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How’s this for a night out: You drive to a dark alleyway in central Los Angeles. There’s a parked van with its headlights blinding you as you pull in. Someone cryptically calls your phone. You’re bundled into the van with a bag over your head and driven off into the night.
Half an hour later you’re in a labyrinthine warehouse, blindfolded, hooded and hogtied, forced to eat unidentifiable items, whipped, pushed and left in a chair for an interminable amount of time, ambient terror music pulsing through your ears while your mind is left to stumble through endless corridors of confusion.
Sound like fun? Then step right up for The Tension Experience: Ascension, a new production that just opened in LA and aims to take the immersive theater experience to twisted new realms.
SEE ALSO:The night two naked women tormented me in Sundance bathroom stallsThe show, which styles itself as a “site specific journey of trust, betrayal and submission,” is the brainchild of Darren Bousman, director of the second through fourth entires in the Sawseries.
Along with producer Gordon Bijelonic, he’s taken elements of the genre's most striking recent productions –- Secret Cinema’s interactivity, Sleep No More’s audience participation, The Drowned Man’s lavish production design –- to create an evening that’s part play, part choose-your-own-adventure and wholly terrifying.
It’s not cheap at $125 a ticket, but your bucks give you quite a few bangs. There are three start times per evening and just 9 participants per session, with more than double that number of actors and even more production staff across the site’s 24 rooms.
Everyone’s experience is different, and the way you act alters your course through the night, but there are some common themes. With spoilers jumping out at you from the next few paragraphs, here’s how my night went down.
On entering the world of The Tension Experience I was asked to fill out a form, specifying that I was fine with enclosed spaces, public nudity (my own included) and eating strange things.
From there my photo was taken by a man who issued an ominous warning in my ear and I was ushered into a lounge from yesteryear, all vintage furniture, frayed photos of people with eyes gouged out and other clues masquerading as props. An old couple danced by a sofa while several women in white floated around the room staring at me intently.
It’s here that you first trigger your own narrative and before long I was rushed down a smoky, strobing corridor to a processing room and undergoing an interview for something known as the O.O.A. Institute.
This is sent to you ahead of the show.Credit: The show is vaguely centered around your enlistment into this organization, with digressions into ritual sacrifice and a bunch of other horror tricks and tropes that I didn’t have the computing power to fully process amid all the confusion.
Its main aim, though, is to make you seriously uncomfortable, and it does this not with ghosts and ghouls but with psychological warfare.
I was stripped. Taken to a room and made to call my wife and tell her lies. Forced to post a fake Facebook status update. Asked by another audience member, a bald man with a mustache playing his own role, to pretend a desk was my father's coffin and tell him what I really thought of him. Asked by the same man to stand up and touch myself sexually for thirty seconds. Huh?
Things didn’t get less weird as the evening went on. Several hoods were put over my head. I had my hands tied. Odd smells were passed under my nose, smells so acrid and potent they had me doubled up in pain. I was deprived of my senses one by one and left bound and blind in a chair.
I bumped into Bald Mustache Man again in a room full of clocks and an old woman and was made to stand eyeball to eyeball with him, staring into his face for what seemed like an eternity, while two the nymphs in white dresses danced around us. After more strange set pieces I ended up in a vertical coffin of static-filled TV screens pressed against the body of – you guessed it – Bald Mustache Man.
At the end, after the bloody crescendo and being chased out of the building to where our clothes were piled up in a parking lot, director Darren Bousman pulled me behind the scenes. Here, in a control room just inches from the main action, the actors incongruously sipped tea and checked their phones while the final group of spectators passed through the funhouse. One of the demon women passed. “Oh hi, we can be nice to you now.”
I didn't meet this man but he looks fun.Credit: At the end of the room, a group of actors and production staff hunched over a bank of TV screens that monitored the action as Bousman talked me through his vision for the show.
Pure glee was writ large across his face as he detailed the discomfort and disorientation he inflicts on his victims and showed me around some of the rooms I’d skipped on my trip. Like the red room, a sand-filled box in which naked dancers tussle. It turns out I’d missed lots of things, including a detour in a van to watch someone get shot.
Every audience member gets his or her own tense experience and the cast members enact multiple plot lines from a 400 page script. The coordination is mind-boggling. There’s even one character that only gets activated all night if a certain word is said.
All this ensures hardcore fans will keep coming back for the show, which is running indefinitely with two follow ups, “Adrenalin” and “Lust,” planned for the future. I for one wanted to get my clothes back on, get home, and start explaining things to my wife.