Slave Ship immersed audiences physically within its set design

Evidence

A hundred minutes without intermission, beginning and often performed in darkness, the drama had three acts: captivity, enslavement, and revolt, entirely played out on the slave ship—a wooden platform split between deck and steerage, and constructed on rockers suggesting both the swell of the sea and the cosmic upheaval endured by the captives. “I had to rip up the seats, and level the floor,” designer Eugene Lee explained. The audience was seated on low benches on all four sides of the ship. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1500

Categorization

• SEED: Could seed an article on immersive theater’s radical-1960s roots, before it became commercial entertainment.