“The Stacks: An Immersive Mystery,” February 22 through March 2

Thursday, February 22, through Saturday, March 2

The Sound Conservatory, 504 17th Street, Moline IL

When director/co-writer Ben Gougeon's world premiere The Stacks: An Immersive Mystery enjoys its February 22 through March 2 run at the new Sound Conservatory – the original, longtime site of the Moline Public Library – it will mark the first theatrical presentation to be staged in the venue. It may very well be the last. But you can't blame Gougeon or his debuting show for that.

As Gougeon explained in a recent interview, Sound Conservatory owner Andrzej Kozlowski hosted the grand opening for his music-themed venue at the tail end of November 2023, "and when I walked in and saw the space, I just knew I needed to do a play there. So I talked to Andrzej. I asked him, 'What are you gonna do with that space?' And he said, 'I'm planning on gutting it and turning it into our concert area.' I said, 'When are you doing that?' He said, 'Next month, in December.' And I was like, 'Would you be amenable to holding off until February or March? Because I would love to do a play there.' And thankfully, he was like, 'Yeah, I can work with that.'"

Consequently, and by necessity, Gougeon was tasked to come up with a concept for The Stacks, co-write the script with (Reader theatre reviewer) Alexander Richardson, cast the play, rehearse it, and stage it all before three months could pass. “There's a podcast that I listen to about immersive theatre," says Gougeon, "where people have talked about their shows and said, 'Yeah, we worked for 18 months to build this … .' We've put this thing together in about 10 weeks."

A Michigan native who has acted and directed professionally for more than 25 years, his credits including helming Augustana College's Small Mouth Sounds, starring in the Mockingbird on Main's An Oak Tree, and appearing on such national television series as The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Law & Order: SVU, and The Deuce, Gougeon relocated to the Quad Cities area in 2019 and now serves as events coordinator for Quad City Arts. He credits The Stacks' origin on the numerous experiences he enjoyed while living in New York and elsewhere, citing the city's long-running, Macbeth-themed Sleep No More as particular inspiration.

“I had been involved in immersive theatre in New York,” says Gougeon. “Obviously, I'd seen Sleep No More, which is like the big granddaddy of immersive theatre, and there was a company that was putting on a show called The Visitation that I was cast in, where the writer and several production people were all Sleep No More alums. It took place in an old 1630s farmhouse out in Brooklyn, which was the oldest residential home still in New York. So that was my first experience as an actor [with immersive theatre], and I loved it – I loved everything about it. The acting style – there's a theatricality to it, because you're constantly on, but people can sit or stand two feet away from you.

“So I fell in love with the form of immersive theatre, and once I moved here, I started looking at venues – just kind of looking at every empty building that came open. I had a couple ideas for storylines in my head, but nothing was really fitting the spaces I found.” Until, that is, he found the Sound Conservatory and its rows upon rows of bookshelves – the stacks.

“It didn't fit with anything I had thought about before,” says Gougeon of the space. “But I was like, 'Okay, we've got this old library, so we'll want something kind of ghostly or spooky or mysterious. And so I started researching different library hauntings or murders that had happened in libraries, and kind of cobbled some of those things together to create our story.

“At its heart,” says Gougeon of The Stacks, “it's an investigation into an unsolved murder. In the fall of 1957, a body is found in the library of St. Bernard College, and we kind of view it from the lens of a current-day investigator. This is a character whose grandmother had always talked about her friend who was murdered, and the case was never solved. So the investigator goes back to the stacks of the college library to try to piece it together. As as she does that, through the night, she talks to the ghosts of the library.

“Kira Rangel plays the investigator,” Gougeon says of the local performer, “and as she walks into this library, the events of the evening unfold for her. She's able to speak with the characters from that night of the murder, and she's also able to observe the action of what actually happened.”

Yet because The Stacks is, as its subtitle states, An Immersive Mystery, the play's patrons aren't merely required to watch Rangel's investigator do her work – they're allowed, and strongly encouraged, to do a lot of that work themselves.

“You follow whomever who want,” says Gougeon. “That's the fun thing about immersive theatre – there's not one perspective to view it from. In our curtain speech, we'll actually kind of push people into the space and spread them out to start the show. But they can follow a single character, they can jump around from scene to scene, because action will be taking place on all three floors of the Sound Conservatory simultaneously. So there's no one way to view the show.

“There is a loop,” he adds. “It's not just straight narrative. There is a portion of the show that repeats, so you'll watch something happen once, and the whole thing will happen again, so you can watch different scenes that second time through. It's happening for you out of order, but when you leave the theatre, you can try to piece everything together.”

“We have two floors of library stacks that people can explore, there's a basement level where we have built five small areas for people to go in and explore, and then there are a couple of side rooms on the upper level that people can go in, as well. That's something we'll be encouraging people to do, too, because not only is the narrative happening, but there is stuff built in to the set décor and the props that people can also explore. There are notes hidden in books from one character to another; there's character-development stuff that's hidden away in cupboards and bags that people will be able to look through. All of them are pieces to the puzzle. You can choose, an audience member, to simply follow Kira and see what she sees. But you could also be watching one scene happening here, and suddenly hear another scene start over there, and say, 'Oh, what are they talking about?' and go over and watch that scene and then follow that character … .

“It's a little choose-your-own-adventure,” Gougeon says. “We've built the show where you can probably see the majority of things in two viewings. You won't see all of it, because there are also things that will happen that one only audience member a night will get to see. But it's impossible to see everything in one viewing of the play. And that's intentional.” He laughs. “Come again, please!”

Please don't, however, try to directly communicate with The Stacks' cast, which also includes Bradley Robert Jensen, Eric Teeter, Anya Giordano, Jean Tegtmeyer, Alice Sylvie, Titus Jilderda, and Jeremy Mahr.

“There is a lot of immersive theatre where it is meant to be very immersive,” says Gougeon. “Like, you can sit down at the bar with one of the actors and chat. But this is much more you observing the characters,” even though those characters may indeed make some sort of contact with their patrons.

“There may be times where an audience member is standing where a character needs to be. And we do encourage people to pick up props. But sometimes an audience member might be holding a prop the actor needs. So we're training the actors how to handle that. You need improv skills, because you've got to be able to adapt. I mean, there may be times where, as an audience member, a character lightly touches your shoulder and kind of guides you to take a step or two in another direction just so they can pass.”

Gougeon adds that “the timing of the piece is the thing that's the hardest to figure out, because there may be a scene happening in the basement and a scene happening on the third floor, and those characters have to bump into each other on the second floor. And the actors obviously don't know what each other is doing. So in plotting out the show with Alex, we have a minute-by-minute breakdown of where everyone needs to be. A lot of it involves clues. Like, I'm coming up from the basement step now, and I may see this other actor is in this scene, so that tells me that they have left the actor on the third floor, so that actor on the third floor is probably over here, so now I can engage with them. The actors have to be super-cognizant of what's going on to get that timing right.”

Regarding the script's construction, Gougeon says with a chuckle, “I'm not a writer. I can do a little writing, but it's not an easy, natural process for me. So my first step was mapping out characters' journeys throughout the show. I started with our victim character and tracked their path, and then sort of started tying each character in – how they intersect with the victim. And obviously, it's a murder mystery, so when Alex came aboard, it about figuring out how do we create tension between all of our characters – build interactions that are very real and natural but also are creating moments where you say, 'Oh, I see how that character maybe has a motive to kill someone.'

“Alex is amazing,” says Gougeon of his collaborator. “I could send Alex an e-mail saying, 'Okay, this is the character, and this is the outline of the scenes they're doing, and we need a scene with this character that centers on this … .' And then, just a few days later, he would send me the tracks for that character. He's so good. And so fast.

“The other person I need to talk about is our art director. Domninic Ramirez,” Gougeon adds. “When I sent out the press release for The Stacks and it got publicized, I didn't know Dominic at all. He's a St. Ambrose (University) alum, and within 20 or 30 minutes of that press release being out there, someone had tagged him in a post and he reached out and said, 'Hey, I am a huge Sleep No More fan. I've traveled to New York and seen it over a dozen times, and I went to London to see (the immerseive-theatre company) Punchdrunk. I love immersive theatre, I would love to work on this.'

“So he and I met for coffee and talked about it and he came on board as our art director. Obviously, the space itself is the set, but when I was talking about all those secrets and the building of all those specific areas where action happens, Dominic has done all that.” With a laugh, Gougeon adds, “Thank God. Because I was like, 'Oh, we're just gonna throw some old books out onto the stacks … !'"

Additionally valued members of Gougeon's team for The Stacks include co-star Jensen (costume design), Richardson's fellow Reader theatre reviewer Roger Pavey Jr. (assistant director and stage manager), Jacqueline Isaacson (intimacy coordinator), and music consultants Kozlowski and Ron May. And beyond working on an immersive murder mystery, there's also participating in a play with dramatic themes that Gougeon very much wanted to explore.

"We have several themes involving feminism and LGBTQ matters in the show,” he says. “The main track is a girl and a boy who are set to be engaged, and she has recently been introduced to a book called The Second Sex, which was kind of the start of the second wave of feminism. So she's kind of pushing back on the 'coming to college to get her M.R.S.' So she is pushing back against getting married and having a bunch of kids. She wants to have her own career. That was the main reason we set the show in 1957, because I wanted this stuff to be at the forefront.

“And then our other major storyline is a PhD. fellow and a professor that are having a male-on-male relationship – the professor is married, has been closeted his whole life, and so they are having this debate over 'Where are we? What do we do with this?' So the play is pushing back against the status quo and the institution of the church and society at that time … .

"We've got issues," says Gougeon with a laugh. "We've got a lot of themes in there. And it's been a lot of fun to put together."

With The Stacks a one-act theatre piece running roughly 75 minutes, Gougeon says, “You won't be seated as an audience. You will be moving about the space, and there are stairs in the space. I had someone reach out the other day and say, 'I don't do stairs well … and I going to be able to do anything?' And I was like, 'It'll be tough.' But if someone does have that issue, we'll happily put a chair out for you on the main floor, and you can still watch from there and see a lot of the story as people wander around That's the thing with this show. You could just stay on one floor and watch what happens, or you can watch a scene from several aisles away, where you have this natural framing that happens with the stacks, or you can get right up next to the actors.

“My free time gets more precious to me as I get older,” says Gougeon. “And so getting to do something that has been this literally create-ive, building it from the ground up, has been truly awesome.”

The Stacks: An Immersive Mystery runs at the Sound Conservatory’s downtown Moline location February 22 through March 2, with all performances beginning at 7:30 p.m. and doors open to the public 30 minutes before curtain. Admission is $10-75, and advanced reservations are highly encouraged, as capacity is limited. For more information and tickets, visit the production's Facebook page and Instagram (@thestacksqc).