David Byrne stands in a room with an awkward amount of doors, most of which don’t actually lead anywhere.
“We’re taking the route the audience would take,” Byrne explains. “I’m not spoiling too much, but every door looks the same, and they can hear sounds coming from some of these doors. Laughter, conversation.”
In about a month, audiences will walk through this same space, and be asked to find the magic door that leads to the next room. For now, it’s just me and the former Talking Heads frontman on a tour of his forthcoming immersive theater installation “Theater of the Mind” in an office building in the Loop.
It’s a head scratcher. But it’s also kind of cool.
After all, this is David Byrne, the Grammy-, Oscar-, Tony- and Golden Globe-award winner who has influenced many artists across many genres over a span of generations.
The show, which opens March 11, will allow 16 people at a time through a series of rooms led by a tour guide named David. This David will be clad in a wardrobe consisting of a seersucker shirt, shorts and sandals with socks. The outfit is identical to one worn by a two-year-old Byrne in a photo on the wall of the installation.
When I mention to Byrne that people may expect the “Davids” to wear one of his more iconic big, square suits, he laughs, and says, “I don’t know if they’ll go for this one.”
“Theater of the Mind” is produced in partnership with the Goodman Theatre as part of the historic company’s 100th season. When construction is complete, the exhibition will fill 15,000 square feet of ground floor space in the Reid Murdoch building Downtown. Following Byrne, and the show’s director, Andrew Scoville, I slip through a trap door into an oddly shaped room with disco balls hanging from the ceiling that feels like a spooky night club.
Here, Byrne explains how everything about the room — from the shape and color, to the angle of the lighting and the sounds — is dictated by science. Yet each audience member will be given a new “identity” at the start, and their experience will be fueled by a story that’s fictional to them and semi-autobiographical to Byrne.
More headscratching.
“You’re given a new self, a new identity,” said Byrne. “And what’s kind of remarkable is, it happens so fast.”
The idea of getting a new identity in an immersive show is not a new one. In fact, Byrne went to a show himself where it happened, and he was shocked how fast people would accept it. The wrinkle in this show is that the “David” character, who is the lone performer and guide of the audience, uses the new identities in a familiar way to cast the audience into roles as they walk through.
The 75-minute journey works backwards through the life of “David” while focusing on key moments from his memories. Along the way, the neuroscientific aspects of the production lead audience members to question their own memories, and in turn, their understanding of their true selves.
Some of the concepts used in the show are based on scientific research into perception, memory and how our brains filter data. In fact, the idea started with Byrne reading about an exhibit in Stockholm, “Being Barbie,” where people used virtual reality headsets to experience life as a Barbie doll.
“We like to think that [our brains] are recording machines,” said Byrne. “But they’re not. Every time we remember, we’re kind of making things up, embellishing. Not intentionally lying, but if our identity is made up of, ‘I’m the person that this happened to, who was born here, and this happened to me,’ does that mean our sense of identity is in question as well? That’s the stuff that the show deals with.”
I think of the Byrne of my own memory, which mostly comes second hand since I wasn’t born yet when the Talking Heads were at their cultural height. On a recent viewing of the band’s 1984 concert film “Stop Making Sense,” I spotted multiple songs that had been sampled in hip-hop, including “Once in a Lifetime,” which Jay-Z flipped into “It’s Alright,” and, of course, “Genius of Love” by Tom Tom Club, which has been sampled more times than I can list here.
More people may be more familiar with his work with the Talking Heads or his iconic fashion: The famous ‘big suit’ Byrne donned in the film was recently an inspiration for Chicago drag performer Willow Pill in the season 14 finale of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” — and she won the show.
A little over a month before audiences will have the opportunity to take the journey themselves, I find the oversized science experiment is still, in large part, a construction zone. But the four rooms on my tour this week crystalize a truth that wasn’t there when I visited the empty space back in October: This will be unlike any show I’ve seen before.
“It’s a very interesting process,” said Andrew Scoville, the show’s director, “of building from the scientific parameters, finding ways to personalize and humanize them with story and to give the location some kind of character and story as well.”
Scoville, who is from the Chicago suburbs and now lives and works in New York, has made a name for himself in the world of immersive theater. “I think that people are less interested in being passive observers and having the story kind of wash over them,” he said. “More and more people want to step inside the story.”
Chatting with him, I mentioned Albany Theater Project’s “Port of Entry,” an ongoing immersive show that takes audiences apartment-to-apartment to see how immigrant families live. Scoville gave high praise to “Port of Entry” and said he took his whole crew to see it. The difference here appears to be the perception of the viewers. Where “Port of Entry” thrusts the audience into an experience based on real stories, “Theater of the Mind” attempts to strip the audience member’s sense of self and propel the individual into a Wonderland-esque dream world.
“Here’s where the audience members get new names,” Byrne said in the middle of the room with too many doors. “They pick them out, but they’re chosen at random, and ideally, from my point of view, they don’t match — whether it’s gender, culture, nationality, religion, or whatever, most of them should be a mismatch. So you’re definitely not who you were. And from this point, you’re addressed by the name that’s on your new name tag. And it works.”
Scoville said the only way to truly understand the show is to “come and let it happen to you.”
On March 11, it will happen to me. I’m looking forward to it.
Mike Davis is a theater reporter who covers stages across Chicago.
