A spa day, a sound bath, a moving meditation and an initiation into strange and tentacle-crafted rites, “Bottom of the Ocean,” an immersive experience staged in a semi-finished Brooklyn basement, ranks as the weirdest show in town right now. , in a city that doesn’t lack weird. How strange is it? Show me another work that hides baby octopuses (yes, okay, fake baby octopuses) in the communal bathroom.
“Bottom of the Ocean” is the third production, after “Houseworld” and “Whisperlodge,” from Andrew Hoepfner, who runs a new company called Houseworld Immersive, dedicated to participatory theater. I’d missed the two previous shows, but in the past month or so a few friends had recommended “Bottom of the Ocean” and I’d heard it said in conversation. Booking a ticket started to feel a bit like fate. And there are worse Tuesday night fortunes than being delivered to the cellar door of a 19th-century church across the street from a smoke and vape shop. Knock at the appointed time and a small window will open. Speak the password and a man in elaborate robes will play a xylophone and welcome you to new worlds.
I can’t really tell you what “Bottom of the Ocean” – which you can experience individually, double or in a group of five – is all about. I probably shouldn’t. Immersion depends on surprise, on not knowing what you will encounter around the next corner. More abstract than compelling hits like ‘Sleep No More’ or ‘Then She Fell’, ‘Bottom of the Ocean’ broadly explores themes of change, death and rebirth. Often there is an undersea motif, but that evaporates in certain rooms.
The show borrows, ecumenically, from ancient rites (the Eleusinian Mysteries seem to be a particular point of inspiration) and New Age practices. It simply makes up some rituals. At one point I may have worshiped a jellyfish.
Throughout the performance, the performance insists on radical intimacy. During the preshow, you’ll be given a safe word to utter if touch isn’t your thing, though the touch is gentle and respectful and never given without permission. But not all intimacy is physical. The three actors (Hoepfner, Chia Kwa and Naja Newell on the night I was there) play characters, but you only play yourself. And over the course of the performance, you’ll be asked to list your own regrets, desires, and prayers.
I’m not used to making these kinds of disclosures to strangers. I barely get them from my therapist. So if you pride yourself on privacy and personal boundaries, the show can stir up some very tortuous feelings. (Perhaps that tortuosity is appropriate for a show with so many cephalopods.) Those, like me, with poor night vision should be careful. The stairs are steep. And those, like me, who don’t like singing in public – well, do your warm-up.
I’ve thought about the politics of immersive theater, what it means to prefer individual experience over communal coexistence. And I thought about it a few more times during ‘Bottom of the Ocean’, at least when I wasn’t thinking about the jellyfish or whether the fire burning on the salver might be a little high or how I got to the emergency exit in the dark. But the goals of “Bottom of the Ocean” are strictly apolitical. The show instead favors inwardness and reflection over action, sending each contestant on a private journey toward something like peace.
Personally, the deepest part of my soul is not my favorite destination, but there is so much to enjoy along the way. Only two designers are credited – Laura Borys, who created the hallucinatory costumes, and the technical designer Howard Rigberg – but “Bottom of the Ocean” is a triumph of style and low-budget ingenuity, achieved by the simplest means: balloons, beans. , wash, water. In the least square meter it creates a sensory deluge. Each new room reveals a strange and distinctive environment.
If I sometimes found the proximity uncomfortable (the proximity and singing), discomfort is the interaction spent for two hours in what can feel like a lucid dream. At the end I emerged, from one kind of warm, wet dark into another. My aura, if I had one, was definitely cleansed.
Bottom of the ocean
At Gymnopedia, Brooklyn; boto.nyc. Running time: 2 hours.