After I published the ghastly results of my theme park design class, a friend of mine reached out with an exciting opportunity! Ryan Sandoval, who created the very funny podcast Finding Pattersby, offered to introduce me to his friend in the theme park biz…
Andy Crocker is a live experience designer who worked on Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser and Ghost Town Alive for Knott’s Berry Farm. When I looked into Andy’s work, I got most excited for an interactive theater piece she co-created called The Apple Avenue Detective Agency, which I happened to play at IndieCade. It’s a funny, touching work I found deeply moving.
Andy and I got together at Walt’s Bar in Eagle Rock for an interview over cider and Mexican Coke. Immersive theater and imagineering continue to fascinate me, and Andy has created projects on a scale from indie to ginormous. I had to know more!
This is part one of my two-part interview with Andy Crocker. I edited this interview for length and clarity.
GG: Recently I took a class in theme park design, and I posted on Equip Story the design that I made. It was so much fun to think, “How do I design a place to tell a story?” That’s a really fascinating and interesting art form. You are in that world. You are a live experience designer. How do you define what you do?
AC: I work at the intersection of games, theater performance art, and installation art. My job is to create stories of unusual shapes that pass the baton to the audience as often as is responsible. So, high caliber performances that are interactive, participatory, and often site responsive. Always live, rarely digital. I’m a real cardboard and tin foil kind of gal.
A lot of people like to use the word “immersive,” but they also use that word for, like, a hotel lobby. The best way to say it: I design experientially more than any other way.
You worked on two high profile theme park projects. One for Star Wars, which was the Galactic Hotel…
The Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, sir. Thank you.
I wrote a whole newsletter about it and I didn’t even remember the proper name of it! You worked on the Starcruiser and Ghost Town Alive for Knott’s Berry Farm. Both were brought up in my class as exemplary example of immersive theater at theme parks. Were you writing scripts? Or were you working with actors, directing their interactive performances?
My role on both of them was Immersive Performance Director. So that means my jurisdiction was all of the unscripted moments. I talked before about passing the baton. My jurisdiction is all those collaborative story moments that are unscripted – training the actors and preparing them for that performance. That being said, just because something is unscripted doesn’t mean it’s not designed.
I am helping to create the connective tissue between fully unpredictable moments and the stunts. We’re not gonna improvise a bank robbery or a lightsaber fight. Someone will die, right? So there’s a whole spectrum of completely unexpected to choreographed scenes, and my job is often in-between those two, helping the transition and helping the actors prepare for unexpected moments. When a story is truly live and interactive, there are things you have to improvise, things you have to learn and things you have to memorize. All living together in the same piece. Part of my job is to help create ways for actors to make those transitions as seamless and invisible as possible.
This is something I’m curious about with the Starcruiser. As I understand it, the guests had apps that tracked their decisions and put them on a story path. Did the actors have an ear piece or something to feed them information about the guests they were talking to? So they knew whether they were on the smuggler or princess path?
I had very little to do with anything that plugged-in or bleep-blorped or anything. I was training actors for human conversation. I will say, in general, because I get called in to work on a lot of these projects… This is not about Starcruiser, in particular, but I think I can speak generally without having Mickey come around the corner and get mad at me.
Many projects where they bring me in, the client says, “Yeah, we’re gonna feed actors information,” or “We’re gonna track their movement.” Sometimes the technological integration works great. But in the end, often the best way to know someone’s name is to learn their name with your brain. And the best way to learn about how someone wants to play is to be present with them in that moment.
I will never forget the first time I went to Ghost Town Alive with my kids. This is long before I worked there. We liked playing it. Then we went away, rode on a rollercoaster, got a hot dog or whatever. Four hours later we were at the saloon and a performer walked by and greeted me and my kid by name. And I was like, “The dream is real.” There is a no-budget magic to just being present with people and it can’t really be replaced.
I imagine it’s tricky for an actor, even a trained improviser, to perform a spontaneous scene effectively with a non-improviser.
You hit the nail on the head. You’re not improvising in the way that you’re trained in traditional improv classes, because you’re not improvising with another performer. Not every improvisor can do that. I’m not saying I don’t cast improvisors. I do. But the Venn diagram of skills you’re looking for in this kind of work are always surprising. I might cast someone who worked at the education department of a museum, who’s an incredible listener, over someone who took every class at UCB. It’s about listening more than anything else. That’s what makes a really great conversation at a party or a really great date. Listening to the person and generosity. It takes a really confident performer to be able to be, like, I’m okay. I don’t need to show off. I can be generous.
It’s not usually about doing a scene. It’s about having a genuine conversation. Then maybe you eventually need them to be on that other side of the warehouse for the next part of the experience or whatever, but you get them there through that genuine connection.
Tell me about your company, Mister and Mischief.
We create immersive interactive theater experiences. My husband Jeff [Crocker] and I co-write and co-create work together. He handles the producorial and I handle the directorial. The writing and experience design we do together. We do some client work, but it’s more like our artistic practice. We’re like a collective or a band. But also married.
Do you have the classic “one for you, one for me” mindset a lot of creatives have? So, the projects you work on for a theme park is for them, and the stuff you work on for Mister and Mischief is for you?
If you’re a painter and a company hires you to paint a mural, it doesn’t take away from your other projects. I learn from the big stuff and take it to my stuff. So it is helpful to work with big companies. I need both of them for my brain, because one makes me stronger for the other. I feel more confident being a full weirdo in my client work, since I’m being a weirdo in my personal practice. And I’m more creative and problem solvey in my personal practice, because I have so many constraints when dealing with giant corporations. There’s IP, accountability, HR, yada, yada.
That made me sound like a creep, but I just mean there are certain things like labor laws to consider. Depending on where you are in the country, you can’t tell an actor to go home and memorize their lines. They have to learn them on site, because you can’t give homework. And that kind of restraint is really helpful when I’m going into my personal practice, because I want to make sure I’m maintaining those boundaries. It makes me write things that are learnable within a certain time period. They just feed each other.
🎲 Your Turn: Have you ever experienced an immersive theater show? Did you enjoy it? Do you think of your day job and your creative projects as completely separate? Or do they feed into each other in interesting ways? Reply to this email or tell the whole world your thoughts by hitting the orange button below to comment.
Leave a Reply