Just over a dozen people stood outside the open garage of Columbia’s Hoot Design Co. on April 10’s dress rehearsal performance of _Frankenstein_. Some drank wine, some snapped pictures, but every person wore a black mask. They faced the garage and watched Frankenstein’s creature get electrocuted and come to life. After the creature, played by Jenny Hipscher, made eye contact with several audience members, it grunted and crawled down from the stage to interact with them. Its stiff, staccato movements became smoother as it got more and more aware of its body.
Behind the audience members of Greenhouse Theatre Project’s _Frankenstein_, a disheveled man, Victor Frankenstein, shouted at his creation. The performance had officially begun.
GTP is a professional theater company that performs and produces both classical and experimental works. In May 2017, the company performed _Dark Creation_, which explored the psyche of _Frankenstein_ author Mary Shelley. This year, GTP decided to honor the novel’s bicentennial anniversary with another Frankenstein-themed play. In this immersive adaptation, there is no ordinary stage; an entire three-story building is used for different scenes. The audience is encouraged to follow the actors, pick up the props and wander around the set.
“Be involved, explore; we want you to take risks and go downstairs and split up from the people you came with,” GTP’s house manager Kristen Thackery told the audience before the performance started. “The experience is totally what you make up of it. Do not sit back, do not relax and immerse yourself in the world of Frankenstein.”
In a traditional theater with one stage and a stationary audience, people generally share the same experience. However, in this immersive play, your experience is determined by which characters you follow or which room you explore. There are sometimes different scenes occurring at once. At one point, the creature wandered around downstairs and outlined its body on a chalkboard while Frankenstein assembled its bride upstairs.
To make sure the audience got the most out of the performance, Thackery worked on crowd control. She walked around with the audience and made sure people were in the right room during key scenes. According to Thackery, GTP’s first immersive production was in 2016 and was a performance of Shakespeare’s _Measure for Measure_.
“It went really well; we learned a lot from it,” Thackery said. “We received a lot of really great feedback from our audience, so we wanted to do another immersive production ever since then.”
Shelley published _Frankenstein_ in 1818, but the 2018 play honoring the best-seller has a more modern tone. The set furniture could come straight from an IKEA catalog. Frankenstein’s creation had conversations with other characters via video as opposed to face-to-face, and some characters’ costumes were adapted to the 21st century.
To Thackery, local theater is important because it connects one community to the rest of the world.
“I think arts are really important in terms of expressing feelings about what’s happening in the world around you,” Thackery said. “I think it’s a great way to get connected to the world around you. It’s a great way to process emotion and feel and explore.”
_Edited by Alexandra Sharp | asharp@themaneater.com_
