Reboot Is a Unique Hybrid of Virtual Theater and Escape Room

Agent Halo (Jamila Joiner) in Reboot. Walking Shadow Theater

One of my favorite shows I’ve ever seen in Minneapolis was Dangerous Productions and Live Action Set‘s immersive Crime and Punishment in 2015, which, among its many achievements, boasted the building of a whole city in the Soap Factory basement. One virtue of live theater, the creators noted, was the ability to create unique experiences, places, and contexts that pull the audience out of their comfort zone. That thought returned to me several times as I stared into the eyes of a dozen strangers, most in their living rooms, during Walking Shadow’s immersive and virtual production, Reboot. Not every element clicked for me, but I’ve definitely never done anything like it.

Reboot isn’t a play, exactly. It has extended dramatic scenes, scripted and unscripted, and features live actors working on real sets. It has many characteristics in common with immersive theater—actors speak to the audience, and the direction of the story changes in small ways (and perhaps large ones) based on how the audience responds. It’s also part escape room, asking the audience to solve logic puzzles in order to open doors. Have you played the Fallout games? The story and puzzles all take serious inspiration from those bunkers as well.

But honestly, the format it most resembled (and I don’t mean this as a negative thing) is the online Zoom classes I took over the summer. I can’t think of any other time in my life where I sat at home, backgrounded by the couch and bare wall (which I became self-conscious about midway through the performance), where I could see and be seen by rooms full of other people of various ages, dispositions, interests, and ideals, all in their own living rooms, drinking wine, cuddling their cats, snuggled up under blankets. We all partook in a shared fiction for two hours, with varying degrees of commitment, while some Homeric heroes of acting got into that space together with all of us unreasonable personalities and acted like characters in a story! If someone’s tech setup was rough, they rolled with it. If one of the audience members was engaging in a strange way, they made that work too. At one point they even sent us to breakout chats.

Walking Shadow Theater

And we all had to work together! Not in physical reality, where we have all our physical and mental capacities at our disposal, but from our little Brady Bunch boxes, sorting through codes and old emails trying to figure out passwords and break into new environments to solve new puzzles. These weren’t our best-presenting selves. Each of us was in our own dark room, staring at a glowing screen, pretending, alert, but in many ways alone.

Two years ago I would have dismissed such a thing as laughable, overcomplicated, maybe even impossible. I’ve watched the Zoom performance evolve up close the last two years, and Reboot feels like some new creature born in the wake of a meteor crash. As a virtual live performance, it serves a social function in this moment beyond its existence as a standalone work of art. It gives people an option for enjoying theater and community without leaving their homes. And it works in a lot of genres that people like, which means that many types of people can engage. I don’t care about logic puzzles, but you could see certain eyes in our audience light up when those appeared. When the moral quandaries and character moments happened, I became more vocal.

My first instinct is to complain that there weren’t enough such moments and that challenging your audience’s biases involves more than just asking them difficult questions. But in doing that, I would be insisting that this unique experience fit the narrow parameters of what I’ve seen before. I would imagine that in order for something like this to accommodate so many different kinds of audience members at the same time, the structure would need to be incredibly well defined. I suspect Reboot leans toward logic puzzles not just to please a separate audience, but also because logic allows a wide variety of people to engage on the same level.

My favorite aspect of the production was the small details, and if anything, I wish we’d had more time to explore all of them. The main drama involves a special agent (Jamila Joiner) working with the audience, who are all in-fiction hackers, to help her break into a secret government facility. These scenes are pretty stilted, by design. Her job is to communicate the basic premise of the new room to the audience and then coax them to a solution if they take too long. However, the archival footage, emails, screenshots of Facebook posts, and even the design of the rooms themselves were as meticulous and specific as those prompts were obvious and broad. It all felt very lived in, and it made me wish there were a different show where I could disappear into the walls.

Many of Reboot’s best moments qualify as spoilers, a consequence of structuring your play around puzzles and unlocking doors. The degree to which it’s dramatically satisfying is wholly dependent on the audience’s investment. Maybe if you knew everyone in the audience (as is often the case with escape rooms) you could all agree to dig deeper into the fiction and make it a more satisfying dramatic experience. But then you would lose one of the signature elements of the show: debating ideas and solutions with complete strangers. It’s drama sneaking into a place where it feels like it doesn’t belong, and whatever my misgivings, I’m glad I had the experience.

Reboot runs through February 27, 2022. For more information on the show and to purchase tickets, visit walkingshadow.org. You can also find Walking Shadow Theater on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.