Theater Without Actors

On the Haunted State of “Immersive” Theater

Beatriz Milhazes, Santa Cruz, 1995, Acrylic on canvas

My feet are bare and so are my companions’. We are walking over cool deep-pile carpet and what feels like rough forest floor as we travel through Viola’s Room, an immersive experience created by London’s Punchdrunk collective, which recently wrapped up a five-month run at Manhattan’s arts complex The Shed. We are a group of six. We walk through corridors accompanied by the gloriously round vowels of actor Helena Bonham Carter, who speaks into each of our noise-canceling headphones. Her voice tells an odd fairy tale. We enter and exit a series of rooms. Beautiful rooms . . . empty rooms. This “immersive theater” experience features no actors at all.

If you’re familiar with Punchdrunk’s previous work Sleep No More you know the basic vibe — the painstaking art direction is the point. But unlike that hit show, where audience members wearing masks are free to wander around a Hitchcockian hotel, this piece is unicursal, like a classic labyrinth — there is only one path. In Sleep No More, you observe and follow dancers from behind the protection of your face covering. In Viola’s Room there are no humans to spy on. Instead, you find yourself moving through a charming sort of music-box machinery. Lovely shadow dioramas light up as you pass. The operating principle is much like that of a haunted house, or “It’s A Small World” at Disneyland. This is a single-file ride, guided by the voice in your ears and faint lights that indicate the way.

There is much here to enchant: an eerily nostalgic 1990s teenager’s bedroom with a Soundgarden soundtrack, beautiful antique-feeling parlors that feel recently abandoned, gentle cold winds and earthen smells that swirl around gnarled trees. Fabric-draped walls press claustrophobically on your arms and shoulders as you squeeze through. The textured carpet on your bare feet has a way of bringing back childhood — I’d never thought of a shag rug as a Proustian aide memoire. But it worked. And for $70, I had a full sentimental and sensory experience. I left feeling satisfied, but also that I had been inside a dream. Which is to say, alone.

I’m a theater director, and I can own up to the fact that actors, including many of my friends, are a little bit much. A little embarrassing. They feel things . . . a lot. They feel things all over the stage. The extensive onboarding speeches for Viola’s Room reassure us that there are no hired performers; it is not a haunted house. No one will jump out and surprise us as we round a corner. This comes as a relief. Knowing there will be no actors we are ready to consume the show’s enveloping sights and sounds with our limited attention spans as the only interruption. We are promised mood-based art with no human interference between ourselves and the environment.

Elsewhere in The Shed, in the 500-seat Griffin Theater, actors are often found acting in plays. But it seems to me there is something mechanical happening there too. The last production I saw there, The Effect, featured very good actors, immaculately lit, wearing tailored costumes and what seemed like expensive microphones so their slightest murmuring was perfectly amplified. This is very high-end theater. It is theater for people who do not wish to sing along with a song, comment on the action (“woo!”), watch an actor tune a guitar between songs, or break a sweat. I can’t help but feel that between these productions, The Shed is approaching waxworks — a hushed controlled space for the replication of a luxury product, precise artworks with no residue, just sheen.

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What happens to an audience member when he finds himself all alone? Theater without actors means that the viewer is the one acting. In Viola’s Room as in so much immersive art (and escape rooms), the audience feels implicitly cast as detectives — we are solving puzzles, discovering a criminal’s identity, or simply looking for cues to help us proceed on our journey. When we find these morsels, we feel gratified. In Viola’s Room, the fragmentary story is a kind of princess-monster abduction fantasy that doubles as a coming-of-age analogy. I think — there is not much to hold on to narratively. We scrutinize odd drawings on the walls, pass empty dinner tables, hear shards of narration about a girl secretly meeting a devil in the moonlight. Maybe the motion itself, the detective work, is the narrative. We are Hansel and Gretel, and should not expect to find a home at the end of the trail of crumbs. Our journey through all this eerie beauty is the point.

Punchdrunk’s Burnt City, a kind of sequel to Sleep No More, had a more sprawling sense of emptiness and radical freedom when I saw it in London in 2023. In a huge open-world installation inspired by scenes from the Trojan War, I felt truly lost and alone amid the beauty and gloom, despite the occasional presence of performers ritually enacting violence, sex, and religious rites. It was about the rooms, not the dancers. Burnt City reminded me of video games that offer a similar experience — a radical freedom to explore a haunted space where you uncover clues and details on your own. I feel the same vertiginousness playing Nintendo Switch’s Breath of the Wild. Video games like Gone Home depict (as do many first-person shooters) a deserted world containing historical evidence that you, the player, uncover — diaries, or occasional remote phone calls with guardian angels, but few real people . . . just their traces. In Firewatch, a richly emotional video game where you embody a heartbroken ranger in a remote national park, the landscapes are gorgeously rendered, but no humans enter your line of sight. Stray hikers and vandals are always just out of frame, having moments before left a smoldering campfire, an empty beer can. We wander, seeking evidence. We occupy a pleasantly forensic state of mind.

In my lifetime, live theater has obstinately refused to become, as almost all other art has, an individual act of private consumption. But Viola’s Room comes close. I was walking with my fiancée and her family but sometimes I lost them for a moment, and felt cocooned in my headphones, swaddled in fabric. This was no escape room that required collaboration. It was at most a mutual haunting. I was just one of a small boatload of silent souls on a ferryboat drifting down a theatrical river Styx.

From a producer’s point of view, a very good thing about theater without actors is you don’t have to pay them. The actors’ union, a powerful force in professional theater, makes the head-count of stage actors a substantial budget proposition. Even on the Fringe, this logic is well known. If you want to make an independent theatrical show that tours this country, or succeeds at the Edinburgh Festival overseas, you had better make sure it’s a one- or (at most!) two-person show.

The actor’s job is more precarious than ever. No matter how much a live performance enriches a haunted house or immersive artwork, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the powers that be would prefer that actors become automata. AI voices narrate audiobooks and articles, and more and more crowd scenes in movies are made with CGI. Canned orchestrations accompany countless regional musicals. It’s cheaper to buy a thousand drones than to train one soldier. All that the theater without actors needs to keep running is a crew to act as stage managers for the machines. Way back in 1997, The Simpsons presciently depicted the coming age of automation in a gruff general’s military school graduation speech: “The wars of the future will be fought by small robots. And as you go forth today, remember your duty is clear: to build and maintain those robots.”

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Maybe there is no way to get rid of the human touch. Memorable time-based “experiences” tend to contain at least some human friction. Without it, the work often wears thin. A ticketed and timed-entry immersive art offering with no live performers is like a coin-operated espresso machine; it tastes metallic. Something’s missing. The actorless immersive experience hustles you along. It’s a self-guided gallery tour attended by humans who try to disappear behind draperies, and it’s an appropriate medium for The Shed, a hulking box made of pure venture capital tax writeoff, which seems for all its solidity about to vanish into thin vapor, a House of Ushers in the midtown mist.

Luna Luna was my first installation experience at the large upstairs space that hosted Viola’s Room. The former was more of a gallery exhibition, a large and thoughtfully curated display of mechanical artworks and kinetic rides from a long-abandoned art theme park. As I ascended The Shed’s silent escalators for the first time into the third floor where timed-admission immersive art was waiting, I remember feeling the atmosphere become increasingly muffled. This was a place made of hidden coat checks and walls of marble that make you reluctant to raise your voice. I once visited Franco’s tomb — the Valley of the Fallen — in Spain; the effect on the human voice was not so different. We go in, are hushed, and made ready. For what? For communing with the dead . . . the contemporary high-tech “immersive” experience.

Luna Luna felt more sad than haunted, but it did hold ghosts — the revered dead of the ’80s: victims of AIDS and drugs and rock ’n’ roll and time itself. The rides had become museum pieces, rusted relics once designed for kinetic life and humorous activation with music, to be ridden in a sunny public park by rowdy coked-up or drunk ravers in Berlin Wall-era Europe 50 years ago. Now the machines were frozen, inert, mounted on plinths, well lit, ready to be looked at by urban art consumers on their second pricey glass of wine in the hushed well-air conditioned Shed, as shifting lights thoughtfully illuminated the graffiti of Basquiat and bright shards of Haring painted on rusted sheet metal. We sipped, we took in culture and read a lot of placards, and we exited to the similarly muted open-air plaza of Hudson Yards, or joined the urban-renewal bar-crawl that is the High Line. We had been “immersed,” but were hardly shocked or changed.

The experience of paying for a ticket and getting on a mechanical ride is of course nothing new, and sometimes it’s marked by memorable human touches. A version of The Tunnel of Love called “Ye Old Mill,” built in 1915, is still an enduring attraction at the Minnesota State Fair. The ride requires at least a couple of pimply teenagers working a minimum wage summer job to make it run. The wondrous automata of the medieval Islamic world were tirelessly designed, maintained and operated by human attendants. I have a soft spot for the figure of the creator serving their marvelous machines. In London last year I visited Novelty Automations, where Tim Hunkin tends his ingenious devices. One of these was an eclipse simulator made out of a little metal box you sit inside with a clunky cranking ceiling that closes out all light except for a few pinprick stars. I found the intimacy of this experience to be extremely emotional — though I’d crammed into the box with my fiancée, and this may have added to the effect. The hand of the artist was present in the painted clouds and those pinhole heavenly bodies, as it is in Viola’s Room, which for all its coolness is in the end a heartfelt attempt to convey story through mood and full-sensory immersion (scent, for instance, is used to great effect).

I did manage to have an unmistakably human experience at The Shed. Just prior to our Viola’s Room entry, in a small curtained space containing cubbies for our belongings, a docent/usher/host asked us to remove our shoes and socks and douse our bare feet with an antibacterial spray. When he spoke about the spray, he winced slightly, seeming to acknowledge the human discomfort of having to discuss the ugly truth of our bodies as vectors for bacteria. That moment, that very human wince — I’ll not forget soon. I’d pay good money to see an actor convey something so real. I very often do.

I think we will see more Viola’s Rooms, more shows without actors, though likely many with a mere fraction of the artistry. Clever producers will hire humans (and more than a few unpaid interns) to attend the machines, reboot the computers behind the light systems when they crash, and tweak the volume when a rider — sorry, audience member — complains. The actors’ union will remain uninvolved, though Hollywood stars will collect royalties for their voice recordings. People will feel emotions — nostalgia, fear, and wonder — guided by a voice they have come to trust, and maybe something surprising and real through the soles of their feet. No one will sweat, or bow at the end. We will simply walk through this dream and out into the next.

Seth Bockley is a writer of stage plays and screenplays, fiction, and poetry. He also directs and adapts literature for live performance.