First thing is first: How do you define game-based LARP theatre? And how is this theatre that everyone can enjoy?

Carly: We define LARP Theatre as an immersive experience that the audience has as much agency to impact that story and its outcome as any of the actors. The personalities are universal and the themes are relevant to us today so we often have people come in reluctant to talk to our actors who quickly find themselves fully engaged because they connect with our characters as people. That’s one of the most exciting parts, our audience stops seeing our characters as Puritans or Victorians but as people they identify with and can empathize with.

Diana: It’s a form of theatre that is both interactive and immersive – you’re interacting with the characters as a free agent AND you’re fully immersed in another world- that allows audience members to do what actors do for their job: inhabit a fictional world and make choices within it. Just as traditional theatre has created structures and systems that help actors safely find character motivation and make choices onstage to tell a story, we’ve developed new techniques and systems that enable audiences to explore and make decisions without becoming overwhelmed or endangered.

Where did you come up with the idea for this installment of Daemonologie?

Carly: We knew we wanted to leave the 17th century. There are many stories left to tell about the intersections of the supernatural and vulnerable populations in that time but we wanted to play in a new space. We saw Evan perform his seance show last October and the idea stayed with me. It isn’t witch trials or hysteria, but it is another point in American cultural history where society was facing the unknown. In 1849 the young country is struggling to define itself culturally, facing waves of immigration, political instability, economic turmoil and is only about 15 year away from civil war. This is also when interest in spiritualism begins to take hold. I had heard about the Fox Sisters and numerous other mediums who had risen to fame and fortune, most being exposed as frauds, while others were able to hold on to people’s imaginations. It seemed like the next great chapter where American identity was influenced by the supernatural and I wanted to dig into why and what it meant.

Diana: Carly and I both have scholarly backgrounds in Irish history and folklore, which led to the immigration story that is really at the heart of Smoke and Mirrors. The history of Irish immigrant women working as domestics in the Northeast is now more widely told in museums, but we still need to talk about it more. I worked at the House of the Seven Gables for three seasons when I first moved to Salem and spent a good amount of time tangling with Hawthorne and his contemporaries. I’m really an early modernist- I study the period between the Renaissance and Reformation and the French Revolution- but I have a fascination with America’s turgid antebellum decades, so I wanted a story that bit into that period and showed what Hawthorne was really like. I didn’t tell Carly until later that one of the characters she devised is actually a Hawthorne archetype, nor did we know until later that the Hawthornes did attend one of the Fox sisters’ séances. Once we had decided to set the story in 1849, connecting the birth of spiritualism and Irish Famine immigration to a particular moment in Hawthorne’s life, the story naturally slipped into context: Salem is a left-behind seaport in a troubled young republic that has just won the Mexican War- a crucial moment in the shaping of both the United States and Mexico that haunts us to the present day – and is about to pass the Fugitive Slave Act. It’s a country in the throes of multiple reform movements – abolitionism, the earliest days of the women’s suffrage movement, prison reform, and mental health reform. Meanwhile, Europe was erupting in a series of revolutions, Romanticism has peaked, the California Gold Rush is ongoing, and… I could go on and on. It’s an incredibly complex, divisive historical moment.

The audience won’t see most of that, but the depth of her research and her ability to answer ours and the cast’s questions makes the show infinitely richer; it’s all underpinned by the complexity of real human cultures to a degree that’s difficult to invent,unless you have years to work with the same material. So again, having lots of historical facts to work with is a gift. The characters and their back-stories also determine a lot of the themes we focus on, but it also runs the other way, because the characters are shaped by certain themes and concepts. This kind of work demands extremely intelligent, flexible actors who are capable of immense vulnerability. It’s highly demanding and requires a discipline that most of them have learned through doing other kinds of audience-interactive performance, including historic interpretation and classroom teaching. A hefty proportion of our current cast and crew are also educators, which I think is interesting.

This is your first time including characters that were real people. What are the challenges of using real historical figures as inspiration?

Diana: At this point, including Hawthorne and the Peabody sisters feels more like including my next door neighbors than anything else. I’ve spent a lot of my working life portraying real historical figures and working with other actors who are doing the same. It just means you have to make more discrete choices about the characters’ motives and interactions, and the actors actually have more to work with because they can read their personal letters, look at their portraits, and visit their houses. There’s a misconception that “sticking to the facts” is restrictive. It’s not. It does some of your work for you and frees you to focus on thornier problems.

Hawthorne is one of Salem’s most celebrated figures yet beyond his writing most people don’t know much about him and he’s an intensely interesting, complex and often troubling personality. As for Sophia and Mary their stories are (in my opinion) more interesting than Hawthorne’s and frankly, their real stories are more sensational than the fiction we have put them in Smoke and Mirrors. We didn’t feel like adding these characters to this story would detract from historical understanding of the time or the people themselves.

Are there certain things you take into consideration before releasing one of the Daemonologie anthologies into the world?

Carly: Yes, we do consider things like is there enough general cultural knowledge for an audience to walk into? We also take into consideration the possible ways the themes of the show and the ideas of the historical character will intersect with where we are in the present. Last year in Blood and Bone, Diana had written the show back in March of 2018 with themes about sexual violence and the vulnerability of women who come forward but by the time we were playing it with audiences in October we were in the middle of the Kavanaugh confirmation the mood was very different. It worked because our audiences were very motivated to find a way to bring justice to our characters but we do try to consider how an audience might react to themes we bring up. There is one show we have drafted but we will take more time to develop it because we want to make sure we are ready for the questions it brings up.

Diana: When I wrote last year’s Blood and Bone, which was set in Essex County in 1690 during King William’s War, I didn’t expect most of the audience to believe the story of sexual violence that emerges within it, and I somehow tripped upon writing it at a particular moment when that cultural conversation was taking a decisive shift. I’d spent years thinking about the question of abuse, PTSD and witchcraft and finally got to write about it at this particularly explosive moment that I couldn't have predicted. This shaped the audience’s tendency to condemn a certain unlikeable character for magical, rather than physical, crimes that they may not actually have committed. We also tend to make choices that challenge the audience’s preconceptions or stereotypes about a time period and its people. One attendee at Blood and Bone was astonished to discover that 17th century Englishwomen were not chattel (for the record, they weren’t). I suspect audiences will respond strongly to the issues of social class, immigration, mental health, race and gender in Smoke and Mirrors, but it's hard to know exactly what to expect.

What led you to partnering with PEM for this production? And what does having the museum’s support mean to you?

Carly: Partnering with PEM has been something we have been wanting to do for a while. PEM has so many storied properties and artifacts in their collection and over the years PEM has become an innovator in how audiences interact with art, history and the interconnections between the two. We knew PEM was exploring ways to interact with and interpret the houses and knowing how creative and imaginative the other engagements had been, we thought this might be the right time and right show. Having the museums support has been a boon for our process. Having all these curators, artifacts and collections at our disposal has allowed us to develop a more complex world for our story. It’s also been invigorating to have museum experts, historians, artists and curators at the PEM to play with us in the realm of speculative history as we seek to interpret this home and the characters who fill it.

Diana: I knew that PEM had previously produced theatrical programming in its historic properties and I’ve longed to “activate” some of the properties so that the public can interact with them more. I belong firmly to the active use, anti-velvet-rope school of historic house interpretation, and I started working with Intramersive in part to test the boundaries of museum theatre. PEM’s support for us as a local company telling local stories validates our experience as a community, and it enables Intramersive to produce our best work by lifting financial and promotional burdens from the shoulders of a very young and small but rapidly growing business. Like most working artists, our three-person staff all have multiple jobs. By supporting us, PEM is making it possible for local artists to produce new work on national themes and tie arts and humanities disciplines together.

October in Salem is unlike anything else. How do you skirt the line between the hype and the authentic?

Carly: We don’t! A lot of the hype about Salem is rooted in poorly interpreted or misunderstood history and folklore. People come here because they are looking for something otherworldly, something magical, proof of the world beyond. They are here for many of the same reasons people gathered around seance tables, looking into mirrors, hovering fingers on planchettes or counting knocks. By presenting a show that strives to create the most accurate scenario we can of a fictional seance night in Salem we can’t help but appeal to people who are here because of the hype but we hope our audience leaves with a deeper sense of connection, not to spirits, but to our cultural predecessors and to what drives them to want to seek out the unknown. Our shows aren’t here to answer if there are spirits or demons, but our shows always look question an audience as to what drives a story to be told.

Diana: By being genuine, both in the questions we ask and the answers we give (or encourage the audience to find for themselves). I think that much of the poorly interpreted history in Salem has actually evolved to fill emotional needs and provide narratives that help individuals to make sense of their own society by contrasting it with the past.

I responded “Didn’t you just arrest the woman who did it?” He said “No! We just didn’t like her, but who actually killed the kid?” And I turned around on this crowd of 40 people at 11:30 on a Friday night and we had our first big talk back. We spent about 40 minutes unpacking the audiences choices, the character motives etc. Everyone stayed, it was cold, we were outside, on a sea wall in the wind and everyone stayed to discuss how they basically had just done what so many people had done in 1692 and why. That was really the moment I knew the work was doing something right and we needed to keep going. That’s also when we realized talkbacks needed to be a thing.

Diana: I distinctly remember an audience member who was so enthused they attempted to follow a demon and its victim as it was leading them away to hell at the end of the show. We can only take you so far… there were also audience members who wanted to perform an autopsy on a dead character, forgetting that the actor playing him was of course not dead, and that he might object to being dissected for theatrical purposes. Blood and Bone is also the only show I’ve ever worked on that incurred repeat ticket sales and talkbacks after ever show for which the majority of the audience stayed every time.

What makes an Intramersive event different than other theatrical productions?

Carly: In more traditional theater production the audience is passive, they sit in the audience and watch actors in a world that only exists on stage. In immersive theatre you are, to poorly paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer “in the world but not of it,” the audience can access the world but not impact the world of the story. In an Intramersive event you are in the world and you can impact it, characters depend on you to stand by them, secrets may or may not get told. Everyone in one of our events has a different experience from anyone else, even in the same show.

Diana: All audiences influence the performance of live theatre, whether they know it or not, and no two performances are ever alike. This is much easier to see and feel at Intramersive events because the illusion of the proscenium is gone; you’re actively suspending your disbelief in order to participate. You're doing a lot of the same things that actors do when they're onstage, but with far less pressure, because there’s no right way of doing it, no director and no script, and you’re not alone; the actors are there to help you, and the other audience members are part of your team. It’s the ultimate collaborative storytelling, and it’s unique and unrepeatable.

For those that might be wary of immersive theater, what do you want them to know about what you do?

Carly: You don’t have to talk to the actors if you don’t want to! We have many people who do not want to interact but they are curious about what we do. Our shows are really at your comfort level, you don’t need to know anything about 1849, seances etc. you don’t need to assume a character (unless you want to) you don’t need to dress in costume (unless you want to) but at any time, if you want to jump in and give your thoughts, share an experience or reveal a detail you overheard or saw you can.