I entered into the first room of Sounds and Sorcery at The Vaults unsure what to expect, but was delighted to see the interesting first step in the experience—projections of human outlines on the ceiling above circular cushioned furniture communicated wordlessly that we were supposed to lay on our backs and watch a projection on the ceiling. Settling in wearing my personal headphones I waited for the visual experience to begin. Unfortunately, the actual animation presented along with the music was less exciting than the experience of entering the space; a series of musical instruments spun, grew, shrank, and transformed in a symmetrical circular projection on the ceiling that felt oddly representational and continued to a point where I began to feel bored.

While further sections of the “immersive music concert experience” were more engaging, this beginning predicted the rest of my experience in The Vaults. I was intermittently extremely engaged and slightly disappointed with different sections of the varied experience. I found it to be an interesting exploration of the possibilities of immersion, if one that could have stood to lean into immersion more for a better result.

The design of the spaces on the whole was quite beautiful, and it was a joy to explore these large areas and see what had been done with set, props, and light to create a world to go along with the music of each section, inspired by the animation of Fantasia. Exploring these areas was a lovely experience, and I especially enjoyed when I got glances of the actual form of The Vaults themselves and how the design worked with this found space. However, I did not realize until almost half-way through my night that there were intended start times for the ideal experience of a narrative with the music in each room, communicated through somewhat confusing light-up clocks in the hallways. The beginning instructions could perhaps have done better to inform the audience of this, and I was a bit disappointed to realize I may have missed some of the intended experience. However, once I realized this it was delightful to see how changes in light along with the music really could create a narrative along with the music in rooms such as The Rite of Spring.

As far as the “theater” aspect of immersive theater in Sounds and Sorcery, I would have loved a little more. As one of my classmates noted, this felt less like immersive theater and more like wandering through beautiful spaces to find proscenium theater. The sections with performers all were surprisingly traditional in format, with separate audience and performer space as well as quite specific time schedules. I enjoyed the performances, but they left me wondering why these were the only places with human performers in the experience. Dance or movement by performers scattered throughout the spaces really could have brought to life the immersive theatrical experience of the evening. Leaving these beautifully designed immersive spaces empty of performers felt like a bit of a waste.

On the whole, the set design was the strongest and most compelling aspect of the experience. The very ending was absolutely beautiful. After a slightly disappointing projection to music on a scrim, and a jarring voice telling me to take off my headphones, I watched a beautiful forest with hanging paper lanterns slowly appear through the scrim. At first I was unsure if I was looking at another projection, but as the sounds of beautiful choral singing grew in volume and harmony throughout the space I saw the depth of the built environment and the scrim lifted in the middle, revealing a path to walk through. The joy of Sounds and Sorcery lay in getting to explore these beautifully designed and lit spaces along with beautiful music, and this ending was a wonderful example of this. I just wish a little more theater was sprinkled throughout these spaces to bring the experience to the next level.

In the world of One For Sorrow, human feelings are strong, they are confusing, they are dangerous, and they are overwhelming. They overwhelm the world. They may destroy it. And this world feels eerily like our own.

I watched Imogen attempt to come to grips with all the contradictions in this terrible world where a terrorist attack has caused an unknown but large number of deaths including that of her cousin. As I watched her reckon with her extreme feelings of anger and of pacifism and beliefs that people don’t deserve these tragedies and that we do, I watched tears falling down her face as all this contradiction and tension took over her body. And I felt myself begin to cry as I felt the horror of the situation, and I felt friends and fellow audience members begin to weep around me, as we all witnessed this horrible moment of human sorrow.

And then I saw something that shocked me. A few dark lines had somehow appeared on the off-white walls of the family living room on stage, and from where one line hit the stage, a significant, three-dimensional stream of water was slowly inching its way downstage, staining the off-white floor as it went. I sat captivated as I watched this water move and listened to Imogen speak of aftermaths and trying to hold evil close and make it good, and her need for connection in this terrible world. As I felt the sorrow in this character and myself and those around me, I watched the set itself weep. It was a compelling and shocking technical effect, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t spend some time throughout the second act of the play watching the effect and trying to figure out how it was being achieved—which may have distracted me a bit from the story. However, it also felt like a beautiful physicalization of the emotional world of the play’s characters. In the play’s script, the stage directions at the top of Act 2 say “A bomb has exploded in the house but JOHN and the family seem unaware.” This could, I suppose, be understood either literally as a direction for a change in the setting or perhaps as something metaphorical coloring the action of the act. Perhaps this is the text that inspired this design choice, but the “crying” walls seem like a more unique and powerful way to make tangible the changes happening in the second act. The progression throughout was a beautiful effect; as the family’s situation moved further and further into abject sorrow, chaos, and violence, the stains on the walls multiplied and intensified, but so slowly and subtly that I often found myself shocked to realize the progress that had been made without me noticing while I watched the onstage action. At at least one moment water began to drip from holes in pipes at the top of the doorless doorways in the walls, which was a further powerful physical image, though I wish the lighting had made this a bit more visible, or characters had been closer to or interacted with it. At another moment, the family’s father Bill threw down two glasses of wine at the ground in anger and left dark splash marks where the water stained the floor, leaving a powerful visual echo of this act of rage in a time of sorrow on stage for the rest of the play.

I wouldn’t say One For Sorrow was a perfect piece of theater, but it was an enthralling, affecting, and visceral one that I expect to be thinking about for quite a while. And this production’s use of stylistic design elements and innovative effects, coupled with its biting, contemporary hyper-naturalistic dialogue, heightened the work of the play more than a naturalistic setting would have. Their play with breaks from naturalism was effective elsewhere in the design. Though I found the moment of loud, clearly recorded magpie chattering near the end a bit too jarring and not especially effective, when Emma screamed a heart wrenching scream of anguish at the end of act 1 and her scream played again almost like a skipping record, I found myself hit with a palpable punch of emotion. Sometimes what happens in the world is too big, too sad to feel real. While we should be reminded that horrible things do happen in the “real world,” theater that stretches from naturalism into something more expressionistic can create for the audience the subjective experience of living such horrible events that never truly look or feel like “real life.”