Exploring Intimacy, Love, and Relationships with ‘Lonely Hearts’ (Q&A)
An interview with Chicago’s Birch House Immersive about their upcoming show
Birch House Immersive, founded in 2016, is an arts company focused on “creating new immersive works while supporting its artists with residency and food.” Currently based out of Chicago, Birch House has worked across different formats within immersive theatre, from last fall’s exploratory sandbox show Cursed: An American Tragedy to their regularly occurring, themed supper club dinners. (And one of their founding members, Dean Corrin, is the former Midwest curator for No Proscenium.)
In more recent news, the company plans to bring back their intimate, Valentine’s Day-themed experience for a few people at a time this February. We asked Birch House’s Lauren Fields and Dean Corrin some questions about the small-scale production over email.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
No Proscenium (NP): Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background in the immersive arts?
Lauren Fields (LF): Lonely Hearts is the brainchild of myself, Dean Corrin, and Janie Killips. Together we are the creative team behind Birch House Immersive. We have been making Immersive work as Birch House for a couple years now, and before that we all worked on a variety of Immersive projects in a variety of styles and mediums, ranging from voyeuristic to task-based to site specific installations.
NP: What, in a nutshell, is the Lonely Hearts project about?
Dean Corrin (DC): Lonely Hearts is a series of private encounters between audience members and actors exploring different aspects of relationships and emotional intimacy.
NP: What inspired the team to make this experience?
DC: In between working on a couple of large scale projects (Dark Day and Cursed: An American Tragedy) we wanted to explore a more intimate and contemplative work, emphasizing personal interaction between audience members and actors. We were interested in the idea of using a bar for an experience, so we started with the question of who would be in a bar on Valentine’s Day and what would bring them there. The experience grew as we all started exploring our different responses to those questions.
NP: How is the audience incorporated into the work? What kinds of choices can the participants make?
DC/LF: Audience members rotate through a series of encounters with characters and interact in different ways with each. In some they may work with the character to create something, in others to offer counsel and help the characters to make decisions, and in others to take a role in the action. What is really rewarding for us about Lonely Hearts is seeing what the audience members bring to the conversation. All of the pieces are very emotionally intimate and ask some hard questions about love and relationships.
It’s interesting to see what baggage people bring into the room and what they choose to share with our actors. It can be a very healing experience to be so open and honest with a stranger in a way they might not be able to with the people in their everyday lives.
NP: How are you designing around audience agency, consent, and safety?
DC/LF: In Lonely Hearts our primary focus is the audience’s “emotional consent.” One thing we consistently return to in development is the idea of “invitation.” We offer the audience the opportunity to engage at the level in which they are comfortable. Even more so than our other work, Lonely Hearts is an opt-in experience, and we communicate to our actors the importance of honoring and elevating the contributions of the audience members.
In the 2018 version, we got a lot of comments from audience members new to immersive work concerned about “what we would do to them.” They loved discovering that the experience was guided by them, their interests, and their comfort. My favorite piece of feedback came from MIASMA creator Justin Brink, who said “You let me feel like I guided the experience by babbling.”
NP: How have audiences reacted so far?
DC/LF: We had such an overwhelmingly positive response to the first version of the show that we decided to create an all new version this year (with some familiar faces and characters!). The experience is about relationships and we were embraced by audience members whose personal feelings about relationships covered a broad spectrum. We had such a fun and fulfilling experience creating the first edition that we decided to return to the same world and explore other possibilities.
NP: Who is the ideal audience member for this show?
DC: This show is great for anyone who wants to engage in interesting conversations and share their feelings. It’s a show about love that embraces individuals, couples, and groups. Everyone has a different experience and a lot to talk about after the show. We like to think that the more the audience member offers, the more we are able to reflect back to them.
NP: What do you hope participants take away from the experience?
DC/LF: First, we hope that people will have a fun and entertaining evening and walk away with some stories to share. Lonely Hearts offers an opportunity for reflection on relationships and the ways that we enter, sustain, and end them, and we hope that through these conversations the audience members will find personal moments or experiences just for them.
Most importantly (despite the irony of the title), we hope that our audience will walk away feeling seen, connected, and anything but alone.
Lonely Hearts runs February 5–6 in Chicago. Tickets are 30.
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