May 12, 2022
Lost Recipes - Schell Games
$14.99; VR (Oculus); Ongoing
From the VR studio behind the I Expect You to Die series comes this delightfully charming, heartwarming, and all-ages appropriate cooking simulator. Players travel back in time visiting kitchens in three distant and distinct eras, learning how to prepare 15 unique dishes. It’s the pacing of Lost Recipes that makes this a highly original VR experience, requiring players to be mindful, taking their time to prepare meals carefully and correctly. Additionally, between consulting with historical experts and casting native performers, this experience is wonderful educational, allowing players to learn about the recipes they are making and the cultures they are rooted in. Plus, if you’re feeling hungry afterwards, Schell Games provides an online cookbook containing all the recipes found in Lost Recipes.
- Patrick B. McLean, Chicago Curator
The Burnt City
The host with the most, the absolute toast of the realm: Punchdrunk welcomes the world into The Burnt City, a sprawling labyrinth built on the banks of the Thames, offering a monumental adventure through a mythic war.
Close to a hundred...
Booking Through: Sunday, September 24 2023
April 15, 2022
We Should Meet In Air
An intimate, sweet and sad interactive phone call with poet Sylvia Plath on her last birthday. Framed as a phone call from Plath on her 30th (and final) birthday, We Should Meet in Air is a tribute to Plath’s role as creator...
Booking Through: Saturday, June 18 2022
April 8, 2022
New World Rising! — Linnea Bond
$30; Philadelphia, PA, through April 10
There’s a perverse thrill to using the real world as your stage, and New World Rising! Does it masterfully. Casting its audience of one as a newly radicalized ecoterrorist, New World Rising takes place on both your phone and over the streets of Center City Philadelphia, seeking out QR codes and dead drops while receiving texts and audio instructions from both the titular terrorist cell, and your increasingly frantic fiancé.
The message of the piece, presenting the ecoterrorists as driven towards ineffectual violence by the crushing feeling of powerlessness climate change brings, is elegant, nuanced, and well executed. New World Rising! avoids the didacticism of other plays on environmental themes to create a must see piece of kinetic theatre.
— Blake Weil, East Coast Curator at Large
April 1, 2022
I Agree To The Terms
Closing Date: April 3
A blistering and brilliant production, I Agree To The Terms blends non-fiction storytelling with a dynamic, interactive framework that illuminates the internet’s ethical black holes. Designed for and about the internet, the production needs to be experienced online and is a prime example of remote theatre at its most innovative and engaging. Imbued with humor, I Agree To The Terms confronts the dark horrors of capitalism without any semblance of preaching. It’s digital theatre at its best: profoundly human.
— Laura Hess, Arts Editor
March 18, 2022
The Traveler's Guide to Little Sodaburg
In this charming fin, I mean, fun-filled remote puzzle adventure, you and your team of 2-6 players will have to work together to reel in a potentially disastrous future of epic scale. Something's fishy in Little Sodaburg... and we mean...
Booking Through: Sunday, December 1 2024
March 3, 2022
May 22, 2022
The Fleecing
The Fleecing, the annual fundraiser for Almanac Dance Circus Theatre, flies high on wings of parody, performance art, and light puzzling to create a truly unique whole.
— Blake Weil, East Coast Curator At Large
Booking Through: Saturday, March 5 2022
Dec 3, 2021
The Drop
We wouldn’t dream of spoiling any portion of the roller-coaster ride awaiting attendees of The Drop but we can wax rhapsodical about the custom-built facility guests are welcomed into and the deeply kinaesthetic experience they’ll have, solving puzzles and making swift decisions...
Booking Through: Sunday, February 20 2022
Nov. 19, 2021
Secret Cinema Presents: Arcane – League of Legends
The crowd, having been revved up by the team of performers just moments before, is quickly shaped into a trench for our two pugilists to go at full steam. And then it’s right back to elaborate schemes, petty larceny, and...
Booking Through: Sunday, December 19 2021
Nov. 12, 2021
The MetaMovie Presents: Alien Rescue (Raindance Run)
Of all the live XR/performance hybrid work I’ve experienced so far, this has been the closest to what I’ve always imagined it would be like. Something akin to a digital LARP with an infinite FX budget. Yet, it’s not just...
Booking Through: Sunday, November 21 2021
Oct. 29, 2021
Poison Garden
At the end of the day, nothing beats a sandbox-style show for die-hard immersive fans. The ability to follow a performer around through a gorgeous mansion was enough to make me love The Poison Garden right away. Telling the story of five...
Booking Through: Tuesday, October 26 2021
Dr. Crumb's School for Disobedient Pets
I absolutely loved playing Dr. Crumb’s. You should stop what you’re doing right now and play it. Each environment is rich in detail and depth, a joy to explore and traverse. The puzzles and challenges are expertly designed to not only...
Booking Through: Tuesday, October 11 2022
Oct. 8, 2021
The LEA Project
The LEA Project is a self-guided web-based experience running a little over 90 minutes. While steeped in well-worn tropes and concerns about AIs, The LEA Project’s narrative is a slick, stylish, and symphonic one, captivating me with its witty humor and phenomenal...
Booking Through: Saturday, February 26 2022
Oct. 1, 2021
Creep 2021
Back with a new show at a brand new venue, Creep 2021 is exactly what you might want out of a new edition of the Los Angeles Halloween-season staple. Taking full advantage of JFI Productions’ new digs at The Ghost Light, the performance...
Booking Through: Sunday, October 31 2021
Oct. 15, 2021
Delusion: Reaper's Remorse
A cinematic thrill ride where each scene hinges on the audience as in a classic adventure game, this year's Delusion, titled Reaper's Remorse brings the LA stalwart back to its horror roots.
Just about the closet thing you'll ever get to...
Booking Through: Sunday, November 21 2021
Sep. 24, 2021
Pipilotti Rist: Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor — Pipilotti Rist
$0 — $18; Los Angeles, CA; Through June 6, 2022
Rist’s work challenges our shared constructs around private versus public, the familiar versus the foreign, and fantasy versus reality. She invites viewers to abandon their sense of separateness, to explore the membranes of our lives — whether actual or perceived — and to peer, with humor and empathy, at our thoughts, identities, corporal selves, and surroundings without cellular divide. The exhibition is her realization of museums as “shared apartments where you can visit each other’s brains and bodies.” Especially after a year of feeling housed within our constraining digital window frames, Rist’s work inverts our viewpoints; the result is a personal, subjective experience instilled in the surreal, universal magic of life.
— Laura Hess, Arts Editor