Immersive Theater at Friends Academy 

For the past few years, the Friends Academy Theater Department’s choices for the fall show have been immersive productions. I asked Andrew Geha, our Director of Arts, what the rationale behind this is. 

Since a 2007 theater-focused trip to London, immersive theater had been an aspiration for the FA theater department with no real opening to pursue it up until the pandemic. In 2020, Catastrophe Theory was released, a television series built to work with Covid limitations such as social distancing. A year later, restrictions were pulled back, but the department couldn’t return to traditional theater just yet.

“Everyone was still masked and a COVID outbreak could send a student or an entire class home for weeks. So in thinking about a show for that fall, I knew it had to be small and modular – which is to say, if someone went out sick, it would need to be a situation where we could easily cover that person’s role,” Geha said about 2021’s fall show. 

This plan became Who Are We Now, FA’s first immersive production, about the impact the COVID-19 pandemic had on our community. The show was impactful and moving to many. However, there was no plan to take up immersive theater again, instead to return back to ‘regular theater’.. The 2022 fall show was set to be Chrysalis, an original play written by Mr. Geha that deals with racism and bias at private schools. Come auditions, a problem arose: there simply weren’t enough people to cast the show. As a result, Friends Academy made another foray into immersive theater out of necessity: The Haunted. 

With the announcement of the 2023-2024 theater season, the department is experimenting with immersive theater without pressure of circumstance. But what value does it hold over traditional theater? 

To this Mr. Geha says, “Immersive theater allows us to tell different stories than traditional theater (and traditional allows us to tell different stories than immersive). One isn’t better than the other. Certain audience members may prefer one to the other. Immersive is a much more personal experience and removes the safety of distance between the performers and the audience. For some people, that’s exciting. For others, it’s uncomfortable. That’s okay.”