Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – Immersive theater roundup: Role playing in Bated Breath’s probing DIRTY BOOKS, spying intimacies against the vistas of DUMBO in THE CIRCUIT

• By drediman
• June 9, 2026
• No Comments

Those of you looking for immersive theatrical experiences beyond Masquerade — and still mourning the closure of the long-running Sleep No More — can get temporary your fixes by partaking in a pair of adventurous productions that will plunge you into bespoke worlds in a manner that’s both unique and encompassing. Here are my thoughts.

DIRTY BOOKS
Bated Breath Theatre Company
Through June 27

It looks like Bated Breath Theatre Company has a hit on its hand with its world premiere production of Dirty Books (RECOMMENDED). Having been extended a number of times since opening during the wintertime, the probing and immersive Off-Broadway play by Maria Lieberman has clearly struck a chord, which is probably in reaction to our current fraught political and social climate. Upon entering the venue — i.e., Bated Breath’s new permanent home on 14th Street — you’ll find that the space has been effectively transformed into a gallery housing an exhibit on the history of censorship, particularly as it relates to banned books. Role playing as a visitor to this fabricated museum, your time there includes a lecture on the legacy of 19th century anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock, which begins the audience’s immersion into the subversive world of the 1960s soft-core adult publishing industry. Based on true stories, the piece follows the clandestine efforts of two men in pursuit of careers as authors of lesbian pulp fiction, which has been met with resistance by America’s established anti-obscenity laws against the proliferation of erotic fiction. While at work on these naughty novels, their wives are become involved in a parallel storyline of its own kind of resilience and resistance, finding love and romance in each other’s companionship, in a weird way mirroring the narratives of their husbands’ books. This secondary plot feels wonderfully relevant in the production’s June extension, which coincides this queer subplot with Pride Month. Over the course of the evening, the audience is given agency to pen, with the characters, erotic stories of their own. Although some of these interactive segments don’t quite gel — much of them involving essentially a theatricalized version of Mad Libs (resulting in stakes that vary from night to night) — the overall Dirty Books experience is illuminating, beautifully hand-crafted (Lieberman has lovingly adapted her play to fit in Bated Breath’s space cozily), and performed with commitment and verve.

THE CIRCUIT
New York Theatre Company
Through June 29

Self-proclaimed as an “immersive silent disco ballet”, The Circuit (RECOMMENDED) in short lives up to this ambitious description of itself. Presented by the relatively fledgling New York Theatre Company, the piece is an immersive hybrid concoction that merges promenade theater, silent disco, and modern dance — all in an impressively seamless and intuitive manner. If it all comes across as a tad gimmicky, that’s because the nineteenth century play that spawned the experience — Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde — is just that. Unfolding in a series of scenes that depict a chain of salacious romantic encounters between yearning yet restless characters — before looping back to where it began — Schnitzler’s play is constructed in a manner that’s at once ingenious and neatly predictable. Throughout this 75-minute outdoor adaptation of the play, audience members wear headsets that funnel Jacob Ryan Smith’s pulsating original EDM score and evocative soundscapes, as well as Connor Wentworth’s artfully minimalist dialogue, directly into the listener’s ears. Together with the emotive, fluid contemporary dance choreography and movement by Josh Zacher (who is also credited as co-director, alongside John Kroft), audiences become privy — like spying flies on a wall — to the obsessions, temptations, psychological trauma, and euphoria often associated with romantic escapades in large cosmopolitan cities like New York. The result is a highly personalized experience that each audience member is able to further curate in terms of levels of engagement with the proceedings. Playing out against some of New York’s most iconic cityscape vistas as seen from the cobblestone streets of DUMBO and Brooklyn Bridge Park, the creative team and the band of game young dancers/actors also create viscerally cinematic pedestrian sequences — during which time spectators become fully engaged participants in the choreographic and emotional flow of the piece — carrying a charged forward momentum from one scene to the next. When the weather cooperates (as it did on the mild and cloudless night I caught the experience), it’s hard not to ultimately view The Circuit as a love letter to New York City and the endless provocative possibilities it seductively promises.