This was my first time at the three-year-old Windy City Playhouse, though I’ve been to the Windy City Fieldhouse to see women’s flat track roller derby, which unfortunately was a couple years before I started writing this blog, because it was interesting being the only one there who wasn’t noticeably tattooed.

This time we weren’t the only ones without tattoos. I know this because we spoke with one of the stage hands (who shepherd people around the set as occasionally necessary during this immersive show) before the show started and she told us she didn’t have any body art (the conversation inevitably went there after starting with her unnaturally tinted hair).

Thirty audience members were served several small drinks (Tom Collins, Champagne, and Whiskey Sour) as the play enfolded around them in the dining room, living room, and kitchen of this house constructed within a theater. There also was a porch, a yard, the hint of a bedroom, and a bathroom that probably wasn’t functional (don’t worry, the theater has its own).

The play will never win a Pulitzer (though Laughing Boy won the prize for fiction in 1930, beating out The Sound and the Fury and A Farewell to Arms, so who knows), but the format was fun and very well-executed by a cast that somehow wasn’t at all distracted by the well-behaved audience (though it was tempting to answer the phone when the cast let it ring several times) standing among them.

It made me think that I was on the Starship Enterprise’s holodeck, in passive mode, where you are an observer who can’t interact, except here the actors were real, not computer-generated, I think. But when the play ended (on a great and unexpected closing line), the lights went out, and the cast left, without so much as taking a bow. Surely, had they been real actors, and not holodeck creations, they would have accepted our applause.  They probably get paid in bitcoin.