You sit in a circle at the Shed, the cultural center in Manhattan’s futuristic Hudson Yards, waiting for the show to begin. Through your enhanced glasses, you see four empty chairs facing you, just out of reach. You watch strangers look out for the actors to arrive. As they do, one at a time, you feel unsettled – each locks eyes with you, specifically. “Don’t panic,” the esteemed British actor Ian McKellen assures you, as the actors take their seats.
Except the actors are not there, really – McKellen, along with co-stars Golda Rosheuvel, Arinzé Kene and Rosie Sheehy, appears in An Ark, a new play at the Shed, in video form, a nearly opaque specter overlaid on the candy-apple red carpeting and crisp white walls of the theater and the outlines of your 180 or so fellow audience members. The experimental new play, written almost entirely in the second person by Simon Stephens (whose most recent show, the Andrew Scott-starring Vanya, wowed audiences at the Lucille Lortel theater last year), is one of the first so-called “mixed reality” shows staged in New York, blending physical experience with digital elements. Over 47 minutes, the actors address you, the viewer, directly. Their gaze remains trained on you. Don’t panic, they repeatedly assure. (Though due to some technical malfunctions at the preview I attended, there was some panicking.)
