For This Connecticut Show: Into The Woods We Go

Picture this: You take the exit 34 ramp on I-91 in Hartford, park in an area behind a chain-link fence, then approach a small box-office tent. After walking down a gravel path as the skyline, highway and the area’s industrial buildings disappear from view, you enter the woods. Minutes later as you hear the nearby river, you encounter a clearing, where you take a seat, put on the wireless headset you were given and start to take in a play happening all around you.

Welcome to Walden, a site-specific, immersive, outdoor production from TheaterWorks Hartford, in partnership with Riverfront Recapture. It will be the theater’s first in-person show since the beginning of the pandemic, as well as its first outdoor show in its 35th season.

It may not be its last. The three-actor play by Amy Berryman, which will be making its North American premiere after its bow in May in London’s West End, will run July 23 to Aug. 22. The show will also be filmed and streamed Aug. 15-29.

The production will be presented among a limited audience of about 50 who will be seated around the natural, undeveloped site as they watch the play, starting at sunset. The show will take place among several locations, including a cabin, which is being built especially for the production, and other parts of the characters’ property, which is planned for sustainable living, such as a vegetable garden, a chicken coop, beehives and rain barrels.

The actors will be heard via the headsets as they move around the locations, even inside the ad hoc cabin. To add to its sense of naturalism, there will be no….COINTINUED