Review: Audience Directs HAPPY HOUR at Spooky Action

You go in, get a beer and pull up a stool at one of two tables for eight. It looks like a poker table and has the same kind of green felt.

But it's a different kind of game. Happy Hour, the new Spooky Action production, is like one of those strangely popular new "escape the room" entertainments. But instead of escaping yourself, though, you work with your group to free a person who appears on a closed circuit video in front of you.

Presented with a limited array of cards that identify different objects with which the captive can use (rope, knife, etc.), the group tries different possibilities that will free their person - Stephanie Tomiko or Robert Bowen Smith, depending on your table - from a succession of rooms, It must all be done within 40 minutes, and a third screen counts the time down digitally.

It's a group effort, a competition against the other side (with no prize) and kind of like a slightly fleshed-out video game.

But is it theater?

Very tough to say.

I guess some of the actors who lend their voices to actual video games get credits on iMDB. This one has the trappings of the theater: You walk up, get a ticket (actually a wristband) and take a seat. There is a kind of guide (Matthew Marcus) who tells the rules and fidgets with the machine if it freezes up. He's kind of playing a part. And so is Carolyn Kashner, the barmaid (in the sense that all barmaids play a role).

And there's a set designer, Kim Sammis, who dressed these odd confining (and sometimes confounding rooms), aided by a lighting director Gordon Nimmo Smith. And while Yves Regenass and Gillian Drake are listed as directors, couldn't you say the audience is just as much the director here? They're directing what happens on screen.

Artistic director Richard Heinrich says he hopes Happy Hour will attract young people, prying them away from their actual video games long enough to maybe get engaged with real actors cavorting on the stage (or in this case, screen), enough maybe to encourage them to come back and take in an O'Neill trilogy some day. (Good luck with that).

As interesting as it may have been, Happy Hour was a little frustrating as well. Not in working with others but in having the person on the screen do what you actually wanted her to do. Ask her to use the knife and she'll just jab the air with it instead of say, poking into a device to get out a key.

There isn't much advantage in her being a human instead of a digital avatar of dots and dashes. This character is not intuitive or even very smart.

Still, you don't want to blame the actress for this. Tomiko is doing what she's told. (I didn't see much of Smith; he was the problem of the other team). I liked both of them better when they were hanging around waiting for the doors to open, as if they were just another couple of theatergoers.

He made a big deal about losing his wallet, which may have been a way to explain their absence when the doors were open, when they were presumably getting trapped in their rooms, which were in the performance space - the ever-flexible Universalist National Memorial Church - but not directly seen by the audience.

Spooky Action has been known for creative use of the space before. You never know quite where you'll be sitting in the basement for one of their productions. In this case, for the audience, it was an apparent classroom, festooned as a small bar.

Unlike Kwaidan, from a couple seasons back, they did not lead the audience through the catacombs of the church; we made the actors go through it and virtually followed them. In some pre-taped bits between the rooms they are seen climbing the bell tower interior or otherwise scraping the attic ceiling.

Happy Hour was devised with a group of gamers from Germany called machina eX, which preys on your mind a bit as the game begins. We never ask, for example, why are they trapped in these spaces in the first place. Who put them there and why?

There is writing involved, such that the actors drop hints that may help the puzzle.

I am kept from revealing much more not because of spoiler concerns, but of giving away the solution, as it were.

Still, I must say it's alarming when a gun comes into play and mob control dictates action, it is almost always used.

Always a bad way to end a game - or a play.

Whatever it is.

Running time: About an hour, depending on how long you linger with your beverage.

Photo credit: Stephanie Tomiko, Robert Bowen Smith. Photo by Tony Hitchcock.

Happy Hour continues through June 5 at Spooky Action Theater in the Universalist National Memorial Church, 1810 16th St NW. Tickets at 202-248-0301 or online.

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