It’s not every theater experience where you find yourself watching the production with a birdcage on your head. And yet, 20 minutes—15? 30? who knows—into Copycat Theatre’s Rooms Play Friday night, one of the performers came up to me and, very politely, placed an ordinary parakeet’s home over my skull, and I tried not crack jokes about knowing why the caged—well, you know. And this moment felt entirely normal in what had unfolded thus far. I had already been renamed “Goat.” I had already been on my hands and knees crawling on a floor covered with rice. I had already Renton-minnowed myself through into a Twombly-like puddle sculpture of a toilet. I had already failed to communicate with a number of people in possibly made-up languages I didn’t recognize. I had already been told to put my iPhone away. I had already crouched under stuffed animal-like spikes as a man in a safari-ish hat told me things that didn’t make any sense at all. I had already tried—and failed—to remove strips of ribbon glued (stapled? nailed?) to the floor and settled on tacking a red diamond to a doorjamb. And now I stood watching one of my fellow audience members lie on a table and get kinda/sorta covered by this pod-person-like thingamajig that was lowered from the ceiling—with a birdcage on my head.

Just to state the obvious, Rooms Play isn’t your ordinary theater production. The herculean collaboration of Copycat Theatre (Person Ablach, Hoesy Corona, Pilar Diaz, Monica Mirabile, and Sam Shea) and more than 50 other artists (see “The Quest,” Stage, April 27, 2011), the 2011 Rooms Play unveiled during last weekend’s Transmodern Festival is as much interactive game as theatrical production. Audience members go through in groups—mine had four—at staggered intervals to wind through the 14 rooms tightly packed into the Whole Gallery at the H&H Building before a young man in a suit guides you down three flights of stairs and out the front doors and passes you on to a woman in a dress, who walks you two blocks to the Howard Street entrance of the Current Gallery, where the adventure continues for another eight rooms. Set to “depart” at 11:36 p.m., my group left a little after midnight and the entire journey took a little more than a hour. Everybody’s experience follows the same path but might involve different particulars. It’s the only reason this “review” is written in the first person: I can only accurately convey the Rooms Play as performed for myself and three others.

And I have to confess that I wondered if I had cheated a little bit. Having spoken with a few Copycat Theatre members, I knew coming in that Rooms Play was going to address the experience of immigration and alienation. I knew that Rooms Play was a fusion of the narrative notion of the monomyth with various ideas, themes, processes, and experiences of immigrating to America and the social and cultural alienation that comes with that. I knew that the 14 rooms in the Whole Gallery would be a little more gently confrontational and that come Current Gallery it would be all hugs and happy faces and touchy-feelyness. I knew this before I even filled out the disclaimer form—which primarily warns about flashing lights, tight spaces, and crawling around, in addition to some more obtuse questions (I seem to recall a multiple choice space for gender and the options being a series of lines or something like that). I knew the overarching thematic concerns of the piece. And I’m not entirely sure I would have gleaned those concerns experiencing the production had I not known them before I entered.

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