Saboteur
story and puzzles by David Pisa
directed by Amy Rummenie
July 9 – August 3, 2011
“Universal Hydro Solutions”
2010 East Hennepin Ave
An explosive summer event with a suspicious man, a woman with a secret identity, and a relationship full of traps. Play along in a dangerous story of espionage and romance combining theatrical elements and unique hands-on scenes. Discover the clues. Solve the puzzles. Unfold the mystery.
Saboteur was a live performance in which the audience participated in the action of the show by doing large-scale, hands-on puzzles.
Introduction
Saboteur was a company-created, site-specific play combining elements of traditional theater and puzzles that the audience solved to advance the story. This was Walking Shadow Theatre Company’s second puzzle show, after 1926 Pleasant in 2006.
Saboteur was a spy story and a romance. The story was gradually revealed over the course of the evening, as the audience made discoveries about what was really going on and their role in the plot. As the play went on, we deliberately adopted a more lighthearted tone, incorporating traditional (and sometimes ridiculous) spy motifs such as the elaborate death trap and the double agent.
Saboteur was staged in a nondescript 3000 square foot warehouse space in an industrial/residential neighborhood. The building had originally been part of a 1930s research lab for General Mills, and its floor still showed evidence of that use complete with concrete ramps and peculiar six inch high walls to contain spills. When General Mills relocated, the 6.5 acre industrial complex became a Superfund site and was cleaned up in the 1980s. Now, these buildings are home to hundreds of artists and small businesses. The building’s murky past isn’t immediately apparent, but helped inspire the show’s conceit that this warehouse was actually a front for a secret organization.
The Audience
The audience capacity was limited to 16 people. While we could have physically fit more people into the space, we wanted to ensure that each audience member could, if they wanted, actively participate in the puzzles.
Though sixteen people is a very small audience by traditional theater standards, it’s actually quite a lot when everyone must work together as a team. As with 1926 Pleasant, a major part of the show was the audience navigating group dynamics. Sometimes, a puzzle worked best if a leader emerged and delegated duties to others, but other times puzzles were designed so that no one person could see everything that was going on, and multiple voices were needed.
Every audience was different. Sometimes people knew each other already, and sometimes everyone was a total stranger. Some people identified themselves as good puzzle solvers and some were afraid they would be awful (as it turned out, people from both groups were occasionally wrong). In some performances, the audience cohered quickly and worked together efficiently, while in others, personalities vied for preeminence, adding an extra layer of complexity.
Welcome to Universal Hydro Solutions
The audience enters through the front door of the warehouse into a small lobby. It has a display case and table filled with bottled water. Signs reveal that this is Universal Hydro Solutions, a water wholesaler and distributor.
A television sits on the table, connected to two closed-circuit security cameras attached to the wall. Gentle lobby music plays from a CD player behind the counter, and a chirpy receptionist welcomes each audience member:
“Welcome to Universal Hydro Solutions! When you need water, call Universal!”
The receptionist indicates that patrons are here for their appointment with Mr. Brinsley. He’s not quite ready to meet with them, but in the meantime she encourages everyone to help themselves to water. There’s a lot of it.
The Velcro Puzzle, Part 1
When the entire audience is assembled, the receptionist clicks on her walkie-talkie to let Mr. Brinsley know that they’re getting started. She gives a quick speech discouraging industrial espionage (photography), reminding the audience that “the room is being watched by closed circuit cameras”, and encouraging team building and cooperation. Then, she says “Before you can meet with Mr. Brinsley, there’s something I need you to do.” She places a large plastic tub in the middle of the floor, and with a simple “Get to work,” she steps back and waits. The audience is suddenly in charge of the show.
The audience opens the tub and finds a couple dozen puzzle pieces. Made of thick, lightweight foam, on one side they have Velcro, and on the other, stickers with circles and squares in different colors. The audience realizes that the walls are covered with strips of Velcro as well as colored circles and squares.
For each puzzle piece, they must find the place on the wall where the color and shape on the sticker match the color and shape on the wall: the Velcro will make it stick there. This isn’t a logic puzzle – each piece can only go in one place. The challenge is just matching colors and shapes, which can actually be difficult when there are so many colors on the wall, and people moving in the room.
We knew we wanted to open the show with an intuitive puzzle that the entire audience could participate in. This particular puzzle idea came about because the location was formerly a frame shop, so when we took possession of the venue the front lobby had long Velcro strips attached to the wall where the product samples used to hang. Then it was just a question of how to build a puzzle that used the pre-existing features of the space.
The Velcro Puzzle, Part 2
Once the audience finishes sticking pieces to the wall, it becomes apparent that, by themselves, they don’t form any kind of coherent image or message. The pieces don’t touch each other, and are split between two different parts of the room. Now what?
Attentive audience members would notice the monitor with a black and white image from a security camera. Now, they see that a security camera perfectly covers one of the two sections of puzzle pieces. Looking up, they see there’s a second camera aimed at the other section of the puzzle, but that image doesn’t display on the monitor.
There’s a video fader sitting on the front counter with a slider bar that can fade the image on the monitor from one camera to the other. Positioning the slider halfway results in the two images overlaying one another, forming a message:
Track Eight. The audience realizes that they have access to the CD player that has been piping out lobby music this whole time. They advance to track eight, and trigger the next event.
The audience couldn’t bypass the video fader and mentally combine the two halves of the image, because one part was upside down. The video camera for that half was also installed upside down, so the image appeared right side up on the TV.
Like the cardboard box puzzle from 1926 Pleasant, this puzzle taught the audience to go ahead and get their hands on things without necessarily knowing what they were trying to accomplish. With no instruction other than “get to work,” a phrase that introduced every puzzle in the show, everyone just jumped right in and grabbed pieces. Once the first part was complete with all the pieces on the walls, it was clear the puzzle wasn’t over yet, but there was still no explicit instruction about how to proceed. The audience, consciously or not, realized that they must be looking for some kind of a message, and examined the room for a way to turn what they had done so far into something else that would yield a message. This multi-stage structure was repeated through most of the puzzles in the show.
Activation
The stereo emits a strange electronic burst of noise, followed by a flood of voices. This soundscape represents the audience’s memories, repressed until now. A doctor reports on successful biological upgrades. Instructors describe cryptography techniques and field training. Other voices fade in and out with ideas about what it means to be a spy, to lead a life of deception, and to live with the possibility of discovery and betrayal.
The Light Switch Puzzle
The audience is in a large, dark room. The windows are blacked out, and the soundscape from the first room fades into eerie background noises.
“You have been illuminated,” the Coordinator says. “Your eyes are opened to the truth. Your handler is waiting for you. It is up to you to reach him. Look around. Rely on your training. You know how to do this. The answer is in this room. Now get to work.”
As she finishes, a single small light – a red LED – illuminates on the wall next to her. The LED is fixed on top of a box with a light switch. This switch is part of a cluster of switches, and around the room are other such clusters. There’s also a door with an electronic keypad. It’s locked, but a sign indicates that the audience is trying to find the code to get through it.
Inevitably, the audience flips the switch attached to the red LED. The single light goes off, but red lights attached to the neighboring switches turn on. Every time the audience flips a switch, it affects the LED attached to that switch, as well as lights attached to adjacent switches.
The audience fans out around the room, trying other switches in different clusters. The LEDs of each cluster have a different color. One cluster has only one switch, and when that LED (a green one) turns on, the audience notices that a second green light turns on in a complex-looking control panel near the door.
The audience realizes that they’re trying to get all the lights in each cluster turned on, which will turn on all the lights in the master control panel. They get to work, and through a combination of luck, experimentation and logic, they find the correct combination of switches. At that point, a new section on the master panel lights up with a code: “3472”, which they punch into the keypad, unlocking the next room.
This puzzle was inspired by the computer game The 7th Guest. In the game there was a room filled with nine coffins. Clicking on any given coffin opened or closed it, as well as the adjoining coffins. We adapted the puzzle so that, instead of just one cluster, we had clusters of 1, 2, 4, and 9. This forced the audience to spread out around the room, and provided a learning curve: the audience was sure to stumble upon the solutions to the two smallest clusters, confirm what they knew with the group of 4, and then be sure of what they were trying to accomplish with the group of 9.
We provided a reset button so that, if the audience got hopelessly mixed up while experimenting, they could turn all the lights off and start again. Once you figured out what you were trying to do, the puzzle wasn’t too difficult if you started from a blank slate, though some audiences were afraid to push the reset button, perhaps fearing it was a trick!
This puzzle took over a week to build. It required days of soldering and used nearly 800 feet of wire. Everything was controlled through an off-the-shelf circuit board called an Arduino.
Meeting Mr. Brinsley
The audience opens the door, and a voice welcomes them. The room is an office, with a large desk, bookshelves, file cabinet, etc. Here, at last, is Mr. Brinsley.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome. I’m already quite impressed with you. In gaining access to this room, you successfully ran through my test of your subconscious programming… and by the looks on your faces, I expect you’re already beginning to suspect the truth. My sincerest apologies to you all, but as secret agents under deep cover we could take no chances. That’s right – you are spies.”
Brinsley goes on to reveal that Universal Hydro Solutions is a cover operation for the spy organization. The audience are sleeper agents, programmed with essential data and techniques, but unaware of all their own memories. Brinsley has activated the agents because he fears one of his coworkers, a spy named Julia, may have been courted by enemy Ruritanian agents. Showing the audience her file photo, he says he suspects her betrayal, and wants to find proof. But he doesn’t have the necessary expertise, so he needs the audience’s help. The Coordinator will lead the audience next door, where they must break into a laser-secured storage facility to retrieve surveillance footage of Julia meeting with the enemy agent.
Ruritania is the name of a fictional European country often used when a story requires spies from a foreign power (or sometimes in academia, where a philosophical argument requires a hypothetical country). Originally created in 1894 by novelist Anthony Hope for The Prisoner of Zenda, Ruritania lent its name to a whole genre of adventure stories. References to Ruritania have appeared everywhere, including other early twentieth century novels, an episode of Get Smart in 1969, and even an episode of Futurama in 2010.
The Laser Maze
The Coordinator leads the audience to an area surrounded by blue tarps. She unlocks a door, urging the audience to be careful of their eyes: “These are active lasers. Now get to work.”
This room is broken up by irregular walls into short, oddly shaped hallways. As the audience explores, they find an electronic device in one corner, a series of mirrors tethered by short chains to the walls, and four boxes labeled targets 1 through 4. A sign by the device says, “This laser will only turn on when the door is shut.” So the audience shuts the door, completing a circuit that makes a laser beam shoot out of the device.
Target 1 is right next to the laser device, and both are next to a mirror. It’s easy enough to hold the mirror (which can move because of its chain) so that the laser shoots back at the target, which then lights up. The audience realizes they’re trying to light up all the targets. They experiment with bouncing the laser from one mirror to another, going around corners and under obstacles. With the door shut, sixteen people make the room feel tight, and often someone accidentally steps into the path of the laser. Also, some paths may use four or five mirrors, and the wobble of the first mirror is then multiplied over the next few, so that everyone in the sequence must work together to keep the beam steady and reach the target.
The targets become progressively more difficult, but the audience succeeds, and when all four lights are lit, a new circuit is completed, and a hatch opens in the ceiling, dropping out a small key. The audience uses the key to unlock a box built into one wall, inside of which is a DVD: the security footage.
This puzzle was simultaneously a maze, a dexterity challenge, and a test of communication. The room was designed so that nobody can see one whole path at once; the audience had to talk to each other about what they were able to hit with the laser at any turning. There were multiple ways that some targets could be reached. Some (the ones we originally intended the audience to find) were a little easier. Other paths were more difficult because they traveled further, or bounced the laser at a more extreme angle. We tried to reduce the number of paths as much as possible to keep the number of choices from being overwhelming, but the audience regularly discovered other, far more difficult, paths to navigate the room.
The Security Footage
The audience brings the footage back to Brinsley, who pops it in the DVD player and has everyone gather around. On the TV is an elegant party in a beautiful mansion. People in formal wear mill about, drinking champagne. Brinsley identifies the Ruritanian Agent. When Julia steps onscreen and approaches the Agent, Brinsley explains that Julia was undercover, trying to discover where the Ruritanians got their weapons, but he fears the Ruritanian Agent knew she was a spy and was trying to court her to their side.
Brinsley’s suspicions seem confirmed when the Ruritanian Agent and Julia begin dancing. Brinsley agonizes that Julia’s behavior is entirely unprofessional. He seems… jealous.
Suddenly, the overhead lights snap on. The audience hears the front door of the warehouse open, and a woman calls out, “Hello? Brinsley?” Panicked, Brinsley goes to his office door to intercept the visitor, and signals for the Coordinator to turn off the television. But before she can do so, Julia herself walks into the room. Upon seeing the audience, she seems perplexed “I didn’t realize you had guests.” Brinsley and the Coordinator inform her that the audience has come for a site tour.
As Julia chats amiably with Brinsley, it becomes evident that the two of them are actually in a relationship together. Clearly, Brinsley hasn’t been entirely honest with the audience.
Brinsley has nearly escorted Julia out of the room, when she notices the footage still playing on the TV, and she stops in her tracks. “How did you get this?” she asks. Brinsley indicates the audience and confesses to Julia, “They’re the agents.” Julia can’t believe this incredible breach of protocol, “You activated them! To spy on me?”
Brinsley loves Julia, but she always gets sent out on missions, while he must remain behind in the cover location waiting for directives from Central. Their time apart gnaws at him, and he begins to fear that she doesn’t really love him back. Maybe she only loves him because they were placed together on assignment, and maybe he has reason to be jealous of people she meets in the field like the Ruritanian Agent.
Julia reassures Brinsley, but is justifiably upset that he has been spying on her: “I do love you, but you have to sort this out. Jeopardizing our mission. Now I’m gonna turn a blind eye, but you have to wipe them, and put them back to sleep or we’re both gonna be in hot water from Central. Okay?”
Brinsley meekly agrees.
This was a tricky scene to stage in a way that allowed the actors to see and communicate with the entire audience, at the same time making sure that Julia couldn’t see the television until the proper moment. It also took a significant amount of predicting audience behavior – an early test audience confessed how tempted they were to turn the television off before Julia caught Brinsley in a lie. We stationed the Coordinator to block the DVD player, but even so, one audience beat her there, leaving the actors scrambling for another path to explain their curious behavior.
This interaction between Julia and Brinsley is inspired by Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals. In that story, secondary characters Julia and Faulkland are in love, but Faulkland never trusts that Julia’s love is true. Early in the play, Faulkland complains that, while he was out of town, Julia has gone to a party and been seen having fun. She replies that of course she seemed to be having fun: if she didn’t, people would assume she was resentful of Faulkland being away, and she didn’t want them to gossip about him. Similarly, in Saboteur, Brinsley is upset that Julia seems to be enjoying her dance with the Ruritanian Agent.
“I seemed to be, because I had to be,” she says. “It’s called pretending. I was undercover.”
A Final Test!
But as soon as Julia is gone, Brinsley’s self destructive nature takes over again. He knows he has no reason to doubt her, but he can’t help himself. And worse, if she’s been lying about being in love with him, maybe she’s been lying about her loyalty to the Organization, too. “If only I could find some way to prove to myself once and for all that I don’t have anything to worry about…”
Brinsley gets a wild idea. He takes the audience into the area outside the laser-maze, and, tearing down the huge tarps that conceal a strange contraption, reveals his plan.
This is a death trap, “far too complicated to explain, with methods too horrible to mention.” Brinsley will lock himself in a small chamber where he will be tortured, and send a message to Julia telling her that he has been captured by Ruritanians and needs her help. “If she frees me, I’ll know her love is true, beyond our duty, and that she’s not a Ruritanian agent. And if she is indeed an enemy spy, well, I’d rather die than live without her.”
The Coordinator abandons Brinsley, saying she’ll have no part in this madness. Brinsley starts the deathtrap and shuts the door. As his screams fill the room, Julia arrives, terrified for his safety, but unable to save him alone. The audience must help her!
The Tilt Maze
The control mechanism to override the death trap is, using the logic of the spy genre, conveniently at hand, but difficult to use. At one end of the room is a giant tilt maze, like the wooden tabletop Labyrinth game, only eight feet square. A ball must travel through the maze, avoiding obstacles, until it presses a button, sending a signal into Brinsley’s chamber, deactivating the trap.
Unfortunately, the tilt maze is behind a giant fence. The audience can only move the maze by pulling on ropes at the other end of the room. There are four ropes, one for each side of the maze, and the ropes must be pulled in the right combination at the right time to move the ball through the maze. The ropes are far enough away that it can be difficult for the people pulling them to see what they’re doing, so other audience members must shout out instructions.
Underneath the entire puzzle, the rumbling clatter of an indescribable device fills the room, punctuated with the intermittent screaming of the imprudent Brinsley. “I deeply regret this!”
This was another puzzle of dexterity and communication. The tilt maze actually didn’t have any branching paths, just one route, and it didn’t have any inescapable obstacles like holes, just different turns to make. Audiences came up with varying ways of approaching the puzzle. Some groups created a system of communication where they named each rope and called out instructions like “North, go! East and South, go!” Some groups had people who stood in front of the fence and acted as if they were surfing, indicating which direction the maze should tilt. And some audiences, thinking laterally, brought chairs over to the ropes and stood on them so they could see better.
This puzzle probably weighed 400 pounds. But audiences didn’t have any trouble moving it by pulling on the ropes. So that it would pivot easily, we made a ball and socket joint out of a bowling ball.
Good Intentions, Bad Results
The audience guides the ball to the end of the maze, but it doesn’t fully deactivate the death trap. Instead, Julia must rush in to the chamber herself to throw the final switch and save Brinsley. As the deathtrap hisses to a stop, they emerge, breathless and bedraggled, but safe.
“You came back for me!” Brinsley cries, and they kiss passionately. But in rescuing Brinsley, Julia thinks she has returned to a compromised location against the policy of the Organization. She has let her love trump her duty, and so she proposes that they must destroy the facility, flee together, and go rogue.
“You would abandon your life as an agent for me?” Brinsley asks.
“Yes,” she replies, “even to the ends of the earth.”
This is what Brinsley was hoping to hear. “So, Julia, I have tested you to the last! And with this useless trick I throw away all my doubts. I know that you love me, that you are a loyal agent, not a Ruritanian spy. Now, will you forgive me for making you undergo this one final test?”
“Wait, what?”
“I love you, Julia, and now I know you love me!”
“A test! You mean you did that to yourself?”
For Julia, this is the last straw. She can’t believe Brinsley would manipulate her this way. “That you would do this to someone who loves you… After such a treatment, I cannot continue in this partnership. I am going to call Central and tell them, on no uncertain terms, that this arrangement must end. Now please, go away. Go.”
Brinsley is crushed, and, shamed by his recklessness, leaves.
Turnabout is Fair Play — the Office Puzzle
But Julia isn’t through with Brinsley yet. She realizes that what’s getting to him is the situation: while she’s out on operations, he just sits here, under deep cover, waiting for instructions that never come. If she could give him a purpose… Julia decides to plant a fake directive on his computer, so he’ll have something to do.
In order to gain access to his computer, Julia needs the audience’s help. Brinsley has an elaborate security system set up, and besides, the audience owes her for having helped Brinsley put her through such misery. Julia leads the audience back to the office, then leaves to go manufacture the fake directive.
The audience essentially ransacks Brinsley’s office following the code to get through the computer’s password lock. A note indicates they should begin by pulling pictures out of their frames and decoding a message on the back. After that, the audience removes the drawers from the desk to find a message on the back, opens the file cabinet and sorts the folders to reveal a clue, pulls the books off the shelf to discover that one is hollow, uses the key inside to unlock a box, and finally opens the water bottles on display to find a message written inside the caps. In the end, the room is in complete disarray, and the audience types the password, “FAILSAFE,” into the computer.
While they search, the Coordinator has returned. Once the audience has entered the password, she says “I’ll take it from here”, and plugs a flash drive into the computer. Then, she sends two messages on her walkie-talkie:
“Miss Melville, we’re ready.”
“Sir, you’d better get back here right away!”
Because this puzzle occurred so late in the show, the audience felt empowered to ransack the room in a way they’d been dissuaded from before. Even so, the vast majority of audiences were incredibly respectful about cleaning up after themselves/hiding their tracks. The Coordinator often had to mess the place up, tossing a few books back onto the floor as she called Brinsley. Some bibliophile audience members were greatly affronted by this!
Every Spy Story Needs Another Twist
Brinsley comes back into his office to find the audience digging around. “What the hell? What happened in here? What’s going on?” He hurries to his desk and sees the new file that the Coordinator uploaded. “Is this a directive?” he asks, and opens it. An electronic noise plays, the same one the audience heard when they activated themselves at the beginning of the show. Brinsley freezes momentarily, then comes to his senses. “What just happened?”
Julia returns to the room. She wears a sleek black dress, she moves and speaks with a new note of power. And now she reveals the truth: “You thought that was a directive, but it was actually an activation sequence!” Julia is, after all, a Ruritanian spy. She has been putting nanobots into the bottled water, slowly working to take control of Brinsley as part of a master plan!
“So do you realize why you kept suspecting me of being a spy? It’s because I am one. Why didn’t I let you die in the death trap? Ruritania has other plans for you, my dear. In fact, the death trap was my idea. Everything you’ve been doing has been my idea – calling together your agents, sending them on these ridiculous missions – it’s all just been an experiment… It was all just part of a test to make sure the nanobots were doing their job.”
And now that Brinsley is completely under her control, she no longer needs to hide her true identity. Brinsley isn’t entirely convinced. He doesn’t feel any different, but it’s all possible…
“What are you going to do now?” Brinsley asks.
“We’re going to take the world by storm, you and I. Every day, a new city, committing new acts of sabotage. And neither of us will ever back down. Now, tell me you love me, my little sleeper agent!”
“God, I love you, Julia.”
“I love you too, Brinsley.”
Has he actually has been taken over by Ruritanian nanobots? Or has he decided to play along in this new game that incorporates and undermines his chronic mistrust, in a relationship that, by affirming his fears, strangely lets him finally feel comfortable? There’s no way to know what the truth is. Either way, Julia leads Brinsley off, giving the Coordinator a curt “See to the agents.”
The Coordinator leads the audience out of the office. “Come with me,” she says. “This will be your final task.”
The Deactivation Sequence
The audience is back in the large room where they initially solved the light switch puzzle. Now, the overhead lights are on, and the Coordinator pulls away some canvas to reveal a huge stack of cardboard boxes.
“Please treat the components with respect,” she says. Putting one box in a particular spot on the floor, she declares “I am quite certain this piece goes here.”
The boxes are cubes, one and a half feet on a side. Each box has one side with a stencil reading “This Side Up.” On other faces are lines, shapes, and expanses of black ink. This is clearly a giant jigsaw puzzle.
The audience begins putting the pieces together, using the image on the front, starting from the piece the Coordinator laid down. The puzzle is built vertically, stacking boxes on top of each other in a wall. They discover that the sides and top of the puzzle are marked in different colors, and that the seemingly random short lines in the corners on the back side of the boxes form letters when correctly assembled.
The audience finishes building the wall, which is fifteen feet wide and nearly eight feet high. On the back of the wall they are able to read the message: “ADD 1 TO EACH LETTER,” followed by a string of letters: STQMNEENUDQGDZCKHFGS. Adding one to each of these letters yields “TURN OFF OVERHEAD LIGHT.”
Audiences loved this puzzle. We designed it to be a gigantic final physical experience, one that could truly accommodate everyone helping at once. With so many ways of approaching the puzzle – the front image, the writing on the back, the colors on the sides, the total number of boxes combined with accompanying signs about how high they could be stacked – there were lots of incremental discoveries that could be made about how to proceed. Often, audiences built the wall, applauded their completion of this monumental task, and then might have stopped, except by now they had been trained to look for another step, so they investigated further the writing on the back.
Fading Memory
When the audience turns off the light, they hear again that strange electronic sound. “Congratulations on everything you’ve done,” the Coordinator says. “The deactivation sequence is already taking effect. As you leave, the memories of these events will become shaky, like a dream or a game. But no matter how unreal it may seem, you’ll still carry it with you. Dormant and waiting.”
Loud music starts up, interrupting the Coordinator’s speech. She pulls back a curtain to reveal Julia and Brinsley dancing. Brinsley now wears a tuxedo to match Julia’s black gown, and as they turn, the audience sees that Julia is holding a gun to Brinsley’s head, but they are both smiling in delight.
The curtain closes, the lights snap back on, and the Coordinator has once again become the receptionist. She thanks the audience for visiting Universal Hydro Solutions, “I hope that everyone had an enjoyable time on their site tour and learned many fun and useful facts about water.” The audience heads back out into the parking lot, left to decide for themselves what they think really happened.
For us, one of the most fun parts of the evening was meeting the audience in the parking lot. Frequently, the entire audience hung around. No longer strangers, having just played together they wanted to compare notes on what had just happened, and ask us questions about how they did, or how the show had developed.
Many people wanted to know if they had completed the show within a good time limit. We never really kept score. The average time was about an hour and a half, with some audiences faster and some slower. Of course, “winning” wasn’t the point of the show, and however long an audience took, what they experienced along the way was what counted.
Walkthrough photography by Dan Norman.