There is now a small vial of sand on my desk. It was not there in the morning. But then night fell, and I walked to the Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church on Orange Street, and I climbed into a cellar marked with an 8” x 11” paper sheet as a bomb shelter, and watched various actors dance and study papers and give each other meaningful semi-erotic looks across small rooms, and stood complicit as a woman was exorcised, and stood even more complicit as a man had at least a dozen of his bones snapped in half, and turned away at the prompting of another actor only to be grabbed by that tortured man and pulled into a dark room lit by only a small plastic candle, where he told me a story about “two lovers, sitting on a bench, holding hands” while holding my hand. When he let go, I had a vial of sand pressed into my palm. Confused? So was I. The whole experience fit precisely into my expectations for “immersive theatre,” thrilling and bizarre, except that I felt less immersed than I ever have watching a conventional show of equal quality.
Sheffield Scientific, an original immersive theatrical experience that ran April 1 through April 4, was directed by Alex Gross, GH ’29, as the latest show from his Valley Road Theatre Company, which he founded in 2022. While past productions from Valley Road have spun classic plays immersive, Sheffield is an entirely original work created by a wide creative team who including Gross, actor-producers Eason Rytter, TD ’27 and Alyssa Marvin, JE ’29, writers Rytter and Ryann Schaffer, MY ’27, and choreographer Parker Mednikow, GH ’29. The abstraction of the show makes it more difficult than with most theatre to discern who was responsible for which elements; what I can say is that the actors were clearly given very particular instructions, and they all executed them with precision and excellence.
Once the whole audience crowded into the basement, a party started—dancing, singing, general merriment that we were encouraged to join. Mr. Sheffield (Abram Knott, MC ’27) welcomed us to the shelter. It was the end of the world, we were told. There was no hope. But, apparently, good memories could be made into a sandlike powder which they kept in jars and in vials. It was not explicitly said, but I gathered the argument: because making any new good memories was impossible, you might as well just relive the old ones.
Audience members then got sorted into groups and were led around the “bomb shelter.” In each room, haunting music played, and actors silently performed scenes, danced, or moved semi-rhythmically as the small group of audience members watched from the perimeter like tourists getting a monument explained. Then, either a curt nod or the utterance of a “Come on” or “This way” would lead us into a different room, where a scene, entirely disconnected from the previous one, and often with no overlapping actors, would play out. Then again, again, again, again, until it was 11:15 p.m. and my head was spinning.
Sheffield had almost no dialogue and a loose relationship to chronology, so I learned very little about the characters. Ticketing emails referred to them as “faculty,” but one was dressed as a general, two as manservant lackeys, one as a mid-century woman, another as a mid-century daughter, and another as a mid-century harried man. It was never clear what sort of education was occurring.
Nor, frankly, was it ever clear what exactly was happening, or why. The Daughter (Hadley Murphey, ES ’29) threw paper airplanes with the Woman, her mother (Abigail Murphy, BK ’27), then got violently exorcised. The General (Marvin) rolled bowling balls at the Daughter, then later played a disappointingly bulletless round of Russian Roulette. Lackey One (Jordan Mincy, SY ’26) fought a chair and won through the power of interpretative dance; Lackey Two (Madeleine Ford, SY ’29) snorted memory powder then wrapped her face in bandages, unwrapped them, and slowly rolled them back into tight cylinders. The Harried Man (Rytter) got tortured, told me a story about lovers, handed me a vial, made a failed pass at the Woman, danced with the Woman and the Daughter, and somehow stayed alive when all others, aside from Sheffield himself, fought each other and died at the end.
What made all of this “immersive,” I surmise, was that the actors and the audience occupied the same physical space. Occasionally, like when I was dragged into the candlelit room, or when the Woman asked my group questions like “Why do you remember?” and we all answered, we were participants in the scenes. The line between the actor and the audience blurs; our actions contribute to the scene. In every new room, the tension loomed: what would they ask us to do?
In most scenes, though, we didn’t do anything. My group stood in a clump and watched the silent, inexplicable scene play out, then followed someone into the next room. In quiet moments, like when the Woman stares at an old photograph and pours one jar of memory-powder into another, I felt like a regular theatrical audience member, only with the nagging sense that this could have happened on a stage. In louder moments, however, like when the Lackeys exorcise the Daughter in a terrifyingly effective strobe sequence, I felt horribly complicit. I’d watched as she was captured and gagged, and now she lay three feet away from me, crying out, “HELP! HELP! MAMA!” I did nothing. I could do nothing. If I acted as I felt compelled, and crouched beside her and unwrapped the bandages binding her, I would have broken the rules I have learned from decades of watching and participating in theatre, and learned that night during Sheffield. In every previous scene, we stood to the side and watched. The exorcism was so tightly choreographed and stylized that I did not feel invited to participate. So, instead, I was a bystander.
When the Daughter was slumped on the ground and I felt compelled to help her, I was immersed. But when I realized that I could not act on that compulsion, the limits of my immersion hurtled to the fore.
Almost every disparate element of Sheffield Scientific made me hyperaware of my status as an audience member. Any details about the plot were obfuscated by wordless scenework, inconsistent character relationships, and the fact that, due to how the groups are moved around, I only saw two-thirds of the total scenes, and apparently missed the most expositional ones. I was engaged in the scenes not because I was engrossed in the story, nor because I cared about any of the characters, but because the whole thing felt like an intellectual exercise of piecing together a puzzle without a reference picture. And the core element of the immersion, that we all moved around and stood to watch scenes, tore my attention away from the characters and onto myself. The General strutted down the lane of a bowling alley, passing inches away from me. Was I too close? Should I step back? What’s behind me—oh, the gutter. I should watch my footing. I looked back up and had missed that the General pulled out a pistol.
I was given that vial of sand early in the show, and in every subsequent scene, I believed it would become relevant. I gripped it between my fingers and held it at the actors’ eye levels, expecting someone to notice it and gasp and grab it from me. I’d become integral to the show—and we, as an audience, would become narrative actors. But it never came up again. At the end of the show, we were all brought back to the main room, and I slipped the vial into my pocket.
Sheffield Scientific was, in many respects, a rousing success. It made an initial skeptic have a lot of fun, and gave that same skeptic a trinket to keep forever afterwards, and had actors who all showed remarkable commitment to their premise and choreography. But I am used to judging the quality of theatre by noticing what keeps my attention. If I am invested in a show in proscenium, my eyes are glued to the stage, my ears pick up only the dialogue and effects, and my body melts into the chair and out of my conscious mind. I am not analyzing, at least not actively. My body’s labor is limited to its automatic functions. During Sheffield, however, all I was aware of was myself: my mind cobbling the story together, my leg falling asleep as I kneeled and held the Harried Man’s hand. I was not immersed, but startled into the hypercognizance that those people dancing and writhing in front of me were actors, and that I was an audience member, and that we had engaged in a strict social contract solidifying those roles.
An Editor-in-Chief, 2025-2026.
