The Los Angeles Immersive Invitational 2025

This annual flash festival, now in its fourth year, is the most pure unadulterated fun I’ve had at the theater in a long time, in part because “immersive” is explicitly an invitation to play — with space, with the audience, and with theatrical conventions and expectations. “Immersive Theater” is a wide net, encapsulating a whole range of site-responsive and interactive productions, and the festival brings together eight teams of creators to write, rehearse, and perform new 10-minute works within 48 hours. Each team is given on a theme, a prop, and a space, transforming the hallways and backstage rooms of the LA LGBT Center into other worlds. Now, 24 or 48-hour play festivals are nothing new, but what sets this one apart is the call for each team to use both a space and the audience innovatively. 

The best use of space, in my book, came in the short “Devil on my Shoulder,” by The Queen’s Fools, in which we were ushered into the sound booth of the Renberg Theater as “members of the press”, alongside a cheering fan. As the publicist character talked to us, we watched a “rehearsal” of the forthcoming musical onstage through the glass, before the actors came backstage with us. Members of the audience were given cards with questions to ask, and a full backstage drama unfolded. The effect of being “on the other side,” so to speak, of a traditional theatrical space succeeded in upending our expectations and throwing us off balance for the roller coaster ride of silliness that was to come.

The most striking interactivity, in part for its simplicity, was Spectacular Disaster Factory’s “Stringed Instruments”, in which we traipsed through an endless corridor of throbbing EDM to a backstage area of a “night club,” where two “bottle service girls” sat in front of mirrors. Each had strings attached to their elbows and wrists, and the audience was left to puzzle out our own role as marionette puppeteers, as the actors intoned what they wanted (“makeup. hairbrush. photograph.”) in monotone voices and allowed us to literally steer their bodies in a 10-minute meditation on agency, gender, money, and power. While most of the other rooms had us talking to the actors, this room gave us a simple mechanism, and tasked us to literally embody them. The effect was lyrical and dark.

The scenes were unified by a central theme, which changes each year for the festival. This year we were transported to a radio station, where we were led between rooms by embodiments of different types of music (we were led by Jazz) and each station we cycled between was based on a different genre: pop, rap, folk, etc.  Our guides were given the herculean task of navigating their audience pod alongside eight others on different circuits between rooms, and did a good job of staying in character and essentially keeping us company by talking, though there were moments where it felt like they ran out of things to say or ways to interact. Most successful was when the guides got to play with one another, and some of my favorite moments in our run-through happened between our guide, Jazz, and Musical Theater, riffing with one another while we waited for the last group in a space to finish.

Some of the stories tried to center their genre, but the ones that worked best let it inform the story but not control it. Cherry Poppins’ “Ismusik,” in which a couple white actors are tasked with portraying the genre of rap music, got the biggest initial laugh when the door opened and we were greeted by a Swedish rapper tasking us with helping him unfreeze a cryogenically frozen Swedish rap superstar. Likewise in Spies Among Us’ “That’s Jazz Baby!” we had to free a hypnotized jazz band onstage by taking their places, and in Spy Brunch’s “Ursa Major and the Blue Mountain Hexes” we learned a subversive folk song with magical powers. These were all a lot of fun, but the interaction felt less like discovery and more like we were extras who had to be taught a quick skill to participate. 

More successful in creating a creative sandbox for the audience was Last Call Theatre’s “Frog & Toad: LIVE in Concert!” in which each audience member sat down with the members of a feuding pop band for one-on-one conversations that resulted in a climactic show-down at the end, presumably informed by how we’d steered the actors with their respective tasks and dilemmas. The acting here felt smooth and natural, the stakes were clear, and the result satisfying. On the other end, Meanwhile…Netprov Studio’s “Settling the Score” was a classic murder mystery in which Classical Music was the victim and other genres were culprits — a cute conceit, but in the 10-minute window we had it felt like we rushed through interviewing suspects and making accusations, leading to a less-than-satisfying finale in which we never found out who did the deed, only that our (face it, random) accusation was wrong. With another half-hour for audience play, this piece could have been brilliant.

The triumphs and the stumbles both are part of the joy of a flash theater festival, where quick creation encourages raw authentic silliness that might be ironed out of a longer development process, and of immersive theater as a genre, which promises to push boundaries with the audience and space.

The festival is a collaborative venture between the Los Angeles LGBT Center and After Hours Theatre Company, with support from the Immersive Experience Institute and media platform No Proscenium. The mission is to serve as both incubator and arena for immersive storytelling, both a field lab for this kind of work and a sort of reunion for the immersive community. The festival, with an audience award at the end, is both a sort-of Sundance Shorts for immersive, and a real playground where artists make work that invites the audience to be in on the game. We need more of this, please.

The Immersive Theater Invitational is an annual event, follow The Immersive Experience Institute for updates.