Eye Contact: Mesmeric Revelations in Baltimore

In Baltimore in 2015, Submersive Productions staged The Mesmeric Revelations! of Edgar Allan Poe, an immersive spectacle based on the women populating Poe’s fiction and personal life. Also in Baltimore in 2015, Freddie Gray, an African American man, was killed by Baltimore police, leading to mass protests and civil unrest. A striking coincidence between the two events suggests that immersive spectatorship intensifies our political experience of the social forces that make us subjects, indicating new ways for theatre to address a nation that has always been fractious and fractured.