A play with no actors on stage? That’s the bet behind the world’s first play in mixed reality

When a stranger smiles at you, you smile back. That is why, when Sir Ian McKellen (The Lord of the Rings, X-Men, Amadeus) walked on the stage in front of me, looked me straight in the eye, and smiled at me, I smiled back. It was the polite thing to do. It was also completely unnecessary, because McKellen was not actually on the stage in front of me. He smiled at me through a pair of special glasses.

The reason for this unusual social interaction is called An Ark, which bills itself as the first play to be created in mixed-reality. Using Magic Leap glasses, the play blends the physical world with the digital realm, creating an unusually intimate theater experience. Opening January 21 at The Shed—the arts center in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards—An Ark tells a story of humanity through the perspective of four unnamed characters speaking to you from the afterlife.

The characters—played by McKellen, Golda Rosheuvel of Bridgerton fame, Rosie Sheehy (a Welsh stage and screen actor, known for her work with the Royal Shakespeare Company,) and Arinzé Kene (a British actor and playwright who originated the lead role of Bob Marley in the West End musical Get Up, Stand Up!)—appear to sit in a semi-circle that you, a member of the audience, are part of. From the second they appear on stage, their eyes peer straight into your soul as they talk directly to you for the length of the play, which lasts 47 minutes.

The illusion, which some might find disconcerting, is that each member of the audience is the center of the attention. In a purely physical world, this conceit would be impossible to realize unless the play were performed privately, one audience member at a time. But with the help of technology, it was convincing enough to elicit an unconscious smile from me—until my brain caught up to the trickery and the magic spell broke.

The making of a mixed-reality play

An Ark was written by British playwright Simon Stephens, who is perhaps most famous for his stage adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and directed by Sarah Frankcom, a British director known for her work at the Royal Exchange and National Theatre. The mastermind is Todd Eckert, who both conceived of and produced the play.

Eckert built a decades-long career in music journalism, film, and dance before embracing technology for its ability to liberate storytelling. In 2012, he joined Magic Leap as director of content development, where he helped pioneer mixed-reality hardware. Four years later, in 2016, he founded a mixed-reality studio called Tin Drum, bought 400 Magic Leap headsets, which he owns to this day, and set out to change what theater could be.

First came The Life, a mixed-reality project with his long-time partner, the artist Marina Abramović. Then came Kagami, an ethereal, mixed-reality concert by the Japanese composer and pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto, who collaborated with Eckert to create the show before he passed away.

Kagami, which first premiered at The Shed in 2023, and has since toured globally, was so dazzling that I wept when I attended a performance in Manhattan. Eckert is immensely proud of the work, but he says An Ark was even more ambitious. “Nobody had ever captured four people simultaneously,” he says of the underlying technology.

The team gathered in London, where they rehearsed An Ark like you would rehearse a traditional play, from beginning to end, with no interruption. Then, they flew to Grenoble, in southeastern France, where 4DViews, the company that designed the volumetric video system that can capture all four actors in full 3D, is headquartered.

In Grenoble, they filmed the play under the scrutiny of 48 cameras, including a cluster of two cameras that stood in for the eventual audience members. “We ultimately got three full takes,” Eckert recalls of the shoot, which took place in an entirely green room he’s previously likened to “Kermit land.”

After three months of data processing, the play was ready for opening night.

What’s next for theater?

Theater is becoming an increasingly endangered art form. Since the pandemic, audiences have been slower to return to in-person performances, production costs have climbed, and public funding has shrunk. Across the country, regional theaters have been cutting back seasons and are still struggling to recover, while Broadway budgets now routinely reach into the tens of millions. As a result, ticket prices have risen, often putting live theater out of reach for younger audiences and first-time attendees.

“There is an entire community of people who feel art is not being made for them,” says Daniel Sherman, a San Francisco-based artist who has been producing theater since 2010, and who also recently finished a play in mixed-reality (though it hasn’t been staged yet.) “If we can add a tech component, and meet people where they are, maybe this could be the thing that brings in younger audiences,” he says.

One of the obvious promises of the mixed-reality technology is it could make theater more accessible. With no actors to tour, no sets to build or transport, and far fewer recurring labor and logistics costs tied to global touring, a mixed-reality play should be a lot more affordable than a traditional production. (A ticket for An Ark costs around $45.)

There are other benefits, too. As producers around the world continue to rethink the genre, technology is increasingly being used not as a cost-cutting tool, but as a way to stretch what theater can do. In the Broadway production of The Picture of Dorian Gray, director Kip Williams used live video capture to allow a single performer (Sarah Snook) to inhabit multiple characters at once in ways that would be difficult to achieve through traditional staging alone. And in Briar & Rose, an augmented-reality children’s play that ran across Europe, Glitch studio combined physical performance with augmented reality technology, placing audiences inside a layered narrative space rather than in front of a fixed stage.

Still, some have been skeptical of technology’s potential for years. Sarah Frankcom, An Ark‘s very own director, used to be one of them. In fact, when Eckert first approached her, she refused the job, arguing, as Eckert recalls, that she was not interested in technology; she was interested in humans in a room.

What made her change her mind? She experienced Kagami through the glasses. “I was intrigued by how it put an audience in a different relationship to a live experience and the possibilities of its intimacy,” she told me in an email. “I was excited by the way it could summon up a communal experience.”

Frankcom says that working with this particular technology has reframed her ideas of what theater could be. “This feels like the beginning of a new form,” she wrote. “And whilst there is no live acting in a traditional sense, I’ve been very struck by how much an audience interact with the actors and how they laugh, cry and reach to hold their hands.”

What do we gain and what do we lose with technology?

Is a play still a play if there are no live actors on stage? Perhaps that’s a matter of semantics. Or perhaps it helps to consider a definition of theater that doesn’t focus on the physicality of the experience, but rather the emotions that it conjures up.

The technology promises cinematic realism, and it mostly delivers. While some glitches made the actors’ arms and feet flicker and stretch into their surroundings (glitches Eckert says he could fix if he had unlimited funds) their faces looked as real as they could through a pair of eyeglasses. The team also fine-tuned the distance between the actors and audience members so the experience feels as intimate as it would in real life. (You can’t ever see all four actors at the same time, forcing you to turn your head to stay engaged.) But there is only so much realism to conjure when all it takes to break the spell is to peek underneath the glasses and see a room full of bespectacled people staring into nothing.

I like to think I would have felt the story in my bones if only the actors had delivered it to me in real life. But I will never be able to put my theory to the test because this exact play, in this exact configuration, could never be performed without technology.

“What can we do that’s not possible in any other way?” Eckert first wondered when brainstorming what the play could be with Simmons. The idea, he says, was never to supplant traditional theater but rather to broaden its potential and having actors of such great caliber address audience members in such an intimate setting accomplishes just that.

“Art, I think, is ultimately a way of making sense of things that don’t make sense,” Eckert told me after the show. If Ian McKellen ushered me off stage to guide me into the afterlife, it would not make sense without a strong sense of suspended disbelief. But here, in the hazy world that only mixed-reality can afford, it does.