The Brooklyn Rail

On the corner of 36th and 8th, audience members take an elevator six floors up and spill out into the dimly-lit lobby of The Vicky Archives, a new immersive theater piece by experimental collective Brouhaha Theatre Project, in performances at The Tank through May 18. The Rail spoke with Brouhaha on the curation of physical space, tangible memories, and the role of individual/collective identity in the formation of a story.

Annie Jin Wang (Rail): Let’s start with the easy question. I would love to know about where the impulse for this piece came from. This piece has been in-process for over two years, so what was the first version of the idea and how did it develop into the version that is now playing at The Tank?

Nick Auer: We started this process by bringing in primary source material from our own lives, voicemails from family members we found interesting, weird letters or emails we wrote to our parents when we were younger, objects from our lives that held interesting meaning; that was a way for us to develop material and throw paint at the wall. Eventually, that led us to a place where we were exploring the amassing of memories, and how that creates identity and narrative for an individual person. For a while it was a memory museum, and then it became an archive about a year ago.

Rail: What do you feel is the difference between a museum and an archive?

Sam Myers: A museum is a public institution that is centered on the experience of daily visitors. An archive feels slightly more secretive; there is something about an archive that is about preservation, primarily. When you bring someone into an archive, you’re piercing a façade.

Dan Kuan Peeples: Yeah, I think there’s a performative element embedded in the aesthetic of a museum, whereas in an archive, you have to dig for it more.

Myers: We like the care with which objects are treated in an archive. The artifacts that are held in the Vicky Archives was something that came from our own experiences of visiting real archives.

Rail: The Vicky Archives is the first show to take over the Tank’s new Attic space for performance, which is usually held for rehearsals. How did the geography of the show as you devised it intersect with the Attic?

Auer: The moment we were able to secure that space with the Tank and cement that collaboration felt like the electric spark that got us to really define what the show is. And this kind of work is so structure-oriented; it’s really all about the intersection of space. We have four spaces to fully design, plus the hallway. How many audience members are in each room? How do they get there? What’s the timing of that? It was a very fluid process in terms of coming to what those rooms were, both in identity and the visual language of each of those spaces.

Peeples: We started rehearsing there about a year ago and fell in love with the space. Like Nick said, once we figured out the space, the show just formed. Whatever constraints the space gave us, we worked with.

Auer: We love the low ceilings. It’s sort of like this enclosed world.

Rail: It provides a sense of intimacy, right? I think about archives as being curated for organization and ease—or dis-ease—of access, but also labyrinthine. I felt like there could potentially be dozens of rooms beyond what we were shown, but I’m most curious about the curation of objects for the archive room. How did the curation of those objects come about and how did they impact how each character developed?

Myers: Amazing question. Max, you’re the object expert.

Max Pendergast: I think what’s kind of special about the objects is that they did come from everyone involved in the show, imbued with meaning from their own lives. I am a trinket collector, so a lot of them are mine, and then performers kept bringing things in. Marjorie Conn, who plays Jo, had a lot of really special objects from her own home. Our set designer, Cat Raynor, took so much care and attention with that room, and she really spent so much time with each object, placing them within our world, and giving them that extra backstory. Some objects that were treated really carefully are never seen by the audience.

Rail: I was also really impressed by the sound system, and I’m curious about the experience of working with your sound designer to pipe in all of those atmospheric noises—almost underscoring, throughout the whole space—that give the piece a light science-fiction feeling.

Auer: Max Silverman, our sound designer, is a total wizard because we didn’t have a super robust team or budget, and he was able to create dynamic sound from a central system in every space. The texture of the world really comes alive once you have sound playing in all these different spaces and in the hallway. The momentum of the piece is so driven by that general room tone that is pervasive throughout.

Myers: I’m glad you mentioned that there is a sci-fi aspect to our show. I would say we as a collective really love world-building. It is one of the things that most animates us when we are setting out to make a new piece. Hopefully, the experience gives audiences the sense of brushing up against a much larger world that has rules and systems that are maybe enigmatic to you because you’re just encountering them. The archive room itself is like the purest expression of the idea that got us excited about this show, and then Dan and I largely were the ones who built out the character-driven piece which emerged from our early devising. Who are the people that spend time in this archive? Why are they there? What are they trying to get out of the archive? How does it serve them or not serve them? It all sort of came from the crux of the idea that there is a place that is filled with artifacts from people’s lives, and the intangible record of their lives, which is their story, made real on these tapes.

Rail: One thing that I’m always thinking about, especially when it comes to immersive theater, is: who’s going to try to break the rules? Who’s going to try to push the boundaries of the world? How do you take that into account as you’re building the experience?

Peeples: Every night an audience member comes up and says to me or someone in the cast, “Oh, I wanted to go out and stop them,” or something.

Auer: I think embracing deviation from the anticipated path is always an exciting part of this kind of work. A couple of performances before you came, an audience member was sitting in the wooden chair in the childhood bedroom for an entire scene. And then they ended up holding the stuffed animal and getting sort of folded into the scene. The actors felt like they wanted to honor that choice, which I thought was really exciting.

Pendergast: I think Nick is right to use the word “embrace”; it’s embracing what the audience is giving you. That’s what makes performing immersive theater so exciting: there is no distance.

Rail: To capture all of these characters’ memories in the form of old-school cassette tapes; there’s something just so wonderfully analog about the tactile experience of memory in that way.

Auer: You’ve really tapped into something that was a very core idea of what we wanted, that even though this play takes place in 2024 we wanted the world to feel very analog and sort of out of time, and not super high-tech. They all write notes on paper. No one’s using an iPad. And then there’s a track where the character Sandy’s use of her cell phone is a source of tension in the group. That sort of implicit rejection of modern technology, despite living in the modern era, felt central to the ideology and texture of the group.

Peeples: I have a question. What was your experience of discovering different things about the character tracks?

Rail: Depending on which track you follow, you have a very different understanding of what the directive of the archive is and its impact on the different archivists by the time we reconvene for the finale. I always say this in my dramaturgy actually, that I think a little uncertainty is good for the theater. We live in a society that is so obsessed with having absolute answers for everything, and being left out of the loop a little and learning to be okay with that can be a good experience to have. If I was going with friends and we were on different tracks, this would be a fun thing to compare notes over drinks after the show.

Auer: We’re hoping people want to come back. We’ve had some return visitors already, so we’re excited.