This fall, Tulsa’s busy community theatre companies have been running the genre gamut, packing local venues with everything from drama to horror to original adaptations. For all that range, several of them have had one thing in common: they were staged in nontraditional spaces as “immersive” productions.
Immersive theatre is a trend that’s taken off locally in the past year, though it’s been a thing in the performing arts world far longer than that. The most well-known example of immersive theatre, and the one that kickstarted this 21st century trend, is Sleep No More, a New York City troupe’s adaptation of Macbeth in which the audience followed actors around a multi-floor hotel to experience the story, told mostly through movement and action. Since then, several immersive productions have been making their way around the New York City circuit, like Cabaret at the Kit Kat Klub, a recently closed revival that staged the musical in the round in a club, and Cats: The Jellicle Ball, a revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical reimagined in NYC’s ballroom scene. This kind of theatre is designed as an experience for the audience, not just something to observe, and audiences are responding: Sleep No More, incredibly, ran for nearly 14 years.
Here in Tulsa, a surge of new theatre companies, led by some of the city’s younger and newer creative talents, has brought immersive theatre fully into the city’s performing arts mix. Some of the drive is practical: for one thing, newer companies don’t have the budgets of legacy companies when it comes to sets and space rentals (a lack now exacerbated by diminished grant funding for the arts). But there’s also a creative vision involved: an urge to create a unique, innovative, elevated art experience that might appeal to people who aren’t typically into theatre.
What is immersive theatre, anyway?
Generally speaking, when you see the word “immersive” in marketing for a show, you can expect some sort of blurring of the boundary between performance and reality, where the audience is somehow part of the piece. Immersive shows often happen in nontraditional or “found” spaces, sometimes forgoing a stage altogether and placing the actors and the audience together in the same location, not separated by a traditional theater’s boundary line between stage and seats.
While “immersive” can mean “participatory,” the audience does not necessarily need to participate with the actors for a production to be immersive. Whether an immersive show is interactive or not, the role the audience plays, whether literal or theoretical, helps construct the overall meaning of the piece.
So what does immersive theatre look like right now in Tulsa? Is it working? Is it cool? I went to four such shows in the past month, and here’s what I saw.
Riffraff Tulsa: Rope
Living Arts of Tulsa
September 25, 2025