If you want to see theater that will leave you indelibly changed, dive into the immersive theatrical experience of The Hidden Ones. This 90-minute, limited dialogue show, interactive piece is the brain-child of actor and director, Anthony Logan Cole. The show is set in the apartment of 6 adults in hiding from the Nazis in Eastern Europe during World War II. As an audience member, you are brought into their world of hiding and silence. As a human, you are guided into empathy from the inside of an experience.
I recently spoke with the shows creator, Cole, it’s choreographer, Whitney Sprayberry (actor in SpiderMan: Turn Off the Dark and in the world premiere of Jagged Little Pill at the American Repertory Theater), and actor Jay Stuart (national tour of Dirty Dancing). We discussed the emotive power of immersive theater, the importance of telling the story of people in hiding during the Holocaust, and the use of non-verbal communication in storytelling. (Note: Actor Jay Stuart arrived at the end of the interview due to a time conflict.)
What is The Hidden Ones?
Anthony: The Hidden Ones is an intimate, immersive experience based on true stories of people in hiding during the Holocaust. Eight audience members are sent to a secret location where they’re smuggled into hiding with two families and over the course of 90 minutes get a very personal exploration of their stories.
Why tell the story as an immersive theater show?
Anthony: Something like 100 Holocaust survivor die every day, so these stories are literally disappearing and if we don’t remember the past, we’re doomed to repeat it. We wanted to really connect audience members with the narrative. We wanted them to touch, smell, taste, become part of this world.
Do you think something about it being immersive versus being on a proscenium stage changes how the audience interacts with it emotionally?
Whitney: I think immersive theater gives you that moment to be a part of the show and come into the show. That what makes The Hidden Ones special and why it works so well as an immersive piece, you can’t turn it off. It’s different from other immersive pieces as well because there are so few audience members. We are really forcing people to zone in and be with these characters.
(Photo: Kristin Pulido)
As the choreographer, what is the role of movement and dance in the show?
Whitney: I really look at it more as like a gestural kind of choreography. If you look at the bombing section, it’s this gesture like preparing for war and if you look at the Nazi soldiers in the way that they marched, even like the downbeat, we worked with a lot of that concepts. I pulled up a lot of imagery and pictures of people in hiding or in the concentration camps and kind of use those shapes to build a lot of this as well. Anthony had already built such a beautiful story line that the gestures kind of lend themselves to the story as well.
How is it different to choreograph a piece where movement and nonverbal communication is almost the only form of communication that the actors have?
Whitney: I find that I’m preferring it. I come from a technical background, I’ve been dancing since I was seven and I was a competition kid. I love all of those things and I wouldn’t be where I am without them but to me I just find it so much more meaningful to create with an actor, not necessarily a dancer. Why would your character make that choice to make this movement? So it’s not just stepping into an eight count of dance out of nowhere. To me that doesn’t feel good and it doesn’t feel natural.I found that having that through-line is much more meaningful to me as a choreographer.
(Photo: Kristin Pulido)
Another feature of the show is that there’s very little spoken dialogue. How do you think that affects audience members?
Anthony: I put myself through college as a mentalist with a nightclub act. One of the people who influenced me and continues to was Teller from Penn and Teller who does not speak in performance. I’ve always been fascinated with a performance style that’s intimate and close but nonverbal. I think things get lost in words sometimes. That’s why every single spoken line of dialogue in the show is, word-for-word, from the archives. They’re not my words, they are the true words of the survivors. I wanted to do right by them and I thought adding my own words would lessen what they had to say because this isn’t my story, this is their story. I also find that audience members don’t want to be talked at, especially if they feel like they can’t respond. Using words and dialogue very sparingly allows them to have more impact. In the world of the show, the whole idea is trying to keep quiet, trying to keep silent, trying to keep hidden. The the hidden life of characters is something that’s always kind of inspired me.
Whitney: As an audience member you’re sitting there and it’s a little jarring to sit in silence. It’s something in our world today, especially as New Yorkers, we just don’t do anymore. To have that 90 minutes of stillness and silence, it really does like stir up something emotionally and psychologically.
(Photo: Kristin Pulido)
Can we talk about how you created a space that is emotionally and physically for the audience? They’re entering a world where they don’t know the rules and where they’re being moved physically (to engage with the actors in the space).
Anthony: Consent in my work is very important among actors and between actors and audience. I like uncomfortable. Uncomfortable is not a bad thing. Unsafe, feeling unsafe even if there’s not a safety issue, is a major thing that I try and avoid. The most important thing we do is what I call the induction, which is when we psychologically set up the audience for the experience. This begins even before you come to the theater. It’s on the website. When you buy the ticket, when you get that letter in your email that gives you the instructions on where to go. It’s all been phrased very specifically. Audience members arrive and we are not warm and friendly to them. We ask for their things to make them uncomfortable and to make them compliant. Also historically and dramaturgically, you were made to give up everything before you went into hiding. Standing in that little room with that amount of music and audience members very rarely talk to each other. The first full character that you meet in the space, he’s very warm and very friendly and guides you and makes you feel comfortable and safe. It was all kind of designed that way so you automatically feel alienated at the beginning so that the moment someone is warm towards you, you’ll make a connection to that person.
Whitney: We’re mindful of how it feels to touch somebody and to move somebody gently. We worked really closely with the actors to be mindful of being careful and ginger, even though we’re living in a world where the outside is crazy. Inside, it’s supposed to be our safe space.
There is engagement between the actors and audience members around taking care of objects. Was that a collaboration between you two?
Whitney: That was just Anthony at his best. It’s just knowing how meticulous it would be in the monotony of the day along with knowing how the audience would react to that, it’s his specialty.
(Photo: Kristin Pulido)
Anthony: It was all inspired by a lot of the gestural movement. Whitney was the missing piece on this project. When I workshopped it last year I had a different choreographer and it was a much, much more dance-heavy piece, it was a very different show. When Whitney came in, everything just clicked and it inspired and changed a lot of the stuff that I was doing. We really understood each other’s vision.
How are you finding people leave the show? Audience members?
Anthony: Broken. Destroyed.
Whitney: We’ve seen a lot of tears. It is magical in a sad, horrible way because we felt like we were doing something right.
Anthony: The actors feel it, too.
Whitney: Welcome Jay. He’s also an Associate Director.
Anthony: We had a buyout of a performance and they showed up and they were six, Upper East Side, mid-sixties aged, modern Orthodox Jews. I did not know if this experience stylistically was going to be for them. I go to get them at the end of the show and I can hear sobbing from the rooms. I lead them out and they’re distraught, more than I’d ever seen, and I send them on their way and I go back into the space and the cast is all sitting around the table and they’re all crying. I was proven so wrong. I didn’t think the show was for them and it is, it’s for everybody. It was kind of a magical night for us.
Maybe you can speak to that, Jay, being on the other side that equation as one of the cast. What is it like for you to be that close to your audience?
Jay: It’s a wonderful challenge as an actor, you truly can’t phone in a performance. I think with that particular audience, we all felt like we were holding a really delicate egg and we wanted to nurture it and do justice for this crowd that had come in. I never know what I’m going to get from each audience member every night and it’s going to be something different. It forces me to be listening, truly be present.
If you would like to experience the power of The Hidden Ones, you can visit their website, https://www.thehiddennyc.com/, for my information on the show and to order tickets.
To learn more about World War II and the Holocaust, you can visit the website for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at https://www.ushmm.org/learn/introduction-to-the-holocaust
Best,
Dr. Drama