Zachary Pincus-Roth.com

All the World’s a Stage at WoW Festival

A tennis court version of "Three Sisters." Photo by Jim Carmody

Published in the Wall Street Journal 

A car, a garden path, a basketball court, a garage. Audiences at La Jolla Playhouse’s Without Walls Festival in San Diego last week weren’t short of venue options. Some watched Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” on a tennis court. Others experienced “Hurtling,” a performance designed for one audience member at a time, on the roof of the University of California San Diego’s engineering school.

Theater staged in the real world can be a jolting experience, but WoW Festival organizers hoped the unusual locations of its 22 site-specific shows would heighten the storytelling. “It’s getting people off this fact that they’re supposed to ‘get it.’ That there’s a singular idea,” said Liz Lerman, director of “Healing Wars,” a dance show that had audiences wander backstage before the show to witness vignettes set during the Civil War. “It’s truer to life.”

While immersive theater isn’t new, especially to Europeans, it’s been gaining steam in the U.S. over the past few years. The trend is influenced by shows like the New York hit “Sleep No More,” a mashup of “Macbeth” and Hitchcock in which audiences wear masks and follow performers around a Chelsea warehouse.

Kevin Spacey in Richard III: The Winter of His Content

Kevin Spacey in the movie "Margin Call"

Published in WSJ Magazine

"If there was one play that we really, really didn't want to f— up, this was it." Kevin Spacey curses a lot, which is especially startling since we are walking through the stately public gardens of Greystone Mansion, the English Gothic–style estate in Beverly Hills.

We're having about as British a day as you can have in Los Angeles, starting with breakfast at the London Hotel. Spacey likes to stay there because the hotel offers free calls to London, where he lives and works his day job as artistic director of the storied Old Vic Theatre.

Spacey, who is strolling along in gray Converse All Stars, is headed out tonight to Avilés, Spain, a tiny northern port town, the next stop on the global tour of the play in question, "Richard III."

"The expectations were so high," he explains. It was, after all, the first time he would be working with director Sam Mendes since both won Oscars for "American Beauty." The production is also part of the duo's ambitious Bridge Project, in which a play debuts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) or the Old Vic, takes an epic world tour to places like Hong Kong, Sydney and Greece. Richard the III lands in New York on January 10 at BAM, a co-producer of the project.