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Audience members of “Ghost Ship” transform into passengers as they enter the stage — or ship. With tastes of ginger candies on their tongue and the smell of sea salt, 16 passengers are part of a fully immersive experience.

“Immersive theater is one of those areas of theater-making that is coming up and offers…the ability for audiences to experience a story in a way that you can’t experience watching TV and you can’t experience watching film,” said director Ricky Pak.

“Ghost Ship,” written by Phillip Valle, opened on Nov. 11 for the second time at Syracuse Stage and is being performed by the SU Drama Department until Nov. 18. The play was first performed by the Cuesta College Drama Program, winning awards at the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in 2019.

The show places the audience on the dock of the boat, stimulating their five senses as the performance happens right in front of them, Pak said. The rest of the set is complete with ladders that actors hang from, decks where actors fight and a helm for the captain. Actors will sometimes bring audience members over to dance, watch shadow puppets or be scared by the ghost mysteries.

As they board the ship, a sheriff tells the audience members they are acting as the jury. Throughout the show, lawyers provide stories to determine if the only surviving member is guilty of killing the whole crew. The show considers all potential scenarios of his guilt or innocence — or whether a demon girl may be the culprit.

Pak’s goal with the show was to give a new experience to Syracuse University drama students, and it’s the first time the drama department has done an interactive show. The uniqueness of the play allows students to pick up new skills, like learning how to be interactive, Pak said. He and his crew spent months thinking about how interactive the whole 30-minute performance could be.

“It’s fun to experiment and see what we can do. What can we get away with?” Pak asked throughout the process. “Can we actually squirt the audience members with water? Let blood drop on them from the ceiling? Can we give them candy before the show to that sense that is never engaged in theater production?”

Multiple students said they gravitate to the show because of its uniqueness. The show’s stage manager, Jess DeLucia, saw it as a place to further her goals as a stage management major.

Courtesy of SU Drama

‘Ghost Ship’ is about a murder mystery on a ship. With ghostly characters, shadow puppets and audience participation, the play is a brand new adventure for Syracuse Stage.
Courtesy of SU Drama

“I want to be as flexible and adaptable as possible, so I look for all of the shows that have unique elements to them that are outside of like a typical theatrical production,” DeLucia said. “When they announced that we were doing a half-hour horror circus, fully immersive, ‘I was like, great. That’s mine.’”

To prepare students for this element, the show’s team established general ground rules and would work with various audiences, like understudies and designers, to practice interactiveness, Pak said. DeLucia had a different role as the stage manager and would work to react to how the audience was reacting.

“Playing a part in the pacing of everything to see like right, we didn’t get a big reaction out of this. I’m gonna keep us going forward,” DeLucia said. “Or we’re getting a huge reaction, I’m gonna hold us back so that we can all sit here and like, really take this in.”

The horror genre of the show drew Kate Grover to be its dramaturg, the main person who does background research on the play to support the understanding of the performers.

Grover spent time understanding the historical connotation of the show, which is based on the real disappearance of the crew of the Mary Celeste in 1872. She looked at Portuguese myths of a demon girl on water, nautical history, ship vocabulary, accents and Canadian legal systems during the 17th century.

Pak’s collaboration made Grover feel welcome from day one. He was always asking for everyone’s perspective. With Evan Hoover, the set designer, Pak brought in some ideas and let the student’s curiosity shape the set.

“I came in with some sketches of ideas and then (Hoover) was like, ‘Okay!’ and just ran away with it,” Pak said. “We’d come back each week and he’d be like ‘How about this?’ And basically, he just designed himself a big playground.”

Since there are only 16 audience members at a time, many institutions wouldn’t take the financial risk to do a show like “Ghost Ship.” The SU Drama Department thought the learning outcomes were more important than making a profit, Pak said.

The small audience does mean fewer people can see the show, but the department decided to add more dates this week as the show sold out. The play is being run three to six times a night, which means actors have to be intentional about what they do during their only 15-minute breaks, DeLucia said.

“I would say that it’s complicated to do a show that is isolated to just having those 16 seats, especially because we want as many people to see it as possible and to be engaged with it. But to stay true to the immersive format, you can’t have more than that,” Grover said.

Students were able to grow their skills throughout the show, especially learning to engage with the five senses during the short 30-minute runtime, Grover said. DeLucia, who is spending her last semester of college in New York City, sees this as a final opportunity to showcase what she’s learned from the SU Drama Department.

“To see all of these efforts coming to fruition is wild. It’s just also cool and I’m so happy with it,” DeLucia said. “This honestly feels like the perfect culmination of everything that I’ve been learning as a student throughout college and everything that I could possibly want to represent the work that I have been doing.”

Published on November 12, 2023 at 10:39 pm

Contact Rosina: rlboehm@syr.edu