By: Skye Sheehy and Erin Hurley
“The Manikins” is totally new, totally different and totally weird — but in all the best ways. The piece flips traditional theater on its head, and it commands the audience member (singular) to consider what their real identity is and who they really are.
“The Manikins” is a play designed for two actors and one audience member. That audience member is invited onto the stage and plays the main character in the freakishly mind-bending story told over the next 90 minutes. Jack Aldisert (‘19), the creator and star of the play, was inspired by his experience at Puget Sound. He mentioned how his education “encouraged us to question everything, ask a lot of questions. They were always encouraging us to be very curious and to interrogate what theater is. And I think that this piece is, in a lot of ways, theater interrogating itself,” Aldisert said. The ideas and experience he garnered in undergraduate led him to create a play that would allow the audience member to see themselves in a new light, a performance of themselves that they willingly put on.
The production experience is what video games and virtual reality try desperately to recreate but have yet to fully capture at the fundamental level: the disconnect between the “player” and the character. Aldisert attempts to solve the disconnect between participant and audience in a profound way, by breaking down the distinction between player and character, audience member and actor. The participant does not become the part. Instead, they are the part, from the minute they meet Aldisert outside the theater to the minute he walks them back out. “I always kind of thought the most exciting thing that a story could do would be to pull you inside it as the audience member and let you have the experience of being a character in that story,” he said. “And I felt like theater was the best medium to do that in.”
The play relies on Aldisert and his assistant possessing keen acting and improvisational skills. It is set in a psychiatrist’s office — the perfect setting for a psychological horror/thriller — and the participant is tasked with answering questions about their life, from the most basic to the most intimate. While the show has a script, it is guided by the audience member’s answers to the questions posed for them. Aldisert and the other actor must masterfully navigate the scenes to ensure the plot remains the same, even if the details change from production to production.
At 500 performances and counting, “The Manikins” has received significant acclaim, having been performed for influential actors in the U.K., as well as influential educators closer to home. German Studies Professor Kristopher Imbrigotta described the show as “a bit nerve-racking, but exciting,” as he had never experienced a performance that relentlessly broke down the fourth wall until it didn’t exist. “The show really takes on a life of its own. It’s like it has its own persona, in a way, clever and interesting and novel,” he said, and added that he would love to try and create something similar with his theater classes.
In a time where imagination seems to be valued less and less, and artificial intelligence is trying to strip the arts of their worth, “The Manikins” demonstrates that creativity still holds remarkable power. Aldisert urged students to “try to do something impossible, that’s what made this piece work. I tried to set an impossible task for myself and tried to achieve it.” This sentiment was echoed in Imbrigotta’s advice, affirming the mentality found in Aldisert’s experience on campus: “Do something that you like, something that you love. If that is sort of the first criterion for why you’re doing something, then it’s pretty much always going to work.” In Aldisert’s case, it certainly did.