15 hours ago
I Survived ‘Viola's Room,' a Spooky New Immersive Show Narrated by Helena Bonham Carter
The real world is plenty scary right now. Forget turning on some gruesome horror movie: reading the daily headlines is enough to make just about anyone scream. All the same, I couldn't resist doubling down on the fear factor and checking out an eerie, immersive new art experience that opened in New York City this week.
On through October at The Shed, the show, titled Viola's Room, is directed by Felix Barrett and produced by Punchdrunk, the award-winning theater company behind Sleep No More. An interactive, hour-long journey, it has guests weave barefoot through a labyrinth of darkened rooms and halls (by designer Casey Jay Andrews), while a delightfully spooky Helena Bonham Carter narrates a fable, based on the 1901 story The Moon Slave by Barry Pain, through provided headphones. Even with no live actors or jump scares, it makes for an intensely effective—even somewhat poetic—haunted-house experience.
Guests walk through Viola's Room.
Photo: Marc J. Franklin
When I arrived for my prescribed time slot, I was surprised to find that there was only one other brave soul in my group. (Viola's Room is designed to be experienced by no more than six people at a time.) Our instructions were simple enough: do not lose sight of each other, and follow the flickering lights from space to space. (I was more than happy to let my partner lead the way.)
In the first space—a teenage girl's bedroom, its walls adorned with Tori Amos and Buffy the Vampire Slayer posters—Carter instructs us to lie down as she begins to tell the gothic tale of a princess who disappears from her castle, abandons her prince, and mysteriously journeys into the night. In time, the room around us was plunged into darkness, the only light coming from inside a blanketed fort in the corner. When, skeptically, we crawled into that fort, we immediately entered into a brand-new space: a maze of hallways lined with ghostly, draped white sheets.
As Carter's narration goes on, she describes the princess's descent into an enchanted and ominous forest—just as we, too, were taken through ever more otherworldly settings. Walking barefoot, we traversed terrains that felt alternately grassy, sandy, and like concrete, our surroundings ranging from a forest landscape to a high-ceilinged chapel featuring stained-glass windows suffused with a foggy light. Another room with a giant dinner table had balloons lining the ceiling, though in the darkness their strings felt more like vines, or even spiderwebs.
