Leave Only Footprints Spookily Snaps Back Annex Theater
Before attending the interactive experience, Leave Only Footprints, I was unsure about what to expect: A haunted house? A murder mystery? But this spooky, fun, campy, mystery experience by The Emilys (Emily Pike and Emily Sershon), along with a dynamic cast of 40+ performers and multiple writers, did not disappoint.
I was greeted by a park ranger, shown to the ranger station, and set up with a map, N/A beverage, and a flashlight, along with ominous warnings to Stay On The Path and news about a missing hiker. From there, participants ranged free. You can visit each scene in any order, multiple times, as you gather stories and clues.
-
The performers do a great job of bringing the audience into their world, but unlike a traditional haunted house, there are no touching or serious jump scares. (Like Emily Sershon, I am a bit nervous of dark spaces, and so avoided Mueller’s Cabin, but the rest was enjoyably eerie). This event is great for a group Halloween activity, for alcohol-free folks, or those who want a fun, immersive experience before hitting nearby bars. For folks who don’t want to leave the comfort of their own homes, there are both streaming and on-demand virtual experiences available. With such a large, rotating cast, you never know what you might find in the woods at Hollow Hope State Park.
While the audience is normally restricted to viewing the stage from the auditorium, Annex crew has transformed the entire theater into a magical campground featuring imposing trees, mysteriously inhabited sand dunes, an unhinged witch’s hut, campsite with a tale-spinning camper, and an electricity-free cabin, filled with evidence if you know how to find it.
Leave Only Footprints header / Annex Theater
I want to thank Emily Sershon (they/them) and Emily Pike (they/them), who were gracious enough to take time out of their busy opening week for a brief Q&A with me.
Nicole Bearden (NB): When I wrote to Catherine [Catherine Blake Smith, marketing director at The Annex] with a request to interview you, she wrote back, mentioning you as The Emilys, which sounds completely iconic. How did your working relationship evolve from proximity to dedicated collaboration?
Emily Pike (EP): My little heart glows whenever we get referred to as the Emilys, but it's funny because we almost always go by surnames in the theater to avoid confusion (Sershon and E Pike).
I met Sershon last winter while I was co-directing Tenderness at Annex with our friend Grace Carmack. Before last fall, I knew of Sershon by reputation as a long-time company member, but we'd never worked together or even crossed paths. When Grace and I started putting out designer inquiries, Sershon raised their hand to do scenic. The set they constructed for us was so beautiful and so conceptually exciting, and they spent many late nights in the theater with us to pull it together. I cannot overstate my gratitude and admiration for their dedication to that project. After Tenderness, we had all bonded over a shared desire to reinvest ourselves in Annex, which was still getting back on its feet after not producing for the first several years of the pandemic, and we agreed to keep working together to do whatever we could to support the company.
Emily Sershon (ES): I love that we share a name! When we were discussing how to credit ourselves and E Pike was deciding whether to go with "E Pike" or "Emily Pike" on the poster, they finally landed on "Emily Pike" saying that it worked for the Halloween show because it made us sound like creepy twins. We're not very twin-like, but I do feel like I've known them a lot longer than I have. We really only met last Winter while working on Tenderness, but the late nights on that show brought us close, and I think we share the same "why" for working on theater, on new work, and with Annex in particular. Developing Leave Only Footprints with them has been such a joy, and our strengths and experiences have complimented one another well—it's felt really natural, and we've always been on the same page with our vision for the show.
We've also discovered that we both talk to ourselves, and since we mostly refer to one another in the space as E Pike and Sershon, if either one of us says "Emily" it's been safe for the other to assume they're talking to themself.
NB: Leave Only Footprints has a large cast, and several different writers. How did the two of you brainstorm this piece into existence (what did those early conversations look like, for example), and how do the diverse styles of both writers and cast come together as a cohesive composition?
EP: The reason the cast is so large is because we made the decision to double-cast each role. This is, in part, a practical choice; it's a long run, and each performance is three hours, so we didn't want to exhaust all the actors. It was also an exciting artistic choice to pursue because the character types we inserted are wide open to interpretation—each actor in a pair has a very different take on their role's backstory and motivation—which means every performance in the run is a little different, depending on which cast list you get to see.
This process was a total reversal for me because, as we began to devise it, rather than starting with narrative, we started with the environment. We knew we wanted to set it in the PNW wilderness. The first artists we roped in were designers who helped us define the installations. Once we began to understand how the physical space would be transformed, we started generating ideas about the archetypal characters that would inhabit those installations. Around that time, a number of writers from the extended Annex family (old and new) started volunteering to contribute text, and the world of the piece is so all-encompassing that we found it was best to assign each writer a discrete task—either language that would be spoken by characters, or written artifacts that would be incorporated into the set.
Absolutely my favorite part of this project has been the way in which every artist has contributed to and impacted our storytelling—every designer, every writer, every actor has offered something that has rippled through the piece, affecting our understanding of the story we're telling and the universe it lives in. Really organic, omni-directional collaboration among an enormous team, which was inspiring to witness and participate in.
ES: Leave Only Footprints started as a simple "haunted house" slotted into just two weeks in October. It was something E Pike and Sophie (LOF Special Effects and Tenderness Stage Manager) advocated for even before our season selection process in the Spring. But then, due to a scheduling conflict with the show we originally scheduled for September, Leave Only Footprints expanded from a modest haunted house to a fully produced, ambitious, multi-faceted project over the summer.
Because of that shift, we planned from the beginning to have a big team since we knew it would be a huge undertaking to transform the whole space and develop the show relatively quickly. We first invited anyone from the Annex Company who wanted to be involved, and from there we reached out to invite more of our favorite people plus Annex alum and friends. As the team grew, I kept joking that we would make it 40 people involved, and we ended up with 44 people credited on the program plus another 30 or so special thanks to people who helped out.
We planned for a large team from the outset for a few reasons. One is that E Pike, myself, and the rest of Annex staff have been focused on rebuilding the Company of Annex after a multi-year break in producing due to the pandemic. LOF is the first event in our first full season since shutting down in 2020, and as an all-volunteer organization, participating artists and Company members are the lifeblood of Annex. Another reason we recruited a large team is because it's always been important to us, above all, that artists had a good time working on this show—we advocated for it to begin with because it sounded like fun, after all. We encouraged folks to participate in any way they were passionate about, tried to minimize the workload on folks by inviting many hands (designers, writers), and casting more than one actor in most roles to reduce the actors' time commitments in October.
It's not like any process on any project I've ever worked on, but it has been gratifying not only to get to work with so many talented and passionate artists, but the individual contributions of these artists has developed our initial idea in ways we couldn't have predicted. The designers, writers, or actors would come to us with an idea for their small corner of the production and it would clarify or inspire the themes as a whole. At times, the communication and meeting-scheduling required to get 40 of us on the same page felt overwhelming but ultimately, it's been so inspiring, everyone has been wonderful to work with, and we've both learned a lot. I know both E Pike and I are just full of gratitude to everyone who said yes to this wild ride.
Exit table at Leave Only Footprints experience / The Evergreen Echo
NB: Leave Only Footprints’ description reads as a combo interactive or immersive theater encounter (along the lines of Sleep No More or Then She Fell), and a haunted house. What can participants expect as far as similarities and differences to these two diverging genres?
EP: I initially pitched this piece as a quick-and-dirty haunted house experience while brainstorming filler programming to make use of the stage between mainstage productions. For scheduling and resource reasons, LOF was determined to be the best candidate for a fall mainstage, so we pivoted and started to expand and elaborate on the basic concept. I'm very interested in horror theater, and I love a good scare, so it was important to me that we kept some of the creepy stuff—there are definitely a few moments that might make you squeal or scream.
But, unlike a standard haunted house, audiences are not on a set path, and we want them to linger for a while instead of getting in and out in 15 minutes. As in Sleep No More, once you're inside, you can roam freely through the space. Actor performances are triggered by audience presence and interaction. And there is a somewhat-oblique overarching narrative strung through that ties the piece together while you discover the distinct stories that exist in each installation. Plus, there's puzzles! So we've got a bit of an escape room element in the mix as well.
ES: I've described Leave Only Footprints to friends as "part haunted house, part performance piece, and part puzzle escape room". But full disclosure: I'm a huge scaredy-cat and have actually never attended a haunted house. In fact, there is one installation within Leave Only Footprints I won't go through alone. It's really good, but I made E Pike go with me on opening night. (Fellow scaredy-cats, take a friend into Mueller's Cabin!)
We tried to create a world both narratively and atmospherically immersive, and we hope the immersion is heightened even further through participation in the puzzles!
NB: How can audiences experience this virtually, and what does the virtual experience offer as opposed to in-person?
EP: Every Saturday, before in-person guests enter the space, we will be livestreaming a one-hour version of the performance for viewers far and wide to enjoy from home! It's really important to us as a company to offer a virtual alternative for all of our productions, mostly for accessibility reasons—Annex lives on the second floor of a building with no elevator, so some folks simply can't reach us, and we know that others may not feel comfortable entering a crowded space during an ongoing pandemic.
Because this show is highly interactive, we worked really hard to engineer a livestreaming experience that would mimic that engagement with performers and set. For this to work narratively, we devised a pair of characters who are only present in the virtual experience who act as eyes and ears and ask for input. Folks that tune in for the livestream can hop into the comments to guide the choices of our camera team as they explore the space and try to get to the bottom of the mystery. And if you can't catch the stream while it's live, you can see those performances on-demand after the fact!
-
EP: We intend to make haunted, immersive experiences a regular thing at Annex, so keep your eyes out for more spooky fall productions from us in the coming years.
ES: I'm passionate about continuing to grow and support the Annex Company. Viva Annex!
