Nerve is a site-specific immersive theatre in Michigan, developed by fiction writer Kathe Koja. Her book, Under The Poppy, set in a Victorian brothel, features whores dressed as mermaids, angels, beasts, and other characters for patrons who want to live out their fantasies. This story of separated lovers, one of them a puppeteer and puppet maker, offers vivid scenes involving characters who are not always who they pretend to be, engaged in activities that are not always what they appear to be. After the theatrical tale came out in 2010, Koja began adapting it for the stage.
That marked the beginning of her work in theatre, which to date has involved adapting novels and plays, and finding environments suitable for them. Koja and her colleagues search carefully for spaces; once they select one, they don’t adapt it to their needs. “You cast the site the way you would an actor,” says Koja, by which she means you don’t make an actor taller; you accept what he is. She adds that the space is at least as important as any other casting decision.
Although she knows what she’s looking for, she doesn’t always find it. “If we don’t get our first choice, it can turn out to be better,” she says. For a production of Faustus, adapted from Marlowe, she wanted a warehouse space by the Detroit River. When that didn’t come through, she discovered that the First Unitarian Universalist Church in downtown Detroit rented its sanctuary. “We wound up getting the organist of the church to be music director and play for us on a fantastic pipe organ,” she says. “To have all the scenes running through the pews of an actual church and playing some scenes on the altar was a gift,” she says.
“The site is in charge of what happens,” adds Koja. “If you try to force something to happen in a site, you get nowhere. You have to understand that whatever site you select will dictate the story. It’s less a setting than another character, and going along with that is fun. My original conception for Faustus had nothing to do with a church, but finding out this church was rentable changed the execution of that concept,” she says, adding that, when she found a Victorian house for Poppy, she immediately knew which room would be perfect for which scene.
Nerve sometimes works its way up to a full production, presenting small pieces earlier and in other venues, designed to draw patrons to the main event. There were several preludes to the full production of Under The Poppy, each different from the others. In one short piece, patrons follow the protagonist along the road leading to the Poppy, where he’ll meet the man he loves. There were events at a Detroit gallery, Hart Plaza in Detroit, the People’s Art Festival, and the Detroit Institute of the Arts. At the museum, Victorian floozies wandered through the crowd to guide patrons to the performance space in the mural building. The events were created by Koja and Diane Cheklich, with puppets by Megan Harris, and sometimes included projections. Original music is by Joe Stacey and Steve Deasy.
Eventually, live actors, live music, film, puppets, and even scent would combine to create the world of a louche Victorian brothel on three floors of a Victorian home in Detroit. Images from an Aaxa Technologies P300 Pico projector ran in the main room on a screen over the mantle. A patron could look over her shoulder and see an actor who appeared simultaneously on screen. “It was a way to give them the back story, but if they never looked at the screen, it was still fine.” Koja says that, like the church for Faustus, this Victorian home came with an unexpected gift that inspired some staging. The homeowner found “an amazing piece of furniture, a desk that opens into a bed” in the basement. It turned out to be pivotal for a story involving a man who buries himself in his work until his lover returns, and then, well, that desk became suitable for love scenes.
“When people think of puppets, they think of marionettes, but a puppet can be anything,” says Koja. For Faustus, for instance, Helen of Troy was a store mannequin with no arms and legs. “We contrasted this with the opulence of the church. Faustus is selling his soul for basically nothing,” says Koja. For Nerve’s Alice, based on Alice In Wonderland, Through The Looking Glass, and some poems by Lewis Carroll, the puppet was a collage sculpture small enough to carry, created by Rena Hopkins.
Down The Rabbit Hole
The site for Alice was a church campus in Ferndale, MI. The White Rabbit led patrons across an empty campus, finally taking them into the building. “Patrons descended a side stairway, crossed a large hall, entered ‘backstage,’ and into the Caterpillar room, then followed Puppet Alice down another hall and up two flights of stairs,” Koja reports. Upstairs were preschool classrooms that the troupe used. Rooms were designated for the Tea Party, Garden of Live Flowers, Humpty Dumpty, Trial room, and the Tweedle room. People could choose their own adventure in various rooms. The actors encouraged patrons to handle and carry Puppet Alice, to wear the vintage hats at the Tea Party, and to draw in the Garden of Live Flowers, using the prompt, “What does beauty look like?” Three of the rooms included custom-created scents. The idea was for patrons to experience Wonderland by creating an environment “where they never knew what would hit them next.”
Here again, the space offered a special opportunity. The plan was for patrons to be led through the front door, but the director of operations recommended an entrance more suggestive of a rabbit hole. A side door allowed them to descend downstairs, passing characters along the way. “The rabbit locks the door behind her and takes off down the sidewalk, and they wonder what they’re supposed to do.” She comes in another entrance, tells them they’re late, and helps them continue their journey. Strobe lights in one room and murky blue lights in another room, along with original music, helped set the mood.
Again, Nerve presented scenes before the full performances “to bring people down the narrative road. If you saw all of them, it gave you a fuller picture when you saw the whole show, but you didn’t have to see it all,” says Koja. One event took place at a tea room; the caterpillar performed in the window, the March Hare ran up and down the street, and the White Rabbit invited people to draw a favorite character in chalk on the street.
Although all Nerve productions are scripted, Koja leaves space for audience activities. Before shows, she advises patrons not to touch characters, who they sometimes want to save from harm. “I had to peel some of the patrons off the characters,” she says. When a villainous visitor to the Poppy takes out his frustrations on one of the floozies and pushes him upstairs, patrons on the main floor heard screaming from above. “Every night, one or two patrons would be brave enough to go up there.” One night, that villain locked eyes with a woman and threw a handkerchief in her face. When the floozy came out brutalized, she used that handkerchief to clean the actor’s face. Koja says some people came more than once to see parts of shows they might have missed while in a room where something else was going on, or just to play.
Although Koja adapts the works, she says that every word is from the source material. The troupe is presently working on Heights, from Wuthering Heights, which they’ll do in an empty art gallery in Detroit. The event will start outside and bring people inside, into the center of a ferocious love story, Koja promises. “What’s most important about doing performances this way is to give people a sense that they’re part of whatever world they’ve come into. We call them patrons and not audiences. They are the other characters.”
Check out the trailer for Under The Poppy below.
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