I open the door of the bathroom to find it covered in blood. I do my best to comfort the sobbing woman I’ve promised to protect, as I finally understand the hopelessness of our situation. I have spent all evening shielding her from the man who holds us hostage in his house. Although my lies to him rolled off the tongue with surprising ease, I realize now that covering up a mess like this is impossible. I take one of the soiled towels from the ground and wipe blood off of the crying woman’s legs. “Will you brush my hair?” she asks me, tears rolling down her face. I run the brush through her tangled locks a few times before another futile attempt to clean. I turn on the faucet, wet a rag, and begin to scrub the floor, though I only manage to rub the filth around on the tile. “Is my makeup okay?” she asks in a small voice, as I open the shower door to find it already full of blood-soaked towels, “He hates it when I don’t look pretty.”
Dissonance is an interactive multi-track immersive horror show set in a cabin in the woods outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, that ran the weekend of November 11th, 2022. Dissonance felt relatively accessible to those new to the immersive horror genre, especially those who have a curiosity about extreme horror but would prefer to opt out of the painful features that accompany most high intensity shows. Despite the lack of rough handling, Dissonance managed to deeply unnerve me. It felt extreme, even without a full-contact component. The show was the result of a first-time collaboration between Emma Lee and Michael Freas – Freas’s first major project and Lee’s second after her ARG, Velveteen Ribbons through her company Firefly Tapestry Storytelling. The three-person cast included Lee, Freas, and a third actor, David Mund. The background crew consisted of just two people: Aidan Freas and Daniel Lee. Will Soderberg created an eerie soundtrack that underscored the action. Despite the small cast and crew, and Lee’s and Freas’s relative newness to the genre, the group managed to create a piece of theatre I would expect from seasoned veterans. The performances were compelling; the writing was devastating; the supernatural elements were subtle and sophisticated. Over the 90-minute runtime, I grew to feel as if I truly knew each character.
Lee played Prudence, a sheltered woman of 27, who lives with the psychotic local pastor, Father Victor, played by Freas. As Prudence welcomed us into their home, she poured us tea and initiated small talk. She was clearly nervous – unused to company – and wanted to do a good job as hostess. When the pastor descended the stairs, we understood the root of her anxiety: Father Victor, who promptly admitted to killing his former wife, had a gun. At its core, Dissonance is about the longing for family. We saw that desire play out in the love that grows naturally between Prudence and her dead friend, Joey, and in the unnatural intimacy that Father Victor forces on both Prudence and his guests. While love follows Prudence wherever she goes in the ghostly personification of safety, it is that same longing for love – though perverted by narcissism – that leads Father Victor down his own murderous path. Dissonance plays with religious indoctrination and explores how easily something beautiful can turn into something sinister. I felt an immediate affinity for Prudence and did my best to help her; and yet it was specifically this affinity, and my resulting attempts to protect her, that put me in harm’s way.
Although Dissonance is solidly structured, I frequently felt like I was LARPing. When we first arrived in the parking lot, our greeter told me and my companion, Madeline, not to be afraid to play around, heighten scenes, or even play characters of our own. The amount of space that Lee and Freas gave us to improvise during the experience was unlike anything I’ve encountered in shows of similar nature. And yet despite the freedom we had as guests, the written story never faded from view. It was dreamlike navigating the world I found myself in while still adhering to the guardrails of script. I followed Prudence throughout my experience; Madeline followed Father Victor, which allowed us to compare notes after the show. My track was heart wrenching and tender. I learned the history of Prudence and Joey, whose spirit guided me back to her several times when she wandered off. Madeline, on the other hand, embraced the twisted teachings of Father Victor and assisted him in thwarting my attempts to be a hero. While I got an experience about the codependent longing to save others from peril, Madeline got a show about the dangers of indoctrination. That the two of us could follow different characters and take opposite tactics as guests, yet both still feel like we had a complete experience, is an incredible feat on the part of the creators. The result was a show of surprising complexity despite its straightforward storyline. Although we only covered two of the four tracks, the other guests expressed similar sentiments.
All three actors gave standout performances. Lee played Prudence as a grown woman with stunted emotional development due to her time as Father Victor’s prisoner. Though childlike in demeanor, the woman within her emerged with jarring clarity when she found herself in danger. At the beginning of the show, Father Victor made her drink an unknown substance from a glass. Lee’s go-lucky smile faded, and her voice dropped an octave before she asked, “What is it?” Her acting was so realistic that I often forgot I was interacting with a piece of theatre: I was in full protector-mode after promising Joey I’d look after her. Joey, played with virtuosic skill by Mund, was the emotional core of my experience. Though he never once spoke, Mund was able to convey all he needed to through silent gesture. I bought fully into our alliance. At one point, the other guests and I were outside in the woods, looking for Prudence when I saw Joey amongst the trees and shouted, “We can trust him! I know him!” before running through the snow to get to him. Mund’s movements and energy were so otherworldly that it was impossible to see him as an actor playing a role: I really did feel like I was following a guardian angel into the night. His determination to watch over Prudence even after death moved me to tears. And although I spent the least amount of time with Father Victor, his presence was powerful enough to shadow all scenes in his absence. Freas’s energy as the demented cult leader was both menacing and unpredictable. I had decided early on that I would do my best to resist him, and although he seemed easily placated, I noticed my lies growing larger and larger to keep up with my deception. The threat of violence was ongoing. When at last I found myself in the bathroom surrounded by bloody towels and nowhere to hide them, I felt real anxiety about my inability to clear away the mess. After an evening of successfully smoothing over the tension between Prudence and Father Victor, I had finally encountered a problem that I couldn’t conceal from view. “I know,” Father Victor later whispered in my ear, “I know that you have deceived me,” as I waited for the consequence of my transgressions. Although this experience lacked any physical pain, I let out a genuine scream.
Theatrically, Dissonance was a masterclass in simplicity. The narrative was clear and easy to follow. Lee and Freas embraced their location and wrote a site-specific script. The natural beauty of the cabin and the surrounding woods added such a vividness to the experience. With only three characters to interact with and just four guests per time slot, the atmosphere felt more like a fucked-up dinner party than a ticketed event. The intimacy was disarming and, in this case, allowed for a deeper immersion than could likely occur with a larger cast or an expansive, custom-built set. And it was the small things throughout my experience that pulled me out of my head and dropped me into the story – a sheet slowly falling to reveal a figure underneath, a silent dance in the snowy night, cloth towels soaked through with bloody water. The smell of gunpowder still rings in my memory. Sometimes, all it takes is a shifting of light and a covering of furniture to signify a changing of realms. Dissonance proved that relative newcomers with a small crew and a limited budget can create an unforgettable piece of theatre. As Madeline and I drove away from the cabin, we unpacked our experience with a religious fervor that reminded me of my initial days as a fan of the genre. Dissonance helped me rediscover why I first fell in love with immersive horror: the intimacy, the intensity of emotions, and the strong thematic storytelling. Lee’s and Freas’s attention to detail and the performances of all three cast members elevated this no-frills show to a masterpiece. I hope to experience more theatre like it in the future. My main regret is that I couldn’t to go through Dissonance several more times to try the other tracks, so I have my fingers crossed for a remount. I don’t know what Lee and Freas are working on now that this initial run has wrapped, but whatever they come up with next, I will be the first in line for a ticket.
Production photos by Sam Delacruz, Emma Lee, and Daniel Lee.
