Return to FOREVERHOUSE

Return to FOREVERHOUSE is an immersive paratheatrical game in the form of an escape room—written, designed and orchestrated by Patrick Michael Ballard with the volunteer hands and production help from the community at Machine Project. The piece was commissioned by Machine Project, and originally conceived for their storefront space. It was performed for participants of 6 people at a time, exploring the inner chambers and being confronted by the Sentry, a wall-sized puppet mouth, Elmer, Patricks teenage online avatar, and Dead Duck, amongst others. The participants unlocked their way through the narrative, exploring each sculpture and finding out how they all related. Each of the puzzle implements was its own idiosyncratic sculpture created and beta-tested by Patrick and the Machine Project community over a year-period leading up to the full show. As the participants solved puzzles they gained access to more characters for interaction, creating off-kilter moments of social improvisation and creating new dimensionality in performer and participant collaboration. The scenes that emerged came with numerous light changes, costume changes, screams in the dark, tiny gifts, and the scuttle of Patrick, climbing scaffolding behind the walls to puppet characters and pop through trap doors in the floor, walls and ceiling. The piece was performed Fridays and weekends for the duration of its run, serving 4 groups per day for two months. Each performance lasted roughly an hour, and then Patrick and Operations Manager Lucas Wrench would reset all of the puzzle sculptures, queued objects, and foley-artist mechanisms before the next group.

Within the maze room, participants interact with a diverse cast of characters, set pieces, and sculptures that were all sealed in the collapsed set of the fabled FOREVERHOUSE; an ethereal production formed from "human memory and flickering light." After passing through the Sentry's Gate, Patrick Michael Ballard's teenage alter ego Elmer (from his performance After the Rise and Fall of Teenager) ushers the audience into the darkness of the antechamber, and then are locked in. Each audience is given 1 hour of working time to solve all of the puzzles, free all of the characters, and escape, thus restoring the set of FOREVERHOUSE to its functioning, fantastical, former glory.

The narrative unfolds as the line between actor, prop, and audience member are blurred in a series of interlocking object rituals. Through all of the lighting changes on the set, introduction of new sculptures, puppets, costumed characters, music, and foley artistry, the illusion of an entire cast is constructed by a single performer, thus adding a level of backstage endurance and responsive improvisation to the secret world of the entire spectacle.

Picture above is a preliminary graphic score and storyboard for the flow of puzzle elements, eventually developing further after several rounds of beta-testing with Machine Project community members.

The Darkness of Backstage is populated by the Varsity Death Angels: ethereal guides which first made appearance in the performance, After the Rise and Fall of Teenager.

At the end of its run, FOREVERHOUSE opened its doors to host the work of other artists to respond to the space. In one iteration, Henry Hoke, , and the rest of the rotating Enter>text poetry, performance troupe were solicited to stage a variety show/poetry reading. In another iteration, Nathan Bockelman, a recurrent collaborator, composed a 15 minute performance for the space, utilizing its properties as a set, but weaving his own narrative through the architecture in an alternate dimension titled, I Am the Undying Life. In the final iteration of this artist series, and featured in the photos above, Meghan Gordon's Sometimes project was invited to host an open house, positioning Meghan herself as the realtor attempting to sell this quirky architecture to passers-bye in a more open ended presentation of the set. As people inquired about various aspects of the set, characters from the maze room experience would show up as "neighbors, specters, and inexplicable permanent co-habitants" of the architecture.

The final tea ceremony, divination ritual in which FOREVERHOUSE's original host, The Twin, is summoned to read the trueness of your character as an "Audience Member"