Babs McGee eagerly informs me she has just THREE questions left before she can take me on as her latest pageant consultant: work from home

“Are you willing to commit to the principles?” she asks. Yes!
“Are you willing to stake your reputation on the line to increase my reputation?” Sure!
“Are you willing to pay me the $75,000 for my system?” …What?

In some way all the interviews have been like this, each starting off at least semi-legitimate before some awful truth comes out to drive things off the rails. Where the hell does Dimitri find these companies, I wonder.

The latest offering from creators Erik Blair and Thea Rivera of They Played Productions, Work from Home was a remote immersive theater experience conducted over Zoom video chat on March 27th-29th and April 4th. The premise was that participants were looking for remote work through Work from Home, Inc., a company recently acquired by Russian billionaire Dimitri Volokov (Blair) who essentially served as a middleman connecting job-seekers with companies of questionable legitimacy. The positions offered ran the gamut – including pet sitting for elite clients, pageant coaching, event staffing for high-end private parties, and more – but they all involved some sort of catch or twist that made it clear why they were using a shady, ask-no-questions oligarch for their recruitment needs.

Work from Home took place via Zoom video chat over a pre-assigned two-hour period. During that interval, participants bounced between the lobby with Volokov and one of the various breakout rooms, each containing one of Volokov’s clients who conducted one-on-one job interviews for the position they had on offer. Once their time was up, or they were ready to call it a night, participants were directed to a final room and provided with the names and Venmo handles of the various performers should they wish to donate. Blair and Rivera were up-front that the show was pay-what-you-can, and it was left entirely up to the participant how many interviews they wished to have, and how much they donated to the artists they interacted with.

While Blair’s Volokov served as the glue holding the experience together, Work from Home was really about the cast in the breakout rooms. They Played Productions assembled a broad, talented group of performers, including a number of veterans of the L.A. immersive theater scene, as well as some relatively new faces. The format of the experience didn’t call for much in the way of set dressing or costuming, so the success of each interview hung heavily on each actor’s ability to keep things engaging through a computer screen, and by having a compelling story to tell.

This ended up being the case for the most part, but some scenes (and performers) stood out more than others. Cindy (Lola Kelly), CEO of Dates4U, did a great job of pacing out the red flags and offering an interesting lesson in psychological manipulation, while Birdie (Ashley Busenlener) was excellent at gradually ramping up the stakes after making it clear early on that something was off about Kids4Crooks. I also found Babs McGee (Karlie Blair) to be an absolute riot, happy to be yes-anded deep into depravity. There were a couple scenes that felt like there wasn’t quite enough in the narrative underlying the interview, which could easily be fixed with a little more fine-tuning. One interview for an assassination company felt a little light on background, for instance. But on the whole things were well done.

Work from Home was satire to the bone, taking caricatures of all those highly questionable job offers that clog up your spam folder and bringing them to life. That on its own is enough to make it a good time, but as with other They Played experiences (e.g., Internal with its novel take on the zombie genre), there were a couple of other layers to it. Certainly there was a bit of gallows humor in play – with so many businesses shut down and people scrambling to find a way to make ends meet, an endless procession of terrible job opportunities likely hits close to home for many participants. But holding up a funhouse mirror to the stressful experience of an any-port-in-a-storm job search turned it into something we could laugh at instead of tearing our hair out over it.

It also helped that the jobs in question were just close enough to plausible to feel like they could actually be out there. Plenty of people have, or know someone who has, been a house-sitter, or a nanny, or gotten deep into spirituality to try and better themselves. But it’s easy to take this kind of concept too far into silliness. Thankfully the Work from Home skits managed to adopt pacing that kept things on the right side of the line. Each company, concept, and character started off relatively professional, only to steadily unravel as the characters slipped clues that maybe you should run screaming instead of accepting the position they were so excited to offer.

It’s worth noting that participating in remote-only productions like these, particularly one-on-one experiences, can be challenging for people who are normally more passive during immersive theater shows. This is especially true in scenes where the character you’re interacting with is terse by design, leaving the actor with less obvious room to carry the conversation, and a muted interpersonal connection due to the dialogue taking place through a computer screen. Going back to the assassination company interview, while the character made sense from a narrative standpoint, the minimalist questions and answers didn’t give the participant as much to work with as some of the stronger scenes. It’s likely that we’ll see more of these types of shows during and after the quarantine period, and both creators and audience may need to put in a little extra to foster a meaningful experience.

Making Work from Home a show where no “tickets” were purchased, and instead having audiences donate directly to the performers after the fact, was a bold move. Obviously there’s the risk for the performers that people don’t actually pony up, and not every creator is in a position to follow the model even in the best of circumstances. But doing so makes a statement about what the company values. They Played saying “We’re not taking any money for this, all dollars go to the artists,” and actually following through is commendable. One could argue that some sort of guidance in terms of suggested donation for those able to contribute might be nice in future pay-what-you-can shows, but during a period during which a lot of the immersive theater community is in a precarious situation, it’s understandable to not want to create that pressure.

It’s unknown whether a remount or another show in a similar format is in the works from They Played Productions just yet. But the concept is viable, and with Work from Home, the company has shown they can make it work.

For more on They Played Productions, check out their website, Instagram, and Facebook page. Check out our Event Guide for more immersive entertainment throughout the year.

If you like the above article and want to find more like it, make sure to join our community. If Facebook is your favorite, follow us there and become a part of our groups for Immersive Horror fans and/or Immersive creators. We’re active on Instagram, posting evocative imagery and informative stories to promote our reviews and recollections; follow us there. You can even find us on twitter; click here to follow. For those who want to explore deeper, we have a vibrant Slack community with new event alerts and immediate ticket sale announcements; click here to join. And subscribe to our event calendar to get emails for all or specific events (look for the link right under the calendar)! Finally, we have a newsletter that comes out once a week; click here to sign up.

work from home work from home