As the patio on Walt’s Bar got more crowded, my interview with live experience designer Andy Crocker got more personal. In the first half of our interview, we talked about the fascinating work of directing actors on how to improvise with guests in immersive theme park experiences like the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser and Ghost Town Alive at Knott’s Berry Farm. But in a strange coincidence, I was more intimately familiar with her original work. I was looking for clues as to how her incredible immersive theatre piece The Apple Avenue Detective Agency, which was a featured game at last year’s IndieCade, came together.
Here’s a quick briefing on the play. Apple Avenue is an interactive theater experience where a group of audience members are inducted into a kid detective agency. The participants wonder the local area for anything “unusual” that could be a clue to an imagined mystery. So, for example, the participants found a dirty wad of gum and a car missing a hubcap. Did a thief stick the gum to the hubcap to pull it off and steal it? However, as the show progresses, we learn one of the protagonists is actually at the center of a real and tragic crime of child stalking. I was riveted by the experience and teary-eyed by the end.
This is part two of my two-part interview with Andy Crocker. I recommend reading part one first, if you haven’t already. I edited this interview for length and clarity.
A lot of the immersive projects we talked about in my theme park class were from Disney, Universal, and Meow Wolf. They have multi-million dollar budgets. I had the distinct pleasure of experiencing a show you created with your husband called The Apple Avenue Detective Agency at Indiecade in Los Angeles.
Can you tell me more about how Apple Avenue came together? You created such an emotional and absorbing experience on what appeared to be not a huge budget. It works so well. It’s so memorable.
I think one of the reasons it works and that people cry often is that… I don’t think it would have that effect if we had a million dollar budget and had built a set. It is designed very specifically to be played in a real neighborhood and if we had tried to fake any of it, it wouldn’t work. That’s how I like to work. I prefer to work on site responsively. Though, listen, I love dollars. Everybody give me money!
It’s a true story. It happened to me and my friends, and so it’s a story I’ve told for a long time. Like, “ha ha, isn’t this a fun fact about myself? I was in a kid detective agency and we solved a real crime. Ha ha ha, isn’t that funny?” I’ve told it in various forms my whole life, and I don’t know when we decided this would be really cool to do as an immersive show.
One of the questions we always ask is, “What is the audience’s role in this and how much can they do?” One thing I was certain of is they can’t change the ending. It’s a true story that happened to us. It really affected all of us for the rest of our lives, which I didn’t know, actually, until I started writing the project and got back in touch with the girls. We had the finale – spoilers – that the whole final conversation is pulled from our phone conversations that I had once I started working on the project. So the reveal that the characters have these very different perspectives of what had happened, that all comes from our real phone calls.
We ended up talking a lot about fugues and rounds and repetitions of things, and so the whole piece is structured like a fugue where things repeat and overlap, because that felt very true to our conversations. Then we were like, well, what if we had a mystery that you can’t solve? We never had closure, so why should we give it to the audience? What if we sent them out looking for as many new mysteries as possible instead of looking to solve anything and we planted literally nothing? We just set people out into a real neighborhood and had them look for mysteries, because that’s really what we spent most of our time doing as kids.
Most children don’t live in Encyclopedia Brown, where a new mystery falls into their lap every week or so.
Lots of kids play Encyclopedia Brown as a framework to be curious about the world, and that was really the through line of the show. Being a kid detective allows you a framework to explore what you don’t understand.
I still can’t talk about it without crying. I do believe that the experience I had as a kid detective heavily influenced my life’s purpose, which is designing frameworks for other people to explore the world. It started then and I just keep trying to do it, whether it’s in space or it’s the old west, or a neighborhood corner, or a black box theater doing existentialist nonsense. All I’m ever trying to do is give people a framework to ask big questions and play pretend and collaborate with their fellow players.
One of the things I could see your work doing is helping people break down emotional boundaries. Somebody who had a horrible experience that altered their ability to be social in real life, I can imagine them being able to interact with actors playing kids, and in a way they’re going back and talking to themselves. Maybe that helps them be able to communicate with others better, because they get in touch with their own emotions in your immersive experience.
Audience members have had really profound experiences of getting to be in touch with their younger selves. A big part of that, I think, is the Bazooka Joe bubble gum we give you at the beginning, because that smell is instantly transportive. When we perform the show in the spring, everyone gets fruit snacks and sits on the ground. Everyone sat on the ground and ate fruit snacks for a good chunk of time, and it was like watching people go back in a time machine, because as an adult, unless you’re a parent or caregiver, you probably don’t eat a lot of fruit snacks.
Can you outline for me the production process for producing something like Apple Avenue?
Sure. We were kicking around the idea. When we knew we wanted to do this show, we were like, we should apply to the Without Walls Festival at the La Jolla Playhouse [in San Diego[. So we quickly put together a proposal with what we knew was true. We knew the story. We put together a little video… I can still remember it. It was like, “The story is familiar. Nosy kids poking around trying to solve a crime. But this story is true.” It was a 30 second thing.
Based on that, La Jolla Playhouse said yes. “We will give you support to get it up on its feet for the festival.” Then we got to work writing it, which was really hard emotionally for me. It was a tumultuous time personally, and so I was feeling very squishy, which maybe was good. I got back in touch with the girls that it happened with. That was magical. It really helped us with the writing, because I suddenly had an ending. It’s based on what changed for all of us.
Jeff, myself, and our associate Ellie [Kuhlke] got to work designing. We knew that we wanted to have a backyard with a fence around it, which felt like we had a home base. So we ended up being like, I guess we’re gonna ship an entire fence to San Diego and then make a backyard in the middle of the UCSD campus.
We always cast everything with at least two actors per role from the beginning. There are no understudies. Everyone just shares the role because it’s LA and we can never pay anybody what they’re worth, so we just make sure they’re always covered. It’s also a great system for creating a spirit of generosity. Nobody owns the role. It’s all shared. They all play with each other.
Then we started rehearsing. Early on in the rehearsal – I feel like your readers will find this interesting – we played Kids on Bikes, the TTRPG.
That’s awesome!
That was our first or second rehearsal. We listened to all the actual archival tapes and read through all of our old journals. And we got a bunch of my daughter’s friends, who were around nine to ten, to take our cast on exploratory adventures around the neighborhood. So the cast spent a couple of afternoons with real live kids, with the kids truly leading the way.
Before we went to San Diego, and before we were done writing it, we took the first chunk of it to a conference called Worlds In Play that is a conference for play practitioners. We just tested the idea of sending people off into a neighborhood with nothing planted. We didn’t test the script. We didn’t have the ending. We just had three people play kids and be like, “Let’s split up into groups and go explore.” Let me tell you, the area of that part of the city of Mesa, Arizona was disturbingly free of litter. There was, like, nothing on the ground. It was very new. It was very clean. There was no grit. We were like, “Oh no, there’s nothing.” And the players still found things. There was a small hole in the grass, and we talked to a man at the ice skating rink who looked like he was not happy. Even with nothing around, they found “clues,” and that’s when we knew we had a show.
Then we rehearsed the show. We started bringing in play testing audiences into our own neighborhood. We shipped the show off to San Diego and hoped for the best. It went really well, and then we got a chance to do it at IndieCade.
Andy, thank you so much. Where can people learn more about your work on the Internet?
On the Internet, you can find me on the Instagrams @andy_crocker_briefcase and @misterandmischief. Mister and Mischief has a newsletter. That’s the best way to find out about our stuff. And if you’re LA, join our playtest posse and come test our stuff before anybody else. You are invited!
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