And in the next Zoom room, a rat doing a striptease

On a recent Saturday, I joined a few hundred people for a wild night at a singularly outrageous nightclub. Each room contained something different and unexpected. In one, a girl strummed a viola and told dirty jokes; next door, a giant rat performed a striptease to the soundtrack of a lecture on Taoism. There was a cooking tutorial, a magician doing card tricks, a burlesque performer contorting on a chaise longue.

It was “Eschaton”: part theatre, part nightlife simulator, part Chatroulette, taking place Saturday nights on Zoom. It conveys the illusion of being a maze of interconnected rooms, even though all of its performers are livestreaming their disparate, usually solo contributions from their homes.

Audience members, tuning in remotely, are encouraged to dress glamorously, dim the lights and pour themselves a drink. (I gladly did two out of three.) You can keep your webcam on or off, though allowing yourself to be spied on feels truer to the show’s air of cheeky voyeurism. For an hour, you can interact with performers, piece together a jigsaw puzzle of a story and crack a “Clue”-like whodunit, if you can even first figure out what they dun.

Or else you can just wander from virtual room to virtual room, enjoying the surreal variety-show aspect of it.

Brittany Blum, a former actor, and Tessa Whitehead, a fiction writer, conceived “Eschaton” as a real-world immersive experience, back when theatre could be experienced IRL, not just via URL — a mystery story unfurling in the atmospheric, perambulatory style of the popular “Sleep No More” or “Then She Fell.”

By early March, the show had been in development for seven months. Whitehead had written five crisscrossing scripts, Blum was investigating real estate options, and the cast was raring to go, ready to play the tortured denizens of a purgatorial nightclub. The title, “Eschaton,” a fancy theological term for the end of the world, fits the broad theme: the performer’s existential need for an audience and the precariousness of a life in the spotlight.

Then the pandemic issued an all-too-real reminder of that precariousness.

“We had to cancel our first table read, and for a week, as we watched ‘Sleep No More’ close and Broadway shut down, we weren’t sure immersive theatre would exist anymore,” Whitehead said. “And if it did, what it would look like.”

Jonathon Lyons performs as a giant rat in the immersive digital show “Eschaton,” photographed on a screen in New York, Jun 1, 2020. The New York Times

But after a couple of weeks, while the creative team was quarantined on different coasts (Whitehead in Brooklyn, New York; Blum in San Francisco), they began to wonder what a virtual version of the show might look like. Would it be possible to translate the spirit of immersive theatre — a form that gets an extra charge from its feeling of unboundedness and the proximity between performer and audience — to the strict confines of a computer screen?

“During quarantine, we felt that audiences needed that type of entertainment, a world they could get lost in and escape the reality they’re in,” Blum said. “We simply met the audience where they were: online.”

They enlisted “Sleep No More” performer Taylor Myers as director and tech studio BENBENBEN, which has lately been helping businesses pivot to virtual spaces. They created a digital lobby — actually, a password-protected website accessible only to ticket buyers — and drew on additional inspirations, such as video games, alternate reality games and online escape rooms. “We had no idea how long quarantine was going to last,” Whitehead said, “so we gave ourselves two weeks to put something together.”

They redirected what would have been their real estate budget into recruiting and paying as many performers, and as many kinds of performers, as possible. The cast grew from five to 26, with several alumni from “Sleep No More” and “Then She Fell” joining the ranks. For obvious reasons, the performers are also their own costumers, lighting and scenic designers, prop masters, makeup artists, musical directors and cinematographers.

“It can feel lonely to set your own stage,” said Mallory Gracenin, a fan-favorite “Sleep No More” performer, who serves as one of the “Eschaton” hosts. “But for a while, I didn’t believe that I could be a working artist. So I’m tickled to get to do this every week.”

Since “Eschaton” began weekly performances as a work in progress, Gracenin has perfected the art of making intimate “eye contact” with the audience in her Zoom room, peering meaningfully and batting her lashes at her camera lens rather than at her screen.

Pole Dancer Alathea Austin in the immersive digital show “Eschaton,” photographed on a screen in New York, June 1, 2020. The New York Times

On the night of my visit, an audience member in London confessed to Gracenin that life had been really difficult lately; the show has become a hub for devotees of immersive entertainment, some from as far away as Germany, Japan or Spain. “You might not feel the breath in the room,” Gracenin said. “But you know when what you’re doing is working. You can still feel connected within this virtual, immersive world.”

The world of “Eschaton” continues to morph and grow from week to week. It’s sprawling enough now to get hopelessly lost in, with several rooms arranged across three floors and a basement. (Before specialising in immersive experiences, Jae Lee, the show’s game designer and co-producer, studied and worked as an architect.) A stage manager and a crew of assistants lurk in the margins, providing tech support as well as nudging guests toward secrets and surprises.

And Whitehead has kept writing, weaving in more intricate narrative threads for the audience to either untangle or get tangled up in. At $10 a ticket, the creators hope some guests might even be inclined to come back for more, thinking of the experience as something like episodic appointment television. “Each week there’s more to discover, more drama to be mined,” Whitehead said.

There have been one-off delights, too. At least one audience member had a pisza delivery turn up on her real-world doorstep. And there are still more ideas the creators want to experiment with. “It’s almost like we’ve stumbled upon a new genre of live entertainment,” Whitehead said.

Gracenin hopes that, even when theatres open up again, “Eschaton” will carry on — perhaps virtually as well as physically. But she’s looking forward to a time when performers and audiences can coexist in the flesh. “It’s going to be really nice to hug a fellow performer,” she said.

© 2020 New York Times News Service