The future of theater is immersive. These L.A. artists are creating it in real time

Los Angeles Times

06-05-2025

Throughout the evening on Sunday, I was placed in a foreign jail, joined a folk-rock band for a sing-along uprising that involved a killer bear and ran up multiple times against selfish, greedy taskmasters, once in a comedic production in a jazz club and another time in the back room of a seedy dance space.
A scene from 'That's Jazz Baby!' from immersive team Spies Among Us. 'Our big goal going in was making a simple, understandable, funny piece and hoping everything else fell into place after that,' says Spies Among Us founder Prescott Gadd.
(Chiara Alexa / For The Times)
And it all felt like freedom, 10 minutes at a time.
The Immersive Invitational, now in its fourth year, was presented in collaboration with the LGBT Center and the After Hours Theatre Company, with the support of local group the Immersive Experience Institute. The conceit: Participating companies are given 48 hours to craft a new, 10-minute production and then perform it multiple times on the event's concluding day. Audiences become part of the show — 'immersive theater' denotes the involvement of the ticket buyer, usually by interacting with or following the cast. There's silliness — one production involved a cryogenically frozen Swedish rapper — and the overall tone is one of joviality, the belief that art in the early 21st century should be increasingly interactive and playable.
In Dr3am Logikk's 'Bird Is the Word,' participants were thrown in a jail, playing the part of a rock band that made a racket in a nameless foreign land ruled by authoritarianism.
(Chiara Alexa / For The Times)
Immersive is a broad term. It encompasses everything from large-scale theme park lands — Universal Studios' Epic Universe in Florida, which opens May 22, is seen as perhaps the largest immersive happening of the year — to play-focused wonderlands such as the Sloomoo slime museum. Immersive theater tends to lean more niche, but as more generations increasingly grow up surrounded by games and social media apps that rely on gamification techniques, experimenting with ways to merge art and play is seen as vital.
'[Participants] have agency,' says Aaron Vanek, co-founder of Spectacular Disaster Factory, one of the troupes in the show. 'I think it's an empowering situation when participants are able to not just immersive themselves in a world but actually affect that world and, in today's current situation, just having a little bit of power to make a significant change to a person, a character or a story is extremely enriching.'
At this year's invitational, music was given as a broad topic, but themes often worked their way back toward artistic expression — the emptiness when its taken from us, the messiness when emotions get involved and the power when collaborating with others. The majority of the productions nodded abstractly to world outside the halls of the Los Angeles LGBT Center in Hollywood, seemingly in broad agreement that life for many in 2025 is full of unseen stressors, and yet many also found an uplifting spirit by allowing audience members to join in on the act of creation.
The now annual L.A. Immersive Invitational featured eight, 10-minute theatrical performances, all centered on a theme of music.
(Chiara Alexa / For The Times)
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With the limited time frame, participating theater crews have to quickly establish a place and a sense of purpose, lending the audience, which must immediately contort to their role as actors, a call to action. We are, for instance, to free ourselves from a prison in an unnamed country or find out who killed classical music. The were different levels of interactivity, as one show gave us interview prompts, another had us act as puppeteers of a sort, and elsewhere we were instructed to do some rudimentary bad street dancing. And immersive theater, when it works, breaks down barriers, allowing the act of play to get to know our fellow audience members and explore narratives and emotions with trained actors.
'A season doesn't exist in immersive theater,' says Graham Wetterhahn, the founding artistic director of After Hours, noting that many productions have short runs. They can often sell out quickly. The L.A. Immersive Invitational is a way, hopefully, to expose audiences to various troupes to expand their reach.
I had to literally be kicked out of 'Stringed Instruments,' from Spectacular Disaster Factory, as the show appeared to continue long after its final beat. Tonally, it differed from much at the Immersive Invitational, striking a demented, borderline-horror feel as audiences explored the dressing room of an electronic music dance club. There, two bottle girls sat before makeup mirrors. Our only instruction was to look for strings with brightly colored paper dots attached, and these were found after a minute or two on the arms of the actors.
'Stringed Instruments' from Spectacular Disaster Factory took on an eerie tone, in which audiences controlled actors as if they were puppets.
(Chiara Alexa / For The Times)
The scantily clad performers spoke in monotone — 'lipstick,' 'hairbrush,' 'pencil' — as the audience took turns puppeteering their arms around their desks. Occasionally, a superior would come in and remind them and us of the minutes till opening. It was affecting. We were at once attempting to help the actors in their request but unable to free them from the grips from the occupation that was leaving them dead-eyed. It leant the audience a discerning sense of agency, as we could control the show but only to a point.
A diary of one of the actors — splayed open on the desk — read that she was grieving the loss of her future. 'Stringed Instruments' was a work that left the audience without a closing moment of wish fulfillment. There was no uprising, no quitting, and that empty future seemed the way forward. And yet there was a sense of comfort in its monotony, the simple act of hunting for items on a desk and directing an actor creating a sense of calmness that sought to raise questions surrounding the ways in which we unjustly acquiesce.
'We're coming at immersive theater from an opposite edge,' says Spectacular Disaster Factory's co-founder Kirsten Hageleit. 'A lot of people are coming from traditional theater. There's people from escape rooms. We're coming from live-action role-playing and a type of role-play where it's not scripted.'
Audience members at the L.A. Immersive Invitational play a piano in 'That's Jazz Baby!' from Spies Among Us.
(Chiara Alexa / For The Times)
'That's Jazz Baby!' from Spies Among Us, the team behind a long-running Little Tokyo tale of espionage, found similar lifelessness in corporate drudgery, this time in a jazz nightclub. Only here, the goal was more lighthearted and the audience did succeed in freeing the performers from the clutches of a exaggeratedly maniacal owner. Audiences had to liberate a cadre of musicians from hypnosis and do so by concocting scenarios in which the club's proprietor was continually forced to leave the room. We donned wigs and played instruments as we fought for equity in a show that argued the appeal of music wasn't perfectionism or talent but community.
Classical music, the genre, was murdered in 'Settling the Score' from Meanwhile ... Netprov Studio.
(Chiara Alexa / For The Times)
Spy Brunch found inspiration in the era of '60s protest music in its 'Ursa Major and the Blue Mountain Hexes,' turning audience members into makeshift musicians in its mischievous show about outwitting a government agent. The story took a metaphorically magical bent, focusing on music's power to unite — and potentially summon a bear. 'Bird Is the Word' from Dr3am Logikk had similar messages but did so via a setting in which rock 'n' roll was outlawed and its Clash-inspired musicians were jailed for making a racket in a foreign land. To fight authoritarianism, we had to craft an inspirational song using no instruments and no animal noises. Both were shows that inspired connections and vulnerability, part of the elation of communal art.
Emotional volatility was touched on in 'Frog and Toad: Live in Concert!' from Last Call Theatre, one of the more prolific companies on the immersive scene. It played to the group's choose-your-own-adventure strengths, pairing audience members with an actor in attempt to stop a band from breaking up. The age-old tension between artistic originality and commerce was explored, and our team failed at finding a compromise. The Queen's Fools went a slightly more traditional theater route with 'Devil on My Shoulder,' in which we were fed prompts to actors in a show that argued even more passive productions can find ways to get audiences to lean in.
There's occasionally an absurdity in interactive fiction. Cherry Poppins' 'Ismusik' and Meanwhile ... Netprov Studio's 'Settling the Score' each put the emphasis on comedic improvisation, the former presenting to us mini challenges as we saved Swedish hip-hop and the latter tasking us with interviewing personified musical genres in an attempt to solve a murder, in this case classical music. Yet underlying each were subtle statements about fame-chasing in our commodified age.
Big messages can go down easy — or even slightly disguised — in immersive entertainment. That's because we're playing, and when we play we're in the moment. We're also slightly out of own headspace and ready to buy into worlds of wonder or even strife. And at the Immersive Invitational, where productions ranged from goofy to heavy, there was an underlying common denominator, and that is that immersive play can inspire radical joy.