SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
An eerie new immersive play in New York City has no live actors. Instead, six people at a time put on headphones and listen to a recorded story as they wind their way through a labyrinth. NPR's Jennifer Vanasco joined in.
JENNIFER VANASCO, BYLINE: We're lying on our backs in sleeping bags on the floor like we're at a slumber party. We're in a bedroom from the '90s.
FELIX BARRETT: A teenage girl's bedroom with all of the sort of bands that she loves, all the books she's reading, all the little toys she's collecting.
VANASCO: That's Felix Barrett. He's the artistic director of Punchdrunk theater, based in London, and the creator and director of the show. It's called "Viola's Room" and it's at The Shed, a cultural center in Manhattan. As it starts, we hear the music Viola listens to.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BLACK HOLE SUN")
SOUNDGARDEN: (Singing) Hides the face, lies the snake.
BARRETT: The radio's playing. It's completely cinematic.
VANASCO: Our feet are bare. The lights are dim. A tiny ballerina is spinning in her jewelry box, and her shadow looms over us on the wall.
BARRETT: The music starts to slip, starts to transform, starts to melt. And as that happens, ever so slowly, the lights go down in the bedroom to pure darkness.
VANASCO: And Helena Bonham Carter begins to tell us a bedtime story.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HELENA BONHAM CARTER: Let me tell you a story from a long, long time ago.
VANASCO: When the lights ease up, we crawl through a child's play tent...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BONHAM CARTER: Crawling on hands and knees through the dusty, secret ways.
VANASCO: ...And into a dark fairy tale of narrow hallways and semi-darkness.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BONHAM CARTER: She thought she knew every inch of that place and its grounds, knew all of its secrets. It was not true.
VANASCO: The story she tells is about a princess, a maze, a pair of dancing shoes, the irresistible pull of the moon. It's the kind of lyrical eeriness Punchdrunk is known for. In their last show in New York, called "Sleep No More," audiences explored creepy, detailed rooms based on "Macbeth." It ran for almost 13 years and just closed in January. Barrett says "Viola's Room" is more intimate, but all sorts of theatrical immersion offer audiences something they don't often get in our world of screens and video projections.
BARRETT: Everything's accessible. Everything's two clicks away, whereas a live, tactile experience that's 360 - it's something where you're plunged into a different universe.
VANASCO: Barrett points out that the headphones and the sound design used in "Viola's Room" make it feel like the story is being told only to you.
BARRETT: Helena's vocal work is so incredible. Like, when she was recording it, like, her bottom lip was on the microphone. And so we imagine that, you know, her lips are touching your earlobe.
VANASCO: No live actors mean that design of the show is everything. Casey Jay Andrews designed the physical part of the experience - what you can see and touch - Gareth Fry, the sound. He says most of the show uses conventional mixing techniques, like what you hear on the radio or on a podcast.
GARETH FRY: Every now and again, I'd use this technique called binaural sound, which is this sort of more three-dimensional use of sound that really only works on headphones. And so that enables us to create these moments where you're not quite sure what is real and what's on the soundtrack.
CASEY JAY ANDREWS: There's a moment when you're in all of her dresses, and they start getting dirtier. And you're feeling the mud and the dirt on these dresses that have just been - there's heaps of them you're kind of passing through and passing through. And there's a moment when it sounds like Helena Bonham Carter just whispers in your ear.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BONHAM CARTER: Go quickly.
FRY: We swap the microphone and use a thing called a binaural head, which mimics human recording. And at that moment, it feels like, oh, you know, all the rules have suddenly shifted and we're not listening to this story. We're in this story.
ANDREWS: With the headphones on, suddenly, in the dresses, in the dark, with the smell of them and feeling the texture of the mud on them and then her whispering in your ear, saying, you know, get out, go quickly, I jumped out of my skin (laughter).
VANASCO: I did, too, but not like it was a jump scare - more like I was waking from a vivid dream.
Jennifer Vanasco, NPR News, New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF UNKNOWN MORTAL ORCHESTRA'S "SHIN RAMYUN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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