A Boston theater company wants to scare Bangor theatergoers out of their seats with a play about two young people talking on cell phones about their lives.
The play is immersive, site-specific, horror theatre, according to Witch Hunt Theatre, the group producing the two-act show in a location that is unknown to ticket holders until the day of the show. Only 20 or so people will be allowed into a local Airbnb for each performance.
Immersive theater is relatively new to Maine but a growing national trend. Immersive theater attendance has risen by 80% over the past five years, according to a report by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Counter/Current: Collective, based in Belfast since 2024, is one of the few theater companies in Maine devoted to site-specific immersive performances. Earlier this year, it produced Anton Chekov’s “Uncle Vanya” at a barn in Appleton. Previous shows were performed at the Waldo County YMCA and behind a storefront in downtown Belfast.
“Live theatrical productions as we know them have been around for thousands of years,” Taylor Stark, artistic director of Witch Hunt Theatre, said on the company’s website. “We are long overdue for a change. Witch Hunt Theatre is one iteration of what I think that change could look like. I want audiences to experience theatre in a way they never have before. I want to remind audiences that in a live performance space, anything can happen.”
Stark grew up in Metro Detroit where she appeared in her first play at the age of 5. She continued to perform in high school and local community theater companies. She graduated from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in 2018. While there, she explored the origins of horror theater in 19th century France and how to make it relevant for 21st century audiences.
“There were 400 theater students at Northwestern so I was looking for a niche to stand out,” Stark said recently as she prepared for the Bangor production.
She was on a year-long fellowship working for an Oregon theater company in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down in-person gatherings around the world. Stark created Witch Hunt Theatre “out of boredom” and produced its first show, “Closer Than You’d Think,” in October 2020. It was formally organized the following year.
In 2023, Stark moved to Boston to attend graduate school and decided to stay. Since then, the company has performed in a Boston university dormitory, a church, a high school classroom and a one-bedroom apartment.
Sundance Campbell, president of the Board of Directors for Penobscot Theatre Company in Bangor, and his wife, Michele Campbell, saw “Closer Than You’d Think” earlier this year in a Boston apartment “on a whim,” he said. The couple was so impressed they invited Stark and her company to bring the show to Bangor.
“What impressed us most was the intimacy of the production,” Sundance Campbell said. “Great theater is always a shared experience between the performers and the audience, but immersive theater intensifies that connection. There is almost no separation between you and the story.”
The couple were also struck by the boldness of Taylor Stark and the actors, as well as their willingness to create something unusual.
“We believed their work would be a great fit for Bangor — Stephen King country, right?” he continued. “But that is too simple an answer. I believe that the work of Witch Hunt Theatre, their genre, is really about fear. That is a universal concept, it is as real here as it is anywhere.”
Watch Hunt Theatre’s production of “Closer Than You Think” will be performed at 7:30 and 10 p.m. this weekend and next at a secret location in Bangor. The site is not handicap accessible. For more information, visit witchhunttheatre.com.