Have you ever wanted to experience Los Angeles during the 70s? Perhaps visit a house party during that time? And maybe, just maybe, get sucked into a spy thriller? Then does Spy Brunch have the show for you!
They are bringing SAFEHOUSE ‘ 77 to audiences this November and, as a fan of spy movies and the time period, I am excited to see what they have in store for us!
SAFEHOUSE ’77 is a site-specific show that transports ten guests back in a 1977 house party that captures the spirt of that era…and the secrets that lurk underneath. Cocktails, snacks, and private encounters will get guests into the mood, and help them uncover just what exactly is going on.
From their description:
It’s 1977 and you’ve been invited to a seriously groovy party at Sharon’s pad in Los Feliz. Drinks, snacks, tunes, games, beautiful people… cool beans, right? But there’s more going on in this joint than meets the eye, and if you’re not careful you could get pulled into something pretty wild by the time the night is over. Will you take a trip into the secret world that exists behind closed doors? Or will you just chill out on the couch, enjoy the spread, and flirt with whomever catches your eye? It’s all up to you… either way, this is gonna be a night to remember!
The show is the first immersive work from creator / director Nick Rheinwald-Jones. With the help of Creative Producer Lyndsie Scoggin and Line Producer Niyia Mack (who helped bring Delusion to life last year), we are definitely in for one hell of a ride.
I was so intrigued by this show that I sent over some questions to Rheinwald-Jones, to help shed some light on this spy saga.
HORRORBUZZ: How did the idea for Safehouse ’77 come about?
NICK RHEINWALD-JONES: Last Fall, I went to New York and saw my first batch of immersive shows, which included Then She Fell and Sleep No More. I don’t say this lightly: those were life-changing experiences. I came back to L.A. absolutely certain that I needed to create one of these things myself — both because I wanted to channel these experiences into something that was my own, and because I just wanted to spread immersive storytelling farther and wider. The spy thriller has been my go-to genre in all my other creative work, and I was really excited to start imagining what that would look like in an immersive format.
HORRORBUZZ: Crafting a spy film or novel is always an intricate thing to plan. What was the process like in developing one for immersive theater?
NICK RHEINWALD-JONES: The first phase was just me filling as many pages as possible with ideas, inspirations, characters, scenes, themes, feelings, and everything else that could possibly go into the show. Once I felt like I had a critical mass of creative material, I started assembling a team.
Lyndsie Scoggin, my creative producer, was the first person I brought in, and she and I spent some time talking about the characters and the structure of the show and how to make it a real audience experience instead of just a story. After that we started casting, and we were able to find a group of actors who were not only excellent performers but who could also contribute meaningfully to building their characters and the story. The first several weeks of rehearsals were very unstructured; sometimes I’d bring scenes in, and other times we’d just sit around and spitball about scenes or thematic elements or whatever else we felt like talking about.
The final phase was me taking everything I’d absorbed from the past few months and writing a final (or at least final-ish) script, which was very rewarding because by then I knew the actors well enough to really tailor the material to them. I also had a much clearer idea of what kinds of things would work well in the immersive format and what kinds of things were better left to other mediums. For example, a lot of the scenes I wrote earlier in the process were essentially designed to be performed before a silent, passive audience, which we obviously weren’t going to have in this show (or in most other immersive shows, for that matter). I guess the tl;dr version is that it was a lot of work, a lot of learning, and a lot of fun.
HORRORBUZZ: What about the 70s-time period drew you to it as the setting for this?
NICK RHENWALD-JONES: The ’70s component was less premeditated than the spy component; it just popped into my brain at one point early on in the process, and then I quickly realized that setting the show in a specific time period could really help with the escapism/immersion elements, especially since we were going to do the show in a house. I wanted people to feel like they were in a different world as soon as they crossed the threshold, and since Safehouse takes place in — essentially — the real world, the only way I saw to accomplish that was by setting it in a different time.
The more I thought about that, the more excited I got about it, because I love time travel almost as much as I love spy movies, and hopefully what I’ve been able to do with this house is to build a sort of time machine that sends every audience 40 years into the past. It’s a fun period to capture in terms of production design and music, since everything back then was bigger, louder, more garish, more analog. There’s more physical interaction with things and people, because you couldn’t just do everything on your iPhone. So I think there’s a lot about the period that works really well in an immersive setting. It’s also a good excuse to serve fondue.
HORRORBUZZ: Is it more James Bond or Austin Powers? (Just reading about it, it could go either way but both sound awesome!)
NICK RHENWALD-JONES: I’d certainly say more James Bond, because the Bond films and novels are such huge pop-cultural touchstones for me. (It’s not a coincidence that The Spy Who Loved Me, one of my favorites, came out in 1977.) The thing is, there’s a limit to how Bond-esque you can make a relatively low-budget immersive show that takes place in one little house in Los Feliz over a single evening. Nobody’s going to be parachuting off a ski mountain or driving a submarine car into the Mediterranean.
I suppose you could have a character sit you down for a one-on-one and tell you that they just got back from doing those things, but then you’re heading towards — ironically — the Austin Powers version, where nothing is really meant to be taken seriously. To me, the spy elements of the show are only fun if the audience really does take them seriously, and that meant we needed to present them in a more grounded way than you’d see in most of the Bond movies. All that being said, I’d really love to do an immersive show with car chases and explosions someday.
HORRORBUZZ: How do your, and your producers, different backgrounds, with all of you coming from different areas of entertainment, meld together when putting a show like this on?
NICK RHENWALD-JONES: I think the great thing about immersive theater is that every show is unique, so nobody’s walking in with a set of assumptions or rules. You can talk about what works well in other shows, but you’re really building something entirely from scratch. Therefore, even though some of the cast and crew had more immersive experience than others, it felt like we were on the same page because we were all just trying to figure out what this show should be. Having a really smart and collaborative cast and crew was a huge boon in that regard; everyone just jumped right in on day one and got to work.
A big thanks to Nick to answering my questions!
Let it be known now that we are HorrorBuzz are VERY excited to check out SAFEHOUSE ’77. We cannot wait to see the spy genre come to life in, what we think, is the very first time for immersive theater.
SAFEHOUSE ’77 opens on November 2, 2017, for a limited engagement. For more information, and to purchase tickets, you can visit them online at: https://www.safehouse77.com/
