#kelly bartnik

For the sake of image loading...these posts are going to split into parts. Here are the performers in the Lost Halloween, Part 2! 

I know that TheChadChronicles shared about this the other day.  Billy Bell reached out with some more info... From Billy:

The show in the creepy hotel with the masks still looms so very large in New York. Immersive shows here, whether they intend to or not, are in dialogue with the story of Sleep No More and the expectations it has set about operational scale, interactive modality, aesthetics, choreography, design, you name it. You can feel this particularly at Third Rail shows: throughout Grand Paradise one detected deliberate embraces of the Punchdrunk idea, and in other parts, deliberate rejections of it.

If, like me, you’ve spent the last year or so thirsting for something new to come along and fill the void that’s opened up through the slow disenchantment process at the McKittrick Hotel, then you’ll likely find HERE to be an intriguing and challenging response to the state of NYC immersive theater. Rather than play larger, it plays radically smaller. The time scale is cut to an hour; episodic by design, the story unfolds in very deliberately selected stages. Spectacle is out, extreme familiarity is in.

After seeing one of the preview performances last week, my best friend – also a long-term SNM veteran – and I both started our responses with the same tricky question: did it feel, well, derivative? And we both knew immediately that wasn’t quite the word we were looking for. 

HERE does feel very familiar, and familial: the movement vocabulary shares a great deal with Punchdrunk and for obvious reasons: Kelly Bartnik and Tori Sparks alike both have long histories with the company and contributed a great deal to it; Tori’s movement work also has a visible impact at Third Rail. HERE chooses to embrace its lineages. The setting is dark; there is wonky distorted sound design and garbled radio effects, and carefully perfumed spaces. Aesthetically speaking, if you feel at home in the McKittrick, you’ll very much like the Riley house, and anticipate some of its secrets.

Familiarity of this kind, though, proves to be helpful: the choreography, pleasing though it is, doesn’t feel alien and can instead move toward the background. The storytelling is done primarily by the space and the sharp characterization. With so little time to establish character, world and story, the choices made in HERE are all critical and deliberate: gameplay in the house isn’t for its own sake. The track I experienced gave me a decent sense of the five characters (four of them living), a sense of their conflicts, and a glimmer of what is likely a disturbing backstory; a quick check-in with the other four guests after the show left us all with a slightly more detailed, but purposefully incomplete picture of their world. As a pilot episode, it works perfectly.

The performance space design, I should add, is absolutely top-notch, with a degree of finish and detail I never would have expected from a small, short run. One particularly impressive moment involved the creation of an impromptu space (we’ll call it “the thing in the tent” and HERE audience will know what I mean) that is sort of a Danvers 1:1 on steroids and felt brilliant: it executes so smoothly and segues directly into important reveals from Jack. 

I was very excited to see Kelly Bartnik’s new original piece of immersive theatre ‘Here’. Kelly and the cast which includes Tori Sparks, Zach Martens, Donna Costello, and Jeffery Lyon developed the show together with all of them creating the movement/dance, dialogue, and physical score with Kelly being the source of creating the original story and characters.

Without going to much into the plot, 'Here’ follows siblings Jack and Vivian and their neighbors DeeDee and Daniel who are also siblings as they return to Jack and Vivian’s childhood home after the recent death of their father Joe Riley. What follows is a complicated web of secrets, relationships, and memories as the characters attempt to come to terms not only with the loss of this father figure, but come to terms with how they are TRULY feeling now that he is gone. The show truly analyzes loss and grief and how everyone grieves in different ways depending on the relationship they had with who passed.

'Here’ is extremely intimate. Only five audience members enter the Riley house during the performance. With the limited audience members, performers, and a smaller space, 'Here’ is MUCH more intimate and personal than 'Sleep No More’ which features over twenty performers and usually over four hundred audience members. The space itself is beautifully designed and incredibly atmospheric. The past haunts every inch of this house in the form of photographs, objects, and mementos constantly reminding the characters of things they would much rather repress and forget. The show is not a free roaming experience like 'Sleep No More’ but instead features an interesting system of splitting up audience members and putting them in different rooms to experience different parts of the story. All events in the show happen simultaneously, but not everyone will see the entire story.

I personally was mostly connected to the character of Jack played by Zach Martens because I found myself with him for most of the show. Zach is a truly captivating performer and actor. I felt so much for this character and accepted him despite his flaws and mistakes he made. That’s how powerful Zach’s performance is. I felt from the moment we made eye contact that we were connected. This led to an amazing one on one experience with him in which his inner demons came out. It was truly heartbreaking. The fact the show features dialogue is really helpful as to better understand the story but also to set it apart from other wordless immersive productions.