Mirror World Creations: Making ‘Gremlin!’
By: Betsy
Tags: Immersive Theatre, Interactive Storytelling, Gremlins, Larp, Interaction Design

I invented “Gremlin!” as a marketing gimmick.

I run phone larps: they usually run about sixty-something minutes and cost forty-something dollars. Then I asked why people weren’t playing them. The usual answers: people didn’t have the time or the money. While there are reasons to be skeptical of both, I decided to take people at their word. No time, no money? Fine. Let’s reduce the price and the runtime of a phone larp both by two thirds.

Nice. Fun. Good idea. Now how do you make a story out of that?

Telescoping stories is hard; I’m always in awe of children’s book writers for this reason. Arcs that take an hour? Easy to think up. Arcs that take fifteen or twenty minutes? Impossible. A friend of mine, R, finally suggested a demon possessing a phone. This is apparently a real phenomena, one which modern-day exorcists have complained about. R and I traded back and forth manic demon dialogue for a while. The demon quickly became absolutely adorable, in a hobgoblinish, casually homocidal way. We decided he was too adorable to be a demon, despite the homocide, so he became a gremlin. This was great, but there was still nothing to do in the larp; talking to a casually homocidal gremlin isn’t a plot, no matter how much we might want it to be.

Pause. Take a break. And then for reasons other than larps, I was trying to teach myself magic.

I have wanted to learn stage magic since I was approximately seven. I am ever thwarted by the fact that I have the manual dexterity of a hand grenade. Panic! Failure! No sleight of hand for this one. Until I was introduced to Juan Tamariz, who is a magical man who does magic over the radio.

I’m not lying.

The man did magic over the radio in Spain for years. He’d tell his audience to get out a deck of cards and then…do things. And then magic would happen. And he didn’t even have to be there in person, misdirecting or making the passes work: he built his tricks so his listeners would make magic with their own hands, without even knowing how. Just by listening to the directions and manipulating cards, or cigarettes, or pen and paper.

Then he dictated a book about it, and some verifiable saints, Gema Navarro and Rafael Benatar, transcribed everything he said and translated the book into English. “Verbal Magic.” It’s astounding. You can pick it up on Scribd here.

Anyway, so after banging my head against this problem, a solution presented itself: we have a gremlin on the telephone, and he’s teaching people magic.

Great. Now to backfill everything else.

Why would a gremlin be teaching a random human on the phone magic? Well, maybe he’s being held captive by a witch and needs someone to use magic to free him. Why is this the first time this human is hearing about magic? Well, we already have a ton of stories, Harry Potter and the like, where there’s a cadre of witches and wizards who can cast spells but have kept the existence of magic secret for…reasons (I’ve always been skeptical of those reasons, so heyo, the gremlin is too). Why would a gremlin be teaching a random human magic on the phone? We’d already decided the gremlin was more impulsive than bright, so maybe this was a fast-grab opportunity — maybe he’d had a disconnected phone, but then the witch who was keeping him captive had WiFi installed in her house and the phone connected automatically. Why did the witch who was keeping him captive give him a disconnected phone? Well, maybe he wasn’t a demon at all. Maybe he was a cute, casually homicidal creature who had machines as part of his natural habitat — in other words, a gremlin.

(Look, I know the Disney movie stripped away any connections “machines” had with “gremlins.” But I was too young for the movie so I first learned of gremlins by the WWII propaganda posters — which I was definitely too young for, but by the time I was a teenager they’d become retro so people had them as like, house decorations. Anyway, the gremlins in those posters are definitely homicidal maniacs messing with machines, so we can use those.)

So then there’s a story. Gremlin kept captive by a witch making an opportunistic bid for freedom, trying to convince the random person he calls to learn magic (so they can infiltrate the witch’s house) and then light the witch on fire (because that’s what people who don’t know about witchcraft do to witches, right?). A nice lighthearted, only-slightly-homicidal comedy — now we just have to make it work.

Making it work is hard.

I have the most brilliant actors in the world, and they were enthusiastic about gremlins. Doing a cute, manic, high-pitched homicidal creature for twenty minutes straight takes practice; they practiced. And they had energy. If you ever have the fortune to run interactive theater, do yourself a favor and hire good actors: they’re basically magic.

But then there was magic.

Gremlin! is an “awwwwww!” larp. You get to go “awwwwww!” because you’re working with a cute murderous thing. It’s possible we could have carried the experience on that. But a phone larp with only one (emotional) note is flat, so I wanted it to also be an “awe” larp; I wanted the player’s stomach to drop the moment they finished that card trick. I wanted the silly gremlin feels to be swept aside for a second by a sense of wonder; when that final card turns, I want the player to feel, for a moment, like they’ve genuinely done magic.

This means we have to playtest until our eyes bleed.

By “we,” of course, I mean the actors. I was mostly chivvying people along, saying “do it again,” bothering friends to be playtest victims, getting recordings of the actor with the most reliable delivery so the others could imitate her.

It still isn’t perfect.

If this were a play on a stage, it could be perfect. The actors could do the trick 100 times out of 100. In a phone larp, however, you’re working with a player — a player who could mishear, drop the cards, or get bowled over by a dog while trying to do magic.

It will never be perfect. We have possibly-hilarious riffs for when the “magic” fails.

And then there’s the ending.

Remember how we don’t just want stories to be one-note? Maybe we don’t want them to be just two-note either.

The ending is creepy.

Subtly creepy, to be sure. The fugitive gremlin gets caught. He drops the phone and flees, after panickedly whispering that he needs a three-minute distraction. The witch gets on the phone. She’s not a witch, of course. Witches don’t exist. She’s just a rather put-together mother with a mischievous six year old son. Who she’s going to punish. And who are you again?

You can tell the witch everything or nothing; you can hang up the phone and let the witch catch the gremlin. Or you can try to distract the witch.

Tick-tock. Three minutes. An increasingly suspicious witch. Or is she suspicious? Was this all real? Or was this a prank by somebody’s six-year-old son?

Tick-tock. What world are you in again?

Tick-tock.

So we need that intensity and tension before the show lets you go.

Can we get it?

***

Gremlin!, $15, 20 minutes, https://www.mirrorworldcreations.com/bookings-checkout/gremlin