![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/a32684ff48019a23e34fdb95a356b756fb-an-ark-tin-drum.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n The cast of An Ark in rehearsal: from left, Rosie Sheehy, Arinz\u00e9 Kene, Ian McKellen, and Golda Rosheuvel.
\n Photo: Tin Drum\n <\/p>\n
Ian McKellen will not be present at this performance. That\u2019s the gist of the email reminder you receive from the Shed before heading there to see An Ark, the \u201cmixed reality\u201d play written by Simon Stephens, directed by Sarah Frankcom, and brainstormed into being by producer Todd Eckert. Though the show is a slight 47 minutes long, it comes heavily padded with special circumstances. Coat and bag check is mandatory; you stow your shoes in a cubby before taking your seat in the red-carpeted space; and, of course, you wear VR glasses. (The nearsighted who haven\u2019t worn contact lenses have to check their own glasses in exchange for a corrective version of the high-tech goggles, likely a dealbreaker for some theatergoers.) It\u2019s a lot of fuss \u2014 not to mention a lot of money \u2014 to conjure the feeling of an event, something new and exclusive that\u2019s letting us in on the ground floor. \u201cWelcome to the world premiere of An Ark,\u201d reads the program note by the Shed\u2019s artistic director Alex Poots, \u201cand the first play created for mixed reality.\u201d<\/p>\n
That seems unprovable. But more important, whether or not An Ark is a truly original experiment, its results are dispiritingly bland. Essentially, four prerecorded actors\u2014McKellen, Golda Rosheuvel (known to Bridgerton<\/a> fans as Queen Charlotte), Arinz\u00e9 Kene, and Rosie Sheehy\u2014sit in a semi-circle of floating chairs and talk to you for a while from inside your glasses. They aren\u2019t characters so much as adjectives: Rosheuvel is warm and a little conspiratorial. McKellen is prototypically stately and droll, an old magician reading a bedtime story. Kene is bright and Sheehy more sharp and shaded, the only one of the group who seems over the whole thing.<\/p>\n What that thing is is never explicitly defined, but the premise is ancient enough to make itself apparent: These four are dead. So are we, but, it would seem, more recently so. \u201cDon\u2019t panic,\u201d they tell us. \u201cDon\u2019t be scared.\u201d It\u2019s the third act of Our Town and we are Emily Webb \u2014 except that An Ark has no first two acts girding it up, and its boneless flow of dewy wonder over the little things that make up life quickly becomes banal where it should be bracing and ecstatic. \u201cThe sweet taste of pineapple juice. The plunge in your heart of a love story. The view of the horizon in the sky as the sun falls\u201d; \u201cold newspapers. A yellow silk shirt. Battered blue jeans. Green tea and mineral water\u201d; \u201ccherry blossom. Chocolate milk. Night terrors.\u201d An Ark loves a list, and though that last one is improved by McKellen\u2019s inimitable growly diction, the onslaught of earnestness starts to wear. So does Stephens\u2019s commitment to the nebulous second person: \u201cYou come alive to the feeling of silk on skin.\u201d Even Mary Oliver<\/a> might need a break from this much wild and precious life.<\/p>\n It may be that Stephens erred on the side of cloying warmth because he knew that these images, these voices, were going to be packaged inside such a cool container. In his own program note, Eckert is at pains to demonstrate the humanity of the project: \u201cAn Ark is not a work of AI,\u201d he writes. Instead of technology that \u201cerodes the foundation of our shared experience,\u201d he\u2019s interested in \u201chow we might utilize technology to expand the traditional forms of theater and film \u2026 to bring us closer to the truth of ourselves.\u201d That sounds nice, but I\u2019m wary, and not just because he said \u201cutilize.\u201d The experience of An Ark is, if anything, predictably insular. There you sit in one of several concentric circles of audience members, strapped to your chair by the wire from your goggles, with some absent British actors floating in front of you, their flesh rendered uncanny and digital, their eye contact direct but frictionless \u2014 you could boo or applaud or start texting your friend and it would make no difference to them.<\/p>\n The strangest aspect of the VR glasses is that you can still see your own environment \u2014 McKellen and Co. don\u2019t hover in a void but rather overlap like holograms with the red carpeting, the chairs, your dimly lit fellow audience members. Is this what An Ark means in describing its reality as \u201cmixed\u201d? If so, it\u2019s a depressing concoction. For stretches of the show, I found myself staring past the unreal actors at the real humans sitting hooked up to machines, their eyes all hidden. If we had all been watching the same video on our phones, no matter how moving the content, would the effect have been so different? Stephens\u2019s script attempts to envision death in order to pay homage to life, but neither great mystery feels freshly illuminated by a project that invests so little in actual presence, actual vigor. When An Ark was done, a hesitation preceded dutiful applause. The woman beside me joined in but turned to her friend with a short, uncertain laugh. \u201cWhat,\u201d she asked, \u201care we clapping for?\u201d<\/p>\n For those who love extreme sports and experimental theater, January in New York is a cold, wet, high-endurance paradise: It\u2019s festival season, and right now Under the Radar<\/a>, Prototype<\/a>, and the Exponential Festival<\/a> (among<\/a> others<\/a>) are at their height, with shows that range from a resurrected Richard Foreman opera (delightful, demented, full of ducks<\/a>) to a mash-up of Jaws and To the Lighthouse<\/a>. After that evening at the Shed, it struck me that I\u2019ve seen several festival shows in much smaller rooms that take up many of the same concerns as An Ark \u2014 some even using similar techniques \u2014 with much more pluck and vibrancy.<\/p>\n In a converted upstairs office room at Target Margin\u2019s warehouse theater space way out in Sunset Park, Normandy Sherwood and Nikki Calonge\u2019s gorgeously textured, totally trippy blend of monologue and bizarro dance theater, The Mushroom (part of Exponential), also asked us to take off our shoes to witness something not quite human \u2014\u00a0but here, the space pulsed with color and sensation, a living forest floor of warm, weird organic energy. Calonge choreographed dancers so wrapped in layers of found and combined materials \u2014 scrunchy yarn and drippy fringe, crinkling plastic and proboscis-like pool noodles \u2014 that their human forms disappeared. They were spore-producing blobs and wiggling pupae, creatures of mycelium that bloomed and receded; merged and reproduced and rejoined the soft, mutating understory. Sherwood wrote and designed the production, and all her crocheted tentacles and undulating, diaphanous fruiting bodies did more to bring human vitality and human decay into the room than any gesture in An Ark. I won\u2019t soon forget an enormous slug \u2014 a dancer zipped up inside what looked like a huge brown Ikea bag \u2014 scooting by me, slow and squishy and facelessly amicable, on its way toward an exit in the shaggy curtains that lined the space. Now that was wild and precious.<\/p>\n \n Adrienne Swan and Nicolas Nore\u00f1a in The Mushroom. Meanwhile, at Under the Radar, life\u2019s ephemera received compelling consideration in both 2021 \u2014 created by Cole Lewis, Patrick Blenkarn, and Sam Ferguson \u2014 and in the \u201cWorker\u2019s Lunch\u201d that was forced to take the place<\/a> of 12 Last Songs, the epic interview-based meditation on work and community that was to unfold over twelve hours at La MaMa. 2021 used live video-gameplay, a cardboard box of a real dead man\u2019s personal effects, and an AI model built by the team to reimagine the final days of that man \u2014 Lewis\u2019s own father, a Canadian army vet who moved to the U.S., embraced Trumpism, and spent his final weeks with both pancreatic cancer and COVID, hallucinating and living in his car after countless failures of the system. As with An Ark, pixelated worlds, mixed \u201crealities,\u201d and questions of what small objects \u2014 and what, if any, moments of dignity \u2014 a life leaves behind sat at the heart of 2021. Here, however, specificity of character superseded generality of sentiment.<\/p>\n![\"Adrienne](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/57232622ceb13ba67b2eda25370bbdbd7b-The-Mushroom-at-Target-Margin-Theater.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Lee Rayment\n <\/p>\n