Quinn Franzen as the actor/narrator in the tent with you, during part one.
  • Alex Garland
  • Quinn Franzen as the actor/narrator in the tent with you, during part one.
Two Saturdays ago, the Satori Group performed a night of one-audience-member-at-a-time shows called Microdramas. Instead of walking into a theater, you walked into a homemade bar, the bar itself built by the Satori crew and stocked with affordable-for-artist-types options (cheap booze, cheap wine, cheap Hilliard's tall boys). There were a bunch of people sitting around the bar, either waiting for their turn to see Microdramas or having just finished seeing Microdramas, and the ones who had just seen it were inarticulate about it, kind of dazed, given to statements like, "You'll—you'll—you'll see. I can't describe it."

My only other clue about what was coming: While waiting, I found a single marble on the ground, its iridescent insides glowing. Meanwhile, behind a wall of blackout curtains, there were crashing sounds like thunder. Over and over as audience members went through, the thunder thundered. This was almost as thrilling as the experience to come, the waiting-for-the-experience-to-come part. Making the whole experience of seeing a show part of the show is one of the most compelling things about Satori shows. (Implied Violence used to do this too—for example, the time they had that show that you could only get tickets to by going to a crepe stand on a certain day and saying a code word to the crepe-maker.)

At long last, it was my turn to experience Microdamas—which wasn't one interactive mini-play, as I'd assumed, but three interactive mini-plays, one after the other. (I only realized this after I expressed confusion later about how the components fit together.) In the first room, the first of the three plays, an actor welcomed me into a beach recliner under a tent and asked me to close my eyes. While sitting on this beach recliner with my eyes shut, a warm light passed slowly in front of my face—the sun. There were oceanic sounds created by I know not what. Then the wind picked up—the tent started flapping and filling with air, getting louder and louder. It was a storm. By the time I was told to open my eyes, the sun was long gone and tragedy had struck. There was a dead woman pressed up against the translucent plastic of the tent. She looked a little Laura Palmer-ish. Beautiful, bluish, dead. The actor asked me to hold the post that kept the tent up so that he could flip on his flashlight (or was it a lighter?), and then we examined her body together through the plastic.

One of the bodies pressed up against the plastic: Beautiful, bluish, dead.
  • Alex Garland
  • One of the bodies pressed up against the plastic: Beautiful, bluish, dead.

After more looking around it became clear there were other bodies pressed up against the tent too, half-decipherable through the plastic. Since the show was said to be interactive, I wanted to see what the actor/narrator (played by Adam Standley when I went through, Quinn Franzen when a friend went through) would say if I commented on what was happening. So I said, as we looked at the bodies: "Sucks." Standley improvised a response, saying he didn't think it was so bad; he said he thought the bodies looked peaceful.

That was the first room, and the first of the two images from Microdramas that I have not been able to get out of my head. The second image I haven't been able to get out of my head came in the second room, during the second play—"the Batman-y part," as I thought of it later. In this room you had to get on your hands and knees and pull yourself along the ground while holding onto a rope. It sort of felt like climbing a rope through an elevator shaft, only sideways, the sideways tunnel delineated by that same translucent plastic that the tent in the first play was made out of. Then I was on my back on a piece of fabric, and people were pulling the sheet in various directions, my body at their mercy, my face toward the ceiling. Then the plastic flap overhead disappeared and Standley was directly overhead, suspended from the ceiling, like a bat, looking down at me. His getting up there so fast, when he'd just been right next to me, defied the logic of time/space. Plus it just looked so cool. Then I was back under a plastic sheet as it was pelted with marbles—yet more storminess.

An audience member, on the floor, crawling through a corridor of plastic sheets in part two of Microdramas.
  • Clare Strasser
  • An audience member, on the floor, crawling through a corridor of plastic sheets in part two of Microdramas.

The third part of Microdramas (i.e., the third play) was... minimalist, you could say. It simply consisted of putting on some headphones (in which I couldn't hear anything—maybe they were just meant to block ambient noise?) and being directed to stand on a raised walkway, where I stood and stood, awaiting instructions that never came. Eventually I focused on a rope in the distance with the word "PULL" on it. So I approached the rope and pulled slowly, half-expecting for something to be flung into my head, or for something to come into my ears through the headphones, waiting for something, but all that happened was a curtain slowly parted on some people singing. The curtain call, I guess? It was an ending that seemed designed to make you feel nonplussed. What did I feel? Did I feel the right thing? Did I feel anything? Were the headphones broken? What about the dead bodies in part one? What happened to them? What about the two storms? What about the guy dangling from the ceiling like a bat?

There was something abrupt and unsatisfying about the end, and yet the whole show was full of abruptness, full of vivid images unsatisfyingly explained, so maybe a certain lack of coherence was the point. Maybe leaving the audience confused rather than clear about what had happened was what they were going for. A friend who saw it before me said he wished there were a little more text to it, which I think is a way of saying he wished the point of it all had been clearer. The Stranger's art critic, Jen Graves, had a different reaction. She told me it made her cry. When I asked what about it made her cry, she said, "What made me cry was that I have never felt so respected by a theater experience before. They actually involved me, I felt like. I guess what made me cry is how uninvolved I've been every single other time I've been in the theater. I was touched." And then she added, "It's not that I want all theater to be turned interactive. But it's amazing to feel the difference so starkly."

The Satori Group will perform more Microdramas—or perhaps modified versions of these Microdramas—this summer.