Thu 9/15-Sun 10/2
Theater Ninjas likes to promote itself as the Cleveland theater scene’s provider of out-of-the-ordinary experiences.
With that in mind, the company has a real doozy planned with its upcoming original show The Last Day, which appears Thu 9/15-Sun 10/2 at the Gordon Square Arcade. The unique experience allows between two to eight audience members to solve puzzles, manipulate arcane machines and investigate a mysterious woman’s magical past.
CoolCleveland talked to Theater Ninjas artistic director Jeremy Paul about the Choose Your Own Adventure-esque The Last Day, which is occasionally scary, very poetic and highly intimate.
How would you describe The Last Day?
The Last Day is sort of our take on escape the room-style games or events. It’s a theater event with no actors, so the audience shows up and they have a little over an hour to explore a series of prepared rooms that have secret letters or things to listen to or watch. There’s sort of all of these little interactive installations spread throughout a couple of rooms in the Gordon Square Arcade, and the more you uncover and the more you explore, the more story you’re able to piece together.
How long has this type of production been on your radar?
We have been messing around in this sort of game-theater territory for about a year and a half pretty seriously, and this is our first full production. It’s purely about game interaction theater. So we created it all on our own, it’s a Ninja original.
Just asking — what was it about the game-theater realm that piqued Theater Ninjas’ interest?
I think because all of us are really interested in theater but we’re also pretty big gamers as well. There are certain video games out there that are more focused on story, instead of just shoot-em-up mechanics. And they’re all about sort of exploring and putting together clues and piecing together like sort of a master narrative. And we wanted to do something like that but make it more three-dimensional, more tactile. So we’ve been trying to draw a little bit on things we loved about certain classic adventure video games, but also what are some of the experiences that we’ve really enjoyed. Things I love are that moment where I got to open up this box and inside it were crumpled-up letters or a series of headsets and I had to listen to a story in the proper order. That made me feel like I was really participating in the story.
In terms of teambuilding, room escape adventures are becoming popular. Just to clarify, that’s not The Last Day?
Right, there are a couple of room escapes in Cleveland and those are sort of predicated on the idea that you’re trying to escape the room. But those are primarily puzzle-based experiences. We do have some puzzles, we do have some ciphers in this show, but our emphasis is really on story.
Naturally, gamers will enjoy The Last Day, but what are theater folks getting out of it?
I think theater folks will get a very different kind of take on storytelling. Typically in theater it’s actors on stage, audience in the house and the story is told to you, a lot like a movie. Once it starts, it’s going to keep going. With this, you sort of get to take the reins on how the story gets told and in what sequence it gets told. So I think it’s a refreshing theatrical experience for people who are used to a traditional method of getting that story. But it sort of adds a little bit of this spice where you get more control over what’s happening.
How does The Last Day fit into the Theater Ninjas mission?
We are a nomadic company and we’re doing this in the Gordon Square Arts Arcade, which is a place we’ve never been before. We’re always looking for new spaces and we’ve been really trying to experiment with different roles for the audience at our shows. And in this, without the audience, nothing can happen here. There are really no rehearsals for this show. It doesn’t exist without an audience member turning a page or opening a can of a bizarre liquid. It’s very audience-focused, which is where our heads are at right now.
So is there a narrative to the experience?
There’s this master narrative we’ve created, and after you go through different parts of the experience, it’s divided into eight sections — each one tells a different aspect of the story. So all you find out at the beginning is a woman has disappeared and she’s behind these series of rooms that have served clues about what happened to her.
Um, will we feel stupid if we don’t figure it out?
No, that was something we were really clear about. There’s no such thing as losing in this game. There might be different parts of the story you don’t get but that changes your experiences of it and at the end there’s a slight choose-your-own-ending that can happen. Different endings are available depending on what you’ve uncovered. But no, by the end of it, there is a story and you will have understood it.
[Written by John Benson]