The Study

What I liked

Like I said there were some good performances. They did the best with what they could. The surgery scene, I will say, was the strongest.

What I didn't like

Basicallg everything needs to be rewritten and workshopped. Someone clearly has played too much choose your own adventure games and thought it would be easy to do it themselves.

The characters need depth, the bookending of being a study can be completely taken out (this ads nothing and the professor character had no stage presence), a little production value to have any sort of set would have been good, get rid of the waiver (it served no purpose other than to set your hopes up for an interesting experience which was not delivered), and make the choices actually seem to matter. Things would happen on stage and you’d hear an audience member say “Did we do that?” “I don’t know.”

The idea to do a choose your adventure play is a good one. It’s very very hard to do, but it’s interesting. In addition, even professionals have a hard time bringing horror to the stage. They need some sort of mentor to help them with this I think. Consider making an original story rather than relying on tired tropes loosely strung together. Make the choices feel dynamic rather than haphazard. And if it’s going to be billed as immersive it had better be immersive. Maybe have a smaller audience actually play a role in the show, so the danger feels real. The production company Delusion for instance does this very well every year. If this team really works at it and rehashes this show into something new and refreshing they may have something.

My overall impression

This show was extremely taxing and very dull. Things were noticeably going wrong the entire show to the point the audience was groaning on a regular basis.

The writing was schlocky (“did you guys hear about the disappearances?”), but despite that there were a few stand out performances. The cannibal wife was particularly chilling.

Despite having a good amount of queer characters, the play found a way to be weirdly homophobic. It was upsetting. Particularly the jock who was weirdly homophobic to only one gay guy despite being friends with two gay guys everyone knows are closeted. And even after the very obvious reveal of being gay himself he STILL calls the guy “fruitloop”. It was alienating and offputting.

Every single character also seemed to hate each other for some reason. We had no reason to care for them as they clearly didn’t care for each other.