, Badlands Jack locked eyes with me and grabbed my hand. I was, as usual, thrilled to be selected for any special treatment by an actor, but there was a part of me that was left standing there in shock, stammering, “but. . . but. . . Drugstore Girl. . . .” Still, no guarantee that she would have picked me anyway.

Watching the murder with Jack was a bit more intense than with Andrea. Instead of holding my shoulders as she had done (and Alice had done earlier in the night), he wrapped his arms around my torso, and every time Wendy stabbed Marshall, instead of squeezing me, he thrust his hands into my gut, as if stabbing me as well. It was borderline invasive, I guess, but tremendously effective.  Kudos to David Essing for that extra twist.

Then there was the finale, a drink in the bar, and finally I stumbled back to the hotel, exhausted but itching to go again.

Next time: I actually follow one of the guys for a change.

My Time at Temple Studios, Part 1

This is the first in a series of posts describing my experience at The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable, an immersive theater production from Punchdrunk.  Over a long weekend in September, I flew to London and saw the show six times.  Ever since, I have been able to think about little else.  For those unfamiliar with The Drowned Man (or its sister production, Sleep No More), here is the basic concept:

Each show takes place within an expansive set, filling an entire building and spread across several floors. Characters move freely about this space, coming and going and interacting in various configurations. Audience members are given masks and instructed to remain silent, then turned loose into the set, free to move about wherever and whenever they see fit, follow or ignore characters, and generally find their own version of the story.  During each 3-hour performance, events repeat nearly three times, allowing for multiple perspectives within a single show.  Performances are largely dance-based, and highly cinematic lighting and sound effects are incorporated into nearly every inch of the space.  This all sounds terribly academic, but as you will see, the effect is anything but.

For anyone concerned about such things, Spoilers HO!

Show #1

Friday, September 13: 5 pm

I wasn't planning to see the show that night. It was a mere three hours after my plane from Denver to London had landed, and one hour until showtime. I had originally left the evening deliberately empty for fear of jet lag. Besides, three shows in a row of Sleep No More had proven to be plenty for me in the past, and I had four scheduled for the following nights. Surely that would be plenty. But as my trip loomed closer, and I read more and more reviews, I started to wonder. Then I wondered some more. Eventually, I wondered a bit too much, and bought a fifth ticket, for the early Friday show. My friend and traveling companion, Shawn, was less than thrilled with me. He already thought that four trips to Temple Studios was too much, but it would be a cold day in hell before he'd let me see it first.  So he booked a fifth ticket as well.

I had a rough idea of what to expect, but there was so much information out there that I couldn't even begin to form it into something coherent. The closest thing I had to a plan was that I wanted to see the PA, who I knew wore a leopard print dress and who was, apparently, a favorite of many fans. Beyond that. . . well, I'd just see where the night took me. First of all, though, I needed it to take me inside. An hour is a long time to wait.

Finally, the red shutters were pulled open and I stepped into a rather uninspiring entryway. Undeterred, I snagged my ticket from the box office, laughed at the poor fools in the coat check line, ran forward to. . . another line. Fortunately, this wait was not nearly as long, and soon I was feeling my way through a dark maze, feeling a Pavlovian twinge of excitement, programmed into my by the corresponding maze at the Mckittrick. A few more turns and I found myself in a holding area, mask in hand, waiting to be let into the elevator (excuse me, “lift”). As we entered, I made a point to get on last, hoping this would mean I would be first out. I wanted to take full advantage of “magic hour,” that first period of the show before everyone is let in, and you don't have to worry about the crowds distracting you.

The elevator stopped in the basement and I charged out. I had no idea where I was going, but damn it, I was going to be the first one there. My destination turned out to be several interesting, but unoccupied rooms. I made a mental note to return to them later (spoiler: I never did find my way back), and charged off again. Where were the actors? I wanted to spend magic hour with a character! Eventually, I found my way into a large room with a black-and-white checkerboard floor. Still no sign of life. I wandered around to a separate portion of the room, where two dummies, a man and a woman were sprawled out on the floor. Turning away from the dummies, I finally found my first character – an old woman in a rubber mask, watching me creepily from the shadows between two pillars.

I approached her, but she took no notice of me. I started to think she wasn't a person at all, but just another mannequin. But every time I managed to almost convince myself of that, my brain started to twist back in the other direction. It was just too dark to tell – until I finally looked down at her legs and saw that she was mounted on wheels. Mannequin it is, then. I headed out to the other hallway, where I finally caught my first glimpse of unmasked life.

It was Frankie (Owen Ridley-Demonick), standing under a light as if waiting for someone. As soon as I approached, he started to move, and led me right back to the checkerboard room. This time, though, it wasn't empty. Mr. Stanford (Sam Booth) stood on a small stage, motionless. We were soon joined by three people in rubber masks, and Frankie's initiation began. I will try to refrain from describing the usual details of major scenes like this, since many others have already done so, but suffice it to say, it was a hell of an introduction. I was instantly fascinated by Stanford, and decided to stick with him – but then, after he cast her as the Grandmother, Dolores (I'm ashamed say I'm not sure who played her) threw a fit and started ripping her suit off. Creepy bald guy or angry stripping woman? Gah. Weak. So weak.

I followed Dolores upstairs to her bedroom, where the PA (Fania Grigoriou) showed up to help her change. Right off the bat, she was intimidating as all hell. Poised, aloof, she didn't look down on people so much as look through them. I almost switched over to her at that moment, but my experience thus far had already been pretty scattered, and I wanted to actually stick with a character for a while.

Eventually Dolores led me back downstairs to the checkerboard room, and as we approached, I could hear the sounds of “The Pink Room,” and, as a fan of Twin Peaks, I knew what that implied: drug-fueled sex orgy. When we got inside, several characters were already engaged in some sort of sexy line dance, and I wound up standing right next to Andrea (Kirsty Arnold), who immediately took my breath away. She locked eyes with me, swaying back and forth, for what was surely just a couple of seconds but felt like minutes. I will never forget that look.

The orgy that followed was not super-impressive, feeling kind of tame in comparison to the Sleep No More witches' rave, but I did really like the bit of sleight of hand, where Marshall and Dolores disappeared underneath the other actors, only to emerge from another room moments later. Afterward, everyone left except for Dolores and Alice (Emily Mytton), and we were reunited with the old lady mannequin.

A thousand words in and I'm only just getting to the first reset, so let's fast forward again. I stuck with Dolores through the reset and into the first portion of the next loop, until she got dressed for the initiation. Of the scenes that I'm skipping over, I would like to make special mention of Dolores and Marshall's dance on the ice floes to “Past, Present, and Future,” which is so fun and joyous that you can easily forget that it's an adulterous liaison. When I did finally leave Dolores, I was faced with a choice – do I move to the PA, who I originally wanted to follow, but who would also repeat a lot of what I had just seen, or do I wander off in search of something new? I settled on the PA, reasoning that I still had several shows to see the rest of the building. This turned out to be a very good choice, as that show was the only one where Fania played the PA, and it would have been a terrible shame to miss it.

If I were to sum up the PA's story in one word, it would be “drugs.” Taking drugs, giving drugs, making drugs, drug druggy drug drug drugs. It certainly made a lot of other characters' actions make a lot more sense, particularly at the line-dance/orgy, where I arrived early enough this time to see that pretty much everyone there actually was in a drug-induced stupor, all at the hands of the PA. After the orgy, as I followed her down a long, dark hallway, she stopped and turned back to me. She stared directly at me for a long, long time. At least, I thought so – it was dark enough to keep me from being 100% certain where her eyes were directed. I tried to stare back non-confrontationally, thinking that maybe this was going to be a 1:1 – but she never reached out her hand. The stalemate was resolved by my jumping six feet in the air when I realized that she was actually staring at Stanford, who had been slowly sliding along the wall behind me for at least a couple of minutes. Creepy bald guy, indeed.

After that, we headed to her office, where she sat down at the desk and re-applied her lipstick. As she finished, she caught my eye in her compact mirror. After the hallway incident, I wasn't sure how to take this, and when she stood and approached me, I took a step backward. She pressed on, I stepped back again, and suddenly I found myself trapped in a corner of the room, where she grabbed my shoulders and planted her mouth on my neck. Have I mentioned how intimidating this woman is? She's less than half my size, but I was kind of terrified of her. The terror didn't last for long, though, because I felt like in that moment, she marked me as her own. After that, we became partners (in crime, I suppose).

Next up was the reset, where she retrieved the old lady costume from Dolores. I followed her down into the basement, and into a small room. Suddenly, she reached behind me, blocking the other white masks from entering, and locked the door. Thus began my first 1:1.

Since this is going to be posted out in the open, rather than the spoiler group, I'll refrain from going into detail about any of the 1:1's I experienced – but when it was finished, my old mannequin buddy was reborn. Then it was back to the PA's office for the start of what was to be the highlight of the show for me. Climbing onto the desk, she retrieved a watch from behind a picture on the wall. She walked back to the edge of the desk, swaying precariously, and reached out her hand for support. I took it and helped her down, and she thanked me by pulling me down into the chair. She placed the watch in my hand and proceeded to perform some sort of ritual over it, chanting and sprinkling some strange seeds. Then she took my other hand and brought me upstairs to a small office just off of Studio 4, where we found a shiny box on a snowy desk. She took the watch from me and placed in in the box, directed me to sprinkle snow onto it, which I did, then closed the box and handed it to me. We returned to Studio 4, where Marshall and Dolores were dancing on the ice again. Holding that box, I was no longer scared of her, I was obedient. I was on Team PA, and I wasn't going to let her down. Soon, the time came for her to take the box and give it to Dolores. We watched Dolores give the watch to Marshall, and finally the PA walked away from me, running her hands across my shoulders in a way that felt like goodbye. I didn't get the message right away, though, and watched her for a few minutes more until she disappeared behind a locked door with another white mask, and I was adrift once more.

I decided I needed a complete change of scenery – there was a whole world outside the gates that I had yet to see! I headed up to the first floor (to use the european numbering), intending to see what lay beyond the Doctor's office, which was as far as I had been. As soon as I got there, however, who should I see but Andrea, walking right back toward me. You remember, Andrea who took my breath away? Decision time – do I go check out the rest of the world, or do I follow the – ah, who am I kidding. Of course I followed the pretty girl.

She took me down to the dressing room, where she changed into a sort of western outfit. This (changing outfits) turned out to be sort of a theme for the rest of the night. A dapper man in a suit showed up (Conrad, although I don't know who played him), and we took off down an unfamiliar hallway, which led right to Studio 3. The bar. That place where people talk and don't wear masks. A little background: I don't feel comfortable going to the bar during Punchdrunk shows. When I'm inside that world, I don't want to hear people who aren't actors talking, and I don't want to take my mask off (unless it's in a 1:1). My first time at Sleep No More, I stumbled upon the bar by accident, and the woman there congratulated me on finding my way back. All I could do was awkwardly croak out, “I didn't mean to find it” and turn right back around.  But this time, I couldn't turn around. Andrea was in the bar. My character was in that. . . place. There was peanut butter in my chocolate. I had some difficulty processing this, which must have shown on my face, because Conrad stopped to ask me if I was all right.  I think I nodded unconvincingly.

They performed a rather delightful magic trick, which ended with Andrea in her underwear again, and soon we returned to the masked world of Temple Studios. I really can't tell you how much of a relief it was for me to put my mask back on. Like a great weight was lifted from my shoulders.

We returned to the dressing room and she changed again, then it was back up to the first floor, where I discovered that Studio 5 had magically appeared off of the long hall to the doctor's office. I swear it wasn't there before. Andrea took part in the Infidelity Ballet, which is another of my favorite bits (really, everything in Studio 5 is golden), and it was back to the dressing room, where she changed costumes. Again. At this point, I had seen her in her underwear enough times that I was starting to feel self-conscious about it. Each time it happened, I wound up standing a little farther back, and spending a little more time glancing around the room.

The next few bits were not particularly notable. She took me downstairs to my THIRD orgy of the night. She comforted Wendy. Eventually, she grabbed a couple of roses and got that look in her eye (no, not THAT look. The 1:1 look). She gave me one of the roses and took my hand. It wasn't for a 1:1, though. Instead, she brought me to Studio 2 to watch Wendy murder Marshall, holding my shoulders and squeezing me with each thrust of the knife. The director called cut.  Andrea told me to throw my rose and brought me to the stage to watch the finale dance, planting me between two trees and telling me not to move. Watching the cast assemble on stage was the first time I realized the true scope of the show, and just how little of it I had seen. In addition to the three characters I had followed, and the ten or so I had briefly encountered without learning much about, there were better than a dozen that I had never seen before! They were a complete mystery to me.

The finale was, in a word, fantastic. Some of the early reviews claimed that it was a letdown, but either they changed it after the previews or those reviewers are stark raving mad, because I can't imagine a better way to wrap things up. It's not just a big, splashy number that brings everyone together, but also a sort of emotional rollercoaster all on its own (even more so once I learned more about the characters). Afterward, Andrea returned and took me to Studio 3, where she danced with me for a few moments, pulled off my mask, and told me I was amazing.

I was on an incredible adrenaline high. I was overwhelmed, in love with everything around me. I never wanted to leave that building. Shawn and I pulled up a table and compared notes – he was raving about a mysterious man known only as “moustache guy,” who we later identified as David Essing's Claude, and who had instructed Shawn to “keep an eye on that clown,” leading to an incredibly terrifying experience that he would only hint about.

This was the point where panic began to set in. I had made a terrible, terrible mistake. Five shows would not be enough. Not even close. I needed ten shows. Fifteen. Maybe twenty. But it was impossible; I would only be in England for a few days. I would have to settle for five.

Or would I? When a staff member came by, not long after that, to kick us out so they could reset, I asked him if there were still tickets available for the late show. . . .