CLEVELAND, Ohio – What if you could go back in time to 1930s Cleveland and watch one of America’s greatest detectives try to solve one of the city’s most notorious crimes?
And what if that scenario wasn’t a come-on for a new Xbox game but a living tableau, a place you could actually visit and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Eliot Ness as he sweated over evidence in search of the Cleveland Torso murderer?
In “Shadow of the Run,” a groundbreaking immersive theater production slated to open in the 2017-18 season, a group of Cleveland artists – backed by Hollywood heavyweights the Russo Brothers – plan to bring Ness and his milieu, a world of bootleggers, whores and hobos, to gloriously disreputable life.
What can people expect who dare to buy a ticket? Here’s how its creators from Roaring Third Productions describe the thriller.
The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run is hunting his next victim while severed limbs lay in the streets.
Nearby, drinks are flowing, bets are placed and morals are slipping. Can you keep your wits until Detective Eliot Ness can catch the killer?
A true American horror story, “Shadow of the Run” dives deep into Ness’ investigation of the Cleveland Torso Murders. A fully immersive experience puts guests directly into the action.
Guests will indulge themselves, have one-on-one moments with the characters and work together to escape before they are caught by the killer himself.
(Roaring Third is named after the Cleveland police precinct where the bodies, or body parts, of at least a dozen victims were discovered.)
Adding Hollywood heft to the project are Anthony and Joe Russo, the Cleveland-born directors behind the blockbuster “Captain America” franchise, who are partnering with Roaring Third to develop “Shadow of the Run” in Cleveland.
The duo, currently working on another Marvel extravaganza, “Avengers: Infinity War,” offered their support in a prepared statement.
“We have a tremendous passion for the city and wholeheartedly believe that this is the type of locally born and bred event that can help elevate the city and stake its claim in the cultural arts landscape on a national level.”
The immersive theater craze, at least in America, can be traced to the Punchdrunk production “Sleep No More,” a London import presented by Harvard University’s American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) at the Old Lincoln School in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 2009.
The show made its way to the long-abandoned 1930s-era McKittrick Hotel on New York’s Lower East Side in 2011, where it continues to pack ’em in.
In this stylized retelling of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” theatergoers become part of the action as masked voyeurs, following characters – including the nubile Lady M and her well-toned hubby, who, at one point in the evening, gets splendidly naked in a clawfoot tub – through a warren of dark passages and rooms filled with weirdly disturbing knick-knacks.
Ben Needham
“Shadow of the Run” director and co-creator Adam Kern first entered the “Sleep No More” labyrinth in New York, where he moved after graduating from the A.R.T.’s MFA program; a few of his friends wound up in the cast.
The Canton native spent four years there, working on readings of new musicals and a few off-Broadway shows. He moved to Los Angeles in 2012, where he joined the cast of Blackout, an intense, immersive production the LA Weekly called “a probing, psychosexual thrill ride of the soul” and the city’s most extreme haunted house.
Kern explains: “You go through alone. The actors can touch you. You have to sign a waiver.”
No slasher-flick tropes or heart-attack-inducing scares await audiences in “Shadow of the Run.” Kern and his team are building the Cleveland show to appeal to a wider audience and tickle the hidden gumshoe in all of us.
(Included in the design are three escape rooms, scenarios that challenge visitors to puzzle their way out of elaborate traps within an allotted time frame.)
The Ness fest promises to be creepily fun and unsettling, a horrifically fascinating trip into a story inspired by Cleveland history, says co-creator Beth McGee.
McGee, an associate professor of theater at Case Western Reserve University, where she teaches acting and voice, wrote the script. She knew instantly what the narrative should be when Kern asked if she wanted to collaborate on an immersive project – the first of its kind – in Cleveland. “I said, ‘I want to do Eliot Ness. I don’t know why.’ “
Her muse may well have been an exhibit she took in at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland by artist Duke Riley.
Commissioned to create an original installation based on a theme related to Cleveland history in 2008, Riley built “An Invitation to Lubberland.”
The work was a multimedia exploration of Kingsbury Run, “a Depression-era Cleveland shantytown destroyed by police chief Eliot Ness in 1938 in an attempt to end the notorious Torso Murders,” wrote Plain Dealer art and architecture critic Steven Litt in a story about the work in December 2010. “It is, in a word, brilliant.”
McGee agreed. “It just so intrigued me,” she says.
The Torso Murders that bedeviled Ness – the Untouchables chief never caught the killer, plunging him into drink and despair, or so the story goes – are a fitting tale for a city that has experienced so many bites at greatness, only to come away hungry. In that way, it is a Cleveland story through and through.
“It’s a story a lot of people don’t know about,” says McGee. “It’s also a story about the haves and the have-nots during the Depression.”
Ben Needham
Like the Riley exhibit, “Shadow of the Run” will bring visitors face-to-face with forgotten local lore in what is still a top-secret location, adding to the mystery of the piece.
MeGee offers a hint: “It’s in a period-specific building in Cleveland where we will utilize the space as part of the scenic design” – 40,000 square feet of space to be exact, adds Kern.
Each night, a story will unfold on multiple tacks; depending on what track you follow, you will encounter characters and experience events that others on a different track may never see. Which is why, says Kern, you’ll want to see “Shadow of the Run” more than once.
“You could come back multiple times and see a completely different show.” (Repeat business is what makes talkers such as “Sleep No More” so lucrative.)
“We’re going to have very, very intricate settings,” says McGee, “so the audience is going to be able to read period letters and period Plain Dealer and Cleveland Press articles and learn through actually touching things and reading things and engaging with actors,” says McGee.
Ben Needham
“Just the very idea that someone could go to the show and then go to Lake View Cemetery and look at Eliot Ness’ grave . . . . The last time Adam went, he discovered bullet casings on top of the tombstone. I think that’s really cool!”
So do Anthony and Joe Russo. The brothers are backing the project with their own cash (Joe in particular is reportedly an immersive theater and escape room freak), but the team is still looking for investors.
“We can’t share the budget, but we have raised 25 percent of our capitalization costs,” says Kern. (Those who want to get in on the action can visit “Shadow of the Run” or “Roaring Third Productions” on Facebook for details.)
Like most of the creatives working on the piece, Joe Russo has a connection to CWRU, earning his MFA in theater there in 1995. Other team members include production designer Ben Needham and escape room architect Christine Woods, both alums of the undergraduate theater program at CWRU.
(The outlier is Kern, who received a degree from Kent State University before migrating to Harvard. He met McGee when the two worked on a production of “Big River” at Porthouse Theatre in 2001; Kern went on to produce a staged reading of McGee’s play “The Possessions of Mary Todd Lincoln” in New York in 2011.)
In the months leading up to the launch of “Shadow of the Run,” amateur sleuths can join what Kern calls an augmented reality game through social media, where players will team up with the fictional Noctis Group – a society of people devoted to solving crimes that have baffled the canniest Columbos – and hunt the Torso Killer throughout the city.
Better still, five willing participants will be abducted by the killer himself for a special preview. (You can sign up to join the pursuit by visiting Shadow’s Facebook page or jumping on a mailing list at shadowoftherun.com. You can check those sites for updates on performance times, casting and venue as well.)
Will audiences from Northeast Ohio and beyond flock to Cleveland to cavort with Ness and The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run? Early indications are that they will.
As part of pitch contest sponsored by the Cleveland Leadership Center early last year, Kern won a $1,000 grant when the project was selected as an “audience favorite.”
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
