Unbridled Energy at Annex Theatre

 

I’m in a show right now at Annex Theatre at 11th and Pike on Capitol Hill called Leave Only Footprints. It’s an immersive show, blending elements of haunted house and escape room with an overarching vibe about a fictional state park in Washington. I play “The Camper,” who tells scary, spooky stories around a fire. 


The audience is free to explore the space however they please and interact with the various characters. One recent night, when the very first pair of audience members came into the campground and sat down, I asked one of them what they are afraid of, as I am supposed to do. “Death,” they said. OK. Fair. Many of my scary stories include references to death. But then they went deep into it, talking about someone they knew, who had died recently. Maybe it was a family member. I don’t know because it really threw me. Like, this is too heavy! I’m not your therapist! I’m not your pastor. 


It was so earnest and heartfelt. I didn’t think they were making it up. And it was a gift really that this person would spool out this story to some dope in a costume sitting around a fake fire. 


I wasn’t sure what to do, though. How to react? How to do it in character? I couldn’t just ask them to walk next door to Vermillion and have a drink and talk about it. 


So I told my story about a park ranger who is crushed to death under a foul, wilderness-destroying steel machine. As the story goes, a part of the ranger lingers on and joins a swirling cloud of spirits of other creatures that had been destroyed by the machine. Then the cloud forms into a single beam, which strikes the machine with all the unbridled energy of the earth. And the machine is destroyed, bringing the world back into balance. 


The audience member got the connection. They told me they did. It was about people’s spirits or souls or memories, something important, living on after they are gone. In that same moment, I connected to the emotional truth of the story in a way I hadn’t done before. 


This was like a flashback to many years ago when I was doing playback improv, when people would share these kinds of deeply personal things and I, along with the other actors would “play back” their story to them and we would all join in one heart and mind. When we did those shows, this was the kind of thing we were dying (so to speak) to hear -- something so juicy that you could really get into it. 


Theatre is supposed to be about – among maybe many other things – actor and audience sharing an emotional connection through art. That night it was. 

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