Denver Fringe 2023 Immersive Superlatives
Our Denver correspondent puts the spotlight on stellar work.
We’ve been fringing in Denver for four years now. One fully remote year (2020), one hybrid year (2021), and two fully in-person events the last two years. Designed to be accessible and affordable, single tickets were $15 while a full access pass was $75, the price of five single shows.
For those who might never have been to a Fringe Festival before, the idea is it’s a safe space for performance artists of all varieties to share their work on small stages for small audiences. I found it overwhelming to choose from 55 shows across 12 venues, but once I looked closely at the descriptions and content tags, it was pretty easy to narrow my focus and plan out my weekend.
Which is what I’d strongly recommend planning your own Fringe experience before attending. You can always take the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach and still have a grand time, but if you want to maximize your investment, a loosely structured plan will serve you well. Be sure to take into consideration if you’ll be driving and thus be able to venture further out to venues on the outskirts, or if you’ll be traveling on foot and need to keep a tighter radius. Also take into account the size of your group, which can hinder your ability to quickly venue-hop, and thus call for more padding between shows.
And always pick a wild card or two, especially if you’re attending on a festival pass. You might catch a dud, or you might stumble into the best thing you see all weekend.
I was able to see six of the nine immersive shows at the 2023 Denver Finge, and they each brought something different to the table.
Most Audience-Centered: Consultation with the Corpse
Presented by Benjamin Ross Nicholson
Consultation with the Corpse was an intimate one-on-one experience that took place in the back room of a small bar. Sitting on the floor in the dark with the low buzz of bar patrons in the background, The Consultant introduced me (The Corpse) to his dark line of work, pointing out that “We’re all currently dying.” Looking over his suite of microservices, all centered around death, I was asked to select three for my session.
The first one I selected was called “Fun-eral”, wherein I was asked about my own experience with funerals. We talked about how funerals can be sad, but also a celebration of life. We proceeded to plan and map out my own funeral, which I fashioned to be like a mini-festival and campout, because that’s how I’d want to be celebrated.
For my second microservice, “Danse Macabre”, we discussed how the visual depictions of skeletons dancing impacts our understanding of what it means to die and what happens when we’re dead. I was asked to select a song that makes me think of death (“The End” by The Doors) while devising a dance to go with it. I performed a slow, light shuffle, as my consultant mirrored my movements, followed by more mutual introspection on what the moves signified.
For my third microservice, I selected “Death Day”, which used computer software to calculate a possible date of death for me based on statistical averages and my short answers to a few quick questions. The point of this service was less about how close my death date might be, and more about whether or not a long life automatically equates to a “good life.”
As a massive fan of the macabre, this new unique concept would have surely spoken to me under any circumstances. But I must share that my circumstances were also unique, as I had laid my father to rest just a week before. Through that lens, Consultation with the Corpse repeatedly brought me to both tears and laughter. It was a truly therapeutic experience, being so vulnerable with a stranger around emotional wounds that were so fresh.
Beyond all that though, Consultation with the Corpse is a remarkable work because it normalizes a topic that our culture treats as taboo, that it is only through knowing and exploring death that we can become familiar with it, and thus be less afraid when we have to face it.
Most Immersive: Feels Like Yesterday
Presented by Leah Cardenas
Feels Like Yesterday had the crucial elements I look for in an immersive experience: a simple story that tangibly progresses; choices for the audience where their interaction affects how events unfold in the experience; opportunities to freely engage with the actors.
In this story, we meet a group of friends playing tag as children, providing an early peek into their personalities. We watched passively as they daydream about what the future holds for each of them. With a time jump in the experience, each audience member is paired with one of the friends with meeting them in some context that explains how they progressed through life. One became a single mom working in hospitality, one moved away to become a scientist in the big city, another is managing a local bar, and so on.
I was paired to be a new hire at the bar. As I sat down in the back office to chat with my new manager, Jim, I learned that his high school reunion was the next day, and that he was nervous about it. We talked about why that might be, and explored the topic of losing (or keeping) touch with friends over time — which he personally attempted to do by writing letters, and invited me to write one to an acquaintance of my own.
After another time jump, the class reunion began, which I attended as Jim’s friend and coworker. As the decades-old friend group reunited and made small talk, they introduced the audience members paired as their plus one guest for the reunion. It became apparent that the friend group was one member smaller than it was when they were kids, as the audience learned that the missing friend passed away years prior. As they reminiscenced about their friend and how they are missed, a sensation of sadness emerged, juxtaposed by a desire to live life to its fullest and cherish what you have in the moment. And, most importantly, to not let life’s complications get in the way of maintaining the foundational friendships in your life.
Best Intro to Immersive: Camping With Dad
Presented by Carter McGrath
Wholesome, fun, and easy to “step into,” Camping With Dad was the perfect introduction for immersive theatre first-timers.
With the audience playing the role of campers checking in for the night, we took a seat inside the minimal, yet very effective, set. An artificial campfire sat at the center of the dimly lit room with one empty camping chair and six foam sleeping pads arranged around it in a starburst. At the outer end of each pad sat a triangular, two-foot tall “tent” illuminated with a tiny battery-operated lantern. While we waited for our “Dad”, most of the audience laid down and stretched out on their assigned pads, resting their heads inside the tents.
With my eyes closed and crickets chirping in the background, I heard Dad kick over a few beer cans as he sat down to get the fire going. With only a little fuss, the campfire “lit up” in red light and he proceeded to rile us from our slumber.
“You kids really tuckered yourselves out on that hike today, huh?” he asked as the audience sat up and positioned themselves around the fire.
And just like that, with hardly any context, I was camping with Dad and my five stranger-siblings. I didn’t know what was happening (yet), but I understood enough to play along.
After reminiscing about camping with his own dad when he was on the verge of adulthood like all of us, Dad poured a round of whiskey shots from his flask. The shots weren’t actually liquor (they tasted more like smokey tea) but it signaled that we could keep it real with our dad.
“You can ask me anything,” he said with sincerity as he looked around the fire at each of us.
Some sticks had been pre-loaded with faux, felt marshmallows and stashed by the fire, which Dad handed out. As we “roasted” our felt-mellows, Dad swatted at one that “caught on fire,” which had the intentional effect of slightly unraveling the felt-mellow, revealing a question on the inside for my stranger-sibling to ask Dad.
Some of us caught on and followed suit, while other stranger-siblings looked confused about why the others were asking such specific, personal questions. Some even asked questions not dictated by the felt-mellows. But Dad answered them all, one by one, playing off of our responses as we played off of his.
Best Performance: In Loving Memory
Presented by Two Cent Lion
Although it was a bit of a stretch to label this mostly proscenium-style show as immersive, it still had some interactive elements and — most notably — a gut-wrenching performance from the solo actor.
The most immersive aspects of the show were front-loaded as guests filed in and were encouraged to sign a guestbook before taking a seat in a mock funeral parlor.
“Don’t worry if you didn’t know him,” the host awkwardly told us before pausing to add, “I didn’t either.”
Their comedic nervousness was palpable, setting the tone for the hilarious, blundering ceremony that would follow.
Colloquially known throughout the Fringe Festival as “Mr. Squirrel’s Funeral” due to clever and curious pre-show marketing, I went into this experience expecting a silly, over-dramatized version of a child’s service for a deceased pet they never actually knew. There was certainly plenty of that, but it also took an unexpected left turn into a raw and emotional exploration of identity and parental expectations tied to that identity.
At the show’s pivotal moment, what started as a contemplation of Mr. Squirrel’s little squirrel life, doing squirrel things, quickly escalated into an emotional, booming tirade about a hurtful, unaccepting father. Were we no longer talking about the dead animal in the shoebox on the table? It dawned on me that it might not be Mr. Squirrel who we had gathered to mourn, but perhaps some past version of the host’s identity.
By forcibly clinging to and celebrating Mr. Squirrel’s life because it felt like the right thing to do — a life that in actuality none of us, including our host, never actually knew — were we, in reality, deadnaming them? Should we have been celebrating the life of the squirrel, or his ultimate demise?
Funniest: AI Spy With My ChatGPT Eye
Presented by The Museum of AI
Kicking off with a fun and relevant “waiting” activity, participants were quizzed on The Museum of AI’s collection of “AI artifacts” in the lobby. When it was time to begin, we entered a screenwriting war room to find coffee-stained scripts strewn about and a suspicious amount of Taylor Swift memorabilia tacked to the walls. A stressed writer sat hunched over his typewriter.
Struggling with writer’s block, he filled us in on the parameters of the scene, split us into two groups, and asked us to deliver an “award-winning” script. At the screenwriter’s request, my assigned colleague and I sat at the workstation to type out a ChatGPT prompt in alignment with the scene specifics. We even threw in a few wild cards to spice it up. Both teams were interrupted a few times by the screenwriter’s strong hinting regarding elements in the room, which were nudges to include certain details, such as inserting product placement within the scene.
What we ended up with were two somewhat similar, but hilariously different stories that took less than ten minutes to write using AI. Each team read their scripts in character, which conjured up tons of laughs from both teams (There were also lots of laughs when “writing” the scenes, too).
The end result was an authentic engagement with ChatGPT that demonstrated how you could technically use ChatGPT to write a screenplay, but also how absurd AI can be, and that any kind of creative work needs a human’s touch.
Bonus: Since the screenplay was such a hit and went straight to Hollywood, we each got a celebratory bag of popcorn as a thank you.
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