St. Louis Gets its First Taste of Immersive Theater with “Hamlet: See What I See”

St. Louis has a healthy, well-established theater scene. The Rep just turned 50; the Black Rep is 40. Fox Theatricals is producing some of the biggest hits on Broadway. And hey—what other city can say it spawned American’s Shakespeare, otherwise known as Tennessee Williams? That said, we’re not exactly known as a hotbed of experimental theater. Look closely, though, and you’ll always find pockets of artists doing interesting, cutting-edge work—actor Kelly Hummert, founder and Artistic Director of Rebel and Misfits Productions, is among them. After spending a decade in New York as an actor and writer, she is back in St. Louis, and in a few weeks, will unveil Hamlet: See What I See, St. Louis’ first immersive theater production. Rather than just passively sitting and taking in the action, audience members will find themselves swept into the court drama at Elsinore; they will remain in motion for two hours, possibly interacting with Ophelia, Laertes, or Queen Gertrude directly. “What you expect, check it at the door. Because that’s not what you’re going to see,” Hummert says. “You have to be comfortable with that, and just let it flow. Let it go right off you, and just experience it.” We talked to Hummert about The Immersive Theatre Project’s inagural show, including what it was like to inhabit the dual roles of producer and cast member (she’s playing Ophelia), how she and director Melanie Armer collaborate, and how the experience of the show has already begun for those tuned into ITP’s social media channels.

I wanted to start with the Immersive Theatre Project, and give people a sense of what you’re doing—and what immersive theater actually is.

It’s a simple, yet very difficult, question to answer. Immersive theater is very new; it’s the hot buzzword on the street in New York, and every other sophisticated town that really values their arts. Really, there are probably 10 people in the world who can do immersive theater, it’s that difficult. There are a lot theaters that are trying to take the lead with it—Punchdrunk comes from London, and they brought a show in to New York. A lot of people have seen it, and so people think that’s exactly what immersive theater is. The show they’re talking about is Sleep No More, and it’s a beautiful, beautiful production. There’s so much money, so much time, and so much talent is involved in that show. It’s from a dancer’s perspective. These are like dancer-actors. So there aren’t any spoken moments in that show. It’s based on Macbeth, and it adds some Hitchcock characters that we don’t really know about. The thing about that show is it’s so gigantic—basically, they’ve taken out three warehouses in Chelsea to build this set, and they spent so much money to do it. You can actually choose your own adventure, you can go off alone, you can follow one actor, you can decide to follow a different actor and follow their track in the show…and you’re in there for a couple of hours. So you can kind of go back and forth, and decide who your favorite character is, if you want to keep their secrets, you get the choice of doing that.

With the play we’re doing, our version of immersive theater is basically taking down that wall between spectator and player. The very second they enter our space, a ritual will occur which they’re not going to fully understand, how or this is going to come into play during the show, but they know there’s something different. They know they’ve walked into a world that is unlike any they’ve ever walked into before. Within that first hour, the cocktail hour that starts before the show begins, we will be interacting with audience members, maybe pulling them aside and telling them a secret or two about the castle, or about the relationships that are going on. Most of the people who come out of this show will come out not having seen the same show. They’ll say, “Ophelia told me this, did she tell you that?” “Of course not, what are you talking about?” “She pulled me into this kitchen and she told me that this was happening to her.” So it changes the color and it changes the tone for that audience member’s whole perspective on the piece.

So in terms of the script—you’re calling this an adaptation—how are you approaching Shakespeare’s original play? Are the actors, when they engage in these micro-interactions with the audience, working from a script,  or are they improvising?

My director, Melanie Armer, is the one who cut the script down to two hours from four and some plus. So, thank you to her! [Laughs.] She did an amazing job. We just wanted to get the ball moving, so we can get into the action right away. We don’t talk about it—we do it. The way that we are instructing our actors to work with the audience is in a very organic and very sensitive way, so that when the curtains draw back, and all of a sudden the actual performance begins, the audience understands almost immediately that they are part of this castle. They belong here, they were invited here, they are our world. So the people that they have interacted with before, they’ll see again, and maybe the one woman Ophelia chooses to talk to beforehand, that will be the woman she keeps counting on, because she has no mother, she has no other female figure in her life. Perhaps that woman will be one she comes back to in the play.

So for us, that immersive nature means just means breaking down that fourth wall. It’s so much more exciting when you can give and receive messages—a thought you’re having, or something you’re feeling about what’s going on onstage—you share that together. There’s no poking at the audience, like “Aha! You see?” [Laughs.] There’s none of that happening. It’s very, very organic. It’s very sophisticated. It’s not in any way pushing against the audience members. We’re not forcing them to be a participant. They just become one. And it’s really a phenomenon. You watch people come into the show. They come get their drinks, and they’re very tickled when they get to go off and get a secret, because they’ve had a special moment with this certain character. And they almost don’t want to share it with anyone, because it’s theirs, and it’s for them alone. So whether or not they want to share it is up to them. But at the end of the day, they’re all going to be coming back into this main room, where it is a shared experience.

It’s at the Barnett on Washington. Can you talk about the process of creating the set—although I guess this would be less set, and more of an environment?

Again, to hit on that point about what immersive theater means to us, my goal is to create a childlike wonder. I don’t care if you’re 20, if you’re 30, if you’re 50, if you’re 65. I want you to enjoy this experience as though you’re a child. All of your senses are going to be used. We’ll find a way for every one of your senses to be at play.

With regard to the Barnett, we went to go see probably 20 different spaces, and just couldn’t figure out we were going to make this immersive. We thought, we’re going to have to bring in so much scenery, we’re going to have to do this and that, and we’re not Sleep No More, we don’t have an $8 million dollar budget for three warehouses and 90 rooms! [Laughs.]

So we ended up at the Barnett, and our jaws dropped. Because it was Elsinore to us. It felt like what Elsinore would be—it has these barren qualities, and yet it has these opulent qualities. When it comes to the furniture, we strike all of it. There’s no seating. People will be watching the actors nonstop, and they won’t even notice how much time flies by, because it is so exciting, and it goes by like just a second. They follow the actors on foot. We’ve devised different ways for them to do that; there are different cues for them to do that.

Everybody in this play, even Hamlet himself, is an ensemble member. We are creating a group of 14 people who live, breathe, and move together. So at the very beginning, at the top of the play when the ghost comes and visits Hamlet, originally, we thought, let’s just have King Claudius play the ghost—that’s his brother. That makes sense. And then we got into rehearsal and we explored these options of creating what actors call a viewpoint, which is creating a gesture. You give someone a word, like “stolen,” or “doomed,” or a word like that. You physicalize what that means for you. And so you go around the room, and everybody has a very different interpretation of what that word means to them. So we all memorize that movement with our bodies, and when it comes down to it, when the ghost comes in, it’s really going to be a chorus of everybody, just not Hamlet or Horatio, who are watching the ghost from the bottom of the hall. We’ll be surrounding them. It’s almost as if Hamlet conjures this ghost, made up of 14 people. It’s every single actor in the show, except for Hamlet and Horatio. Originally, when it was just King Claudius, we thought, no, that’s not spooky enough. Hamlet walks among a world of ghosts, if you really sit and read the script, that’s what the man does. So we thought, how can we surround him with that feeling, and just get him soaked in this feeling of being haunted and unsure and less secure about himself? And we felt this was a much stronger way to do it.

In terms of introducing the actors and educating the audience about the production, how do you handle that in immersive theater?

There’s no ushers. I’m not handing out anything. There are no booklets, no playbills. I want people to feel like this is real. I want them to come in, and go, “Oh, man, that’s Hamlet. He didn’t even realize this was going to be a wedding. This is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.” I don’t want to muddy people’s heads. If you go to the site, you click on our names, you’ll see what we’ve done, what shows we’ve been in, all of that good stuff. I keep not calling this a play, or a show. It’s an experience. Let’s call it a theatrical experience if we have to. But it’s the kind of thing, whether it’s a kid who’s 25 or a person who’s 50, they’re both going to be like, whoa…it’s just a thing they’ve literally never seen before.

As far as our social media platform, and getting it out there, we don’t want people to have any questions about who’s playing who. And people will have some interaction with those characters before the show starts, so I think it will be very clear to them who is playing who, as far as the named characters that we all know and love and that we all have memories of: “Oh, yes, that’s Gertrude, the Queen.” The way we introduce those characters is through the mind’s eye of Horatio. Our director came up with that beautiful concept, which I just adore. The way she’s decided to do it is to bring people in slowly. With the ritual, they will be anonymous, which gives them a certain boldness to come into this production and do what they want and be who they want to be for these next two hours. They get to be anyone they want in the world. And it’s completely up to them. When they are entering this world, Horatio is actually the one who first undoes the curtain and tells them, “Look, this is a story I’m telling. I was alive to survive this story.” Horatio’s been drinking with everyone since cocktail hour began, and he just gets to a place where he’s in that same environment he was in, and he remembers suddenly everything about it. And he can’t help but to tell others this story of how this all went down. So that’s our first introduction to Horatio, and he is the one that we follow without question, because he’s the one character in this show that never has an ulterior motive. He tells the truth one hundred percent of the time. You can always count on him. You always know he’s a truth-teller.

Our Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, on the other hand—Melanie and I talk about these characters and we just go, they are so odd! There’s something so weird about these two, coming in, they’ve clearly been paid by the king and queen to come and try to figure out what’s going on with Hamlet, and tap into his brain, and Hamlet’s one smart man. So it takes him a few sentences to figure out they’ve been asked to come here. As opposed to Horatio, who came because Hamlet’s almost a brother to him, and he wanted to see his father’s funeral because he had so much respect for him. These two are quiet different, and we always feel like they have this otherwordly presence in this room. Then you go ah, that’s why Hamlet’s mind is the way it is, he’s hanging out with these people. We cast the amazing Sarajane Alverson in both roles. It’s just her. And we call it the R & G Machine. [Laughs.] She’s figured out how to play both roles and do it in such a way that is, hmm, well, it makes complete sense when you watch it. It’ll be an odd thing, but we want it to be odd, we want it to stick out as being “What was THAT? So many other players are playing it normally, and yet here this happened. I can’t make sense of it.” And to me, I go perfect, as an audience member, you’re becoming a Hamlet. You don’t really know the full story, you’re just going, and you’re taken aback by it all. If we’re saying Hamlet murders everyone, which is technically what happens, in a way the audience is complicit to it…without knowing so. But that to me is exciting. People walking out of the door, and going, “Oh my goodness—did I help create that?”

I don’t like to give the secrets of the show away, but I will say that a person who’s never seen Shakespeare before, they think they will hate it, but they will come and they will love it. We are arranging the story in such a way that it is so relevant and so modern and so what we are all going through right now. And I could have a scholar come in, and that person would not be able to say, “Oh, those two? They made choices that completely defy this script.” We changed nothing in the script. We may have cut some things. And we made decisions about these characters that make them as strong as we’ve ever seen them. For instance, instead of Ophelia being this wilting flower of a girl, she’s strong. She knows what she wants. Her track is very brutal, what happens to her, but she’s a strong woman. And you look at it, and you think about it, and you think, OK, the Prince of Denmark is the smartest guy at court. He’s not going to date some dumb girl. I’m always confused about Ophelia being portrayed as “La-la-la, you don’t like me anymore? That’s terrible! I’ll just go die now.” [Laughs.] That’s just not enough for me.

You’re producing and playing Ophelia. What’s that process like for you, what’s the creative process like? How are you balancing those two very different roles?

I’ve been an actor for about 19 years. I know when to turn it on, and when to turn it off. I’ve become very good at that. With this production what I do is I separate my time. I know when I’m producer Kelly, and producer Kelly is there every time she’s not in rehearsal. And when she’s in rehearsal, she is not thinking about anything related to how this should look or how this should feel, or how the press will think about it. We just want to create an event that will make people say, “I never expected this…yet it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” That’s our only goal. Once you’re in an ensemble, too, that helps so much as an actor. You walk in, and you’re all on the same page. You’re all in the same world, and you’re all invested in that same story. So, I don’t even think about producing when I’m acting. It’s just a nonstarter. After the show, my director might come up to me and say, “OK, producer Kelly?” And I’ll be like, “Here!” And she’ll say, can we do this, what about that, what about this, what about this concept? We still concept together; the two of us still collaborate. And so for me, I have to be completely out of my head during that rehearsal to be able to come back and say what works and what doesn’t, what should we get rid of and what drives the story forward.

What else should people know about what you’re doing?

This is the first immersive theater production in St. Louis. I have five more planned in the pipeline, so it’s not a one-off production. It’s also not the only project I’m going to be working on; I have another one that I haven’t released yet which is very different from the immersive theater project. Almost the opposite. [Laughs.] Everyone says, nobody knows what immersive theater is, and I say, it doesn’t matter—just come to the show, and you’ll know what it is. So far, stepping back from my roles as an actor and a producer, I can say this is going to say this is going to be an intensely incredible production. We have five equity contracts on this one. So we have amazing actors coming in from out of town. We also have a lot of cast that is St. Louis-based, and they are incredible. Emily Brady Koplar of Wai Ming is doing our costumes. She dove right in there with my director and I, and said, this is my vision for what this is, and it was beautiful. She’s a designer, and this is what designers do—they make a statement, they make pieces that go together, that make sense together, so there’s no reason she couldn’t create pieces that make sense within this world. She said, “This is the most interesting challenge I think I’ve ever had, but I love it.”

What I tell people when they ask me oh, well, what’s happening, what’s different? I just say listen, what you expect, check it at the door. Because that’s not what you’re going to see. And you have to be comfortable with that, and just let it flow. Let it go right off you, and just experience it. Forget about your day, forget about what happened during your day. Enter our universe, and you get to be somebody else for two hours. Maybe even three, depending on when you show up. That’s a beautiful thing. The other thing is, we do welcome social media during our shows. In fact, that’s going on now. It’s all about intersecting stories, and people pulling in reports. We’re starting a Snapchat campaign where every actor, for about four or five days, is in charge of that Snapchat. They give you close looks at what’s going on with their character. So when you get to the beginning of the show, you’re going to know who everybody is. It will be fun surprise when you find out that I’m playing Ophelia, but I’m also playing the ghost with my other castmates. We’re playing those roles together, and our bodies will create gestures, and people for a second will go, “What is happening here?” But they will learn to understand our language. It’s such a funny phenomenon, in immersive theater, people will walk in and they’ll have had a cocktail or two, their shoulders are down from a long day at work, or they had a hard day, or maybe they’ve had a happy day—whatever. They come into the space and they move the way they move as human beings every day.

All of a sudden, when they see us doing our movements and they see us speaking in a certain way in this heightened language, they too start to follow us. And it’s amazing. By the end of the show, people will be walking like us. They will be floating around like us. They will be using their arms almost like they become dancers. They become a part of what they’re doing; they are it, and they don’t even know they’re doing it! It’s so fascinating and precious and exciting. It’s just an experience like no other.

Hamlet: See What I See happens November 12 through 18 at The Barnett on Washington (3207 Washington). Tickets are $55, or $35 with a student ID. For more information, go to theimmersivetheatreproject.com or visit the Immersive Theater Project on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat.