The Drowned Man

Wow! Where do I begin? Punchdrunk's The Drowned Man was truly incredible. We left around 6 p.m. for the 9 p.m. show and Amy, a.k.a. Mapquest mom, got us to the the theatre. Temple Studios was more like a warehouse and when we arrived there was already a queue forming to get in. We grabbed some McDonald's around the corner, then hopped in line. Many of the people in line had already seen it. Some stayed after the matinee for the evening show. A gentleman named Peter, who was wearing the Punchdrunk company t-shirt and we assumed worked there, was going for the 27th time. When they opened the doors we picked up our tickets, I checked Tanner's backpack while he got his, and we hopped in a new line to get into the performance. Tanner was the cutoff for the first group so Amy and I were the first to walk into the theatre by ourselves. It started out as a dark scary maze. We queued up at the end of the maze where they passed out our masks. The audience wears masks the whole time so that we could tell the difference between each other and the performers. The show consists of about 40 actors each on a different path throughout the story and is loosely based on Woyzeck in conjunction with a few Hitchcock characters. The audiences is free to wander about through five stories of rooms and sets viewing everything and following the many characters through the story. Some characters will select audience members and interact with them or grab their hand and run through the stairs to another floor. They would interact with other characters in scenes with very little dialogue that were mainly modern dance type movement. For the first round, I followed lots of random small characters; for the second and third I followed the Woyzeck character through their whole story. I even got "strangled" by one of the murderers. The show ended with a sort of hoe down, after which we were herded into a bar toward the exit. We ran outside to the underground after the show but missed our train and ended up taking a taxi the rest of the way. Tanner, Liz, Amy and I stayed up for a bit to snack and talk about the show.