SPARKED Brings an Immersive Mystery to Buzzard Point
Rorschach Theatre turns a vanished couple and a 1933 storm into a journey through the history and haunted lore of Southwest D.C.
Ever-adventurous in transforming unconventional spaces for immersive theatrical experiences, Rorschach Theatre takes audiences back in time with its new, original production SPARKED: The Vanishing at Buzzard Point.
Inspired by the real, rough-edged history of Buzzard Point — the Southwest D.C. neighborhood Rorschach now calls home — SPARKED concerns a young couple in 1933 who go missing during a savage storm. The denizens of the Five Dead Horse Tavern, “a bar out of time,” relate the tale to the audience, but only after attendees are split into separate groups and guided along different paths through scenes of the story.
“So it is a site-specific, semi-immersive, movable theater experience of historical fiction,” explains Elizabeth Ung, part of the four-person directing team alongside Esteban Marmolejo-Suarez and Rorschach founding artistic directors Jenny McConnell Frederick and Randy Baker.
Frederick and Baker wrote the script with input from the cast, creating a period mystery that “takes place in multiple times, but in this specific area of Buzzard Point in D.C.,” according to Ung. “It reflects the history of the city, of this neighborhood, through our fictionalized lore of what has happened since this hurricane passed through in 1933.”
The show also aims to reflect the Halloween spookiness of the season, encompassing “a multiplicity of genres,” Ung says. “It’s exciting to create all these connections with different characters in different timelines — and also just creating things in the space itself. We’re in a lot of different warehouse spaces, and so we fashion them to each 10-minute sequence of the story and the aesthetic.”
Ushering the audience from era to era and room to room (with seating), the show offers theatergoers a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure experience. For the actors and creative team, the challenge is honing their timing to keep the separate scenes in sync.
As Marmolejo-Suarez points out, though, “Rorschach’s been doing this for over 20 years now,” finding stories “that naturally suit their mission of found spaces and immersive but not interactive theater.”
Still, creating these experiences in unfinished spaces poses special challenges, says Marmolejo-Suarez, a member of another small but mighty theater company, We Happy Few.
“As an artist, it really gets you out of your comfort zone, and working muscles that you’re building new connections in your brain, when you’re trying to come up with solutions in a space that is not anything like a theater and doesn’t have the resources you’re used to relying on,” he says. “You have to get really creative about where you can have an entrance or an exit, or what your capacity to hang lights or backgrounds is.”
For both Marmolejo-Suarez and Ung, directors early in their careers, SPARKED has served as a rewarding foray into immersive theater-making. For audiences, the show offers other rewards.
“When the audience splits up, they experience the story in a different order,” says Ung. “So each audience member will be digesting what has happened in each room in different ways. They get an experience of piecing together connections of characters, what are their relationships and what has happened to these characters since then, and why is this happening?”
Leaving some things ambiguous for the audience to decide, Ung says, “activates the audience’s imagination, and their theorizing of what is the lore here of these Buzzard Point residents? So for the audience, they want to figure out, in their own ways, this mystery.”
SPARKED: The Vanishing at Buzzard Point runs through Nov. 15 at The Stacks, 101 V St. SW. Tickets are $20 to $50, with discounts for Students and Seniors. Call 202-399-7993 or visit rorschachtheatre.com.
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