Role-playing games and theater seem so closely aligned that it’s surprising more companies haven’t fully embraced gamer culture as part of their aesthetic. (If you can believe that pirates somehow miraculously appear in the nick of time to save Marina’s life in Shakespeare’s Pericles, you can pretty much believe any of the narrative twists in LARPs.) And in pragmatic terms, there’s also a helluva big potential audience in gaming fans for theater companies eager to reach new patrons.
Appropriately, the idea for Otherworld came to artistic director Tiffany Keane Schaefer while she was waiting in line for the midnight release of the video game Skyrim. Schaefer, who was studying directing at Columbia College Chicago at the time, notes that “there were a lot of discussions [in class] about ‘how do we engage young people in theater? Theater is dying, you know.’” Looking around the line, Schaefer says she decided “these are my people and I wanted to have the theater where people are standing in line at midnight, talking about the narrative that they are going to explore.”
VALHA11A completed its initial arc on May 27 but will be returning for another installment later in the summer. “You sign up and you are playing up to five episodes for your character,” explains Schaefer. The premise for the game is that players are “Vikens,” or members of an ancient race known for their interstellar navigational skills, and they must complete the journey known as the “Grand Rite.” Players choose a ship at the beginning of the game, which, notes Schaefer, “kind of dictates what kind of experience you will have,” though players can also, via Zoom breakout rooms, travel to different realms. Actors from the Otherworld ensemble play the captains, AI computers, and fellow crew members. It’s not necessary for a player to have been part of the first arc, or “saga,” as Schaefer calls it, to do the second. Otherworld charges players $35 per episode, or $150 for the entire campaign; the first saga played every Wednesday at 7 PM for three hours.
