They Enter, They Exit
i'm a scholar of the little moments
Note for Paid Subscribers: No, YOU forgot to do the haiku poll twice for this month. …okay, okayyyyyyy. You’re right. It was me. Haikus for June will be coming your way on Tuesday (July 1st, ha) but they’ll be inspired from my very own brain this month. Whoa. Next month, we’ll get back to the poll.
For the last couple of months, I’ve been venue managing a show on Governors Island—that closed today—called The Death of Rasputin. It’s an immersive theatre experience in the vein of Sleep No More (for those of you who are familiar). What that means is that everything in the show is happening simultaneously and it’s basically a choose-your-own-adventure for the audience. It’s ninety minutes to run around the space as the show happens around you. You can move a bunch, you can mostly stay in one place, whatever you want. (Within reason. And within manners. Which…some full-grown adults do not seem to understand.)
I mostly stayed in one place.
That was basically my job though. The company putting on this show was renting the space from Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) and the venue managers were representatives of LMCC. We were there to make sure things in the space were fine, the audience was safe and left the island before the last ferry, and that no fires broke out. But I did up with three NYC Fire Guard certifications so if a fire had broken out, I was ready to help…get people to an exit.
I’ve worked with LMCC in various capacities for a year now so I was more than happy to jump in again. It was a nice gig and I got to see half the show every time I was there. The same half. Because I mostly stayed in one place.
Staying in one place proved to be simpler and more effective than anything else. I mostly stood in the dead zone between the space that was the bar and the space that was Siberia while keeping an eye on the stairs that led to palace spaces. With 150 people and a handful of actors and crew moving through the space themselves, it was so easy to be in the way if you moved around basically at all. Plus…stairs. In this economy? No, thank you.
But actually, I ended up mostly standing in the same little corner by the stairs because, being right next to the double doors to the bar, I was able to watch a lot of entrances and exits. And entrances and exits are some of my favorite little details to watch.
This is kind of niche, I know. Talking specifically about watching entrances and exits in an immersive theatre show and theatre in general. But I have long known there is a lot to be learned from entrances and exits. Entrances and exits have a certain amount of power. Something that I think most of us understand, if even just subconsciously.
If we’re talking theatre—and we are right now—there is almost no way to understand a character and/or their circumstances faster than by watching them enter or exit a scene. With the entrances and exits in this show in particular—a show set at the turn of the (20th) century Russia—they covered a whole manner of sins. There was showboating and sneaking, determination and conniving, willful obliviousness and heavy understanding. I suppose that’s what happens when a revolution is about to upset Petrograd.
Adding weight to entrances and exits as moments is something I love to infuse into my own writing as well. I’m a writer who relies a lot on sound; if I can’t hear what the characters sound like, not a whole lot of writing is getting done. But one way around that is to start with the way they enter or exit a scene. That’ll tell me a little bit of something about a character as a person, even if I can’t hear how they sound.
It’s the little moments of life that tell us what we need to know, what we should know, what we do or do not want to know. An entrance and/or an exit is the ultimate little moment. Because we all make them. We enter the world, there are a bunch of entrances and exits in the middle, and then we exit the world. We watch other people make them as well. All of our entrances and exits added up with the entrances and exits of our family, friends, loved ones, enemies, acquaintances, strangers is what life is made of. There is no better place to remember that than at a show or watching a movie or reading a book.
Or at work. Or at a party. Or at a concert. Or at home. Or at the doctor’s office. Or getting on or off the train. Or or or, all the ors of our actual lives.
I’m a student of the small things. I’m a scholar of the little moments. I think that’s why I spend so much time trying to watch for details.
There are noisy and loud and destructive entrances and exits happening all around us all the time. We see and hear those whether we want to or not. Particularly on a national level—all levels—we know who is here and we know why they say they have entered or exited in such a fashion and what they plan to do while they are in the room. But that often means we miss the smaller, more impactful entrances and exits (which is, of course, by design). It’s so easy to be distracted and not notice our heart is sneaking out through the exit. It’s easy to not hear a connection knocking on a jammed door. When the biggest doors are being open and closed the most and in the loudest way, it’s so easy to not see entrances and exits of anyone from any other place.
This existential exploration may well be on its way out the exit right now, this metaphor tip-toeing to the door. But—and I know I’ve written about this before—when all the distractions are so constantly exhausting, I work hard to remember the magic of the little things.
I mean, I have to work hard to remember the magic of the little things. I’m not always very good at it. But I do what I can. Because otherwise…I don’t know. I don’t really know what else there is. So, I guess I’m hoping that this is a reminder that this is something there is.
A reminder that I was doing my job to support theatre and that is something there is. That as I was sitting at a small table in the empty bar listening to melancholy instrumental music and staring up at a swinging lantern being rocked by the convergence of all characters in this immersive show, I knew this little moment was something there is. And when two characters burst from their quarters across the bar, dancing towards the doors with, at least for one, the realization of a plot in mind, that was something there is. And when the symbolism of their exit downstairs and entrance upstairs and ultimate exit was realized for the audience as the final act, that was something there is.
And you know what? At the end of the show, all those little moments, those entrances and exits, were met with a jaunty disco tune from the 1970s. And joy. And applause.
A little taste of the vibes of the show.
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