Theater Without Actors

My feet are bare and so are my companions’. We are walking over cool deep-pile carpet and what feels like rough forest floor as we travel through Viola’s Room, an immersive experience created by London’s Punchdrunk collective, which recently wrapped up a five-month run at Manhattan’s arts complex The Shed. We are a group of six. We walk through corridors accompanied by the gloriously round vowels of actor Helena Bonham Carter, who speaks into each of our noise-canceling headphones. Her voice tells an odd fairy tale. We enter and exit a series of rooms. Beautiful rooms . . . empty rooms. This “immersive theater” experience features no actors at all.

If you’re familiar with Punchdrunk’s previous work Sleep No More you know the basic vibe — the painstaking art direction is the point. But unlike that hit show, where audience members wearing masks are free to wander around a Hitchcockian hotel, this piece is unicursal, like a classic labyrinth — there is only one path. In Sleep No More, you observe and follow dancers from behind the protection of your face covering. In Viola’s Room there are no humans to spy on. Instead, you find yourself moving through a charming sort of music-box machinery. Lovely shadow dioramas light up as you pass. The operating principle is much like that of a haunted house, or “It’s A Small World” at Disneyland. This is a single-file ride, guided by the voice in your ears and faint lights that indicate the way.

There is much here to enchant: an eerily nostalgic 1990s teenager’s bedroom with a Soundgarden soundtrack, beautiful antique-feeling parlors that feel recently abandoned, gentle cold winds and earthen smells that swirl around gnarled trees. Fabric-draped walls press claustrophobically on your arms and shoulders as you squeeze through. The textured carpet on your bare feet has a way of bringing back childhood — I’d never thought of a shag rug as a Proustian aide memoire. But it worked. And for $70, I had a full sentimental and sensory experience. I left feeling satisfied, but also that I had been inside a dream. Which is to say, alone.

I’m a theater director, and I can own up to the fact that actors, including many of my friends, are a little bit much. A little embarrassing. They feel things . . .