The Great Gatsby Immersive Experience

Today we hop aboard a time capsule, traveling to the roaring 20s in New York. We’ve got a party to go to. Welcome to Gatsby’s house!

Leah, Grason, Brendan and I booked a ticket to the Gatsby Immersive Theatre experience during one of our first weeks in London. I will forever mark it as my favorite night in London, and maybe one of the best nights of my life.

We walked up the stairs to the theatre where a young gentleman in costume began telling us about the show we were about to experience. He warned us of all the flashing lights and prop gun shots. In his humorously abrasive New York way, he told us that the actors WERE going to speak to us, and we should respond. “When the actors begin speaking to each other, that’s your cue to shut your mouth! If you don’t, one of us will come along and … remind you. Also, those magical light up boxes you call phones. They don’t exist in the 1920s! Turn them off! If we see you with them, we will come along and smash them to pieces… unless you’re using them to pay at the bar of course!”

He then ushered us all into the room, where I was immediately dazzled. It was beautifully lit in ambient shades of blue, purple and gold. There were vines and flowers growing up the walls, golden details, and a group of beautiful instruments places underneath a chandelier in the corner of the room. Everyone was bustling about, getting a drink or finding a place on the stairs to sit. We had a bit of time before the show started so we decided to grab a drink. In true 1920s fashion, I chose to order a Bees Knees. Everyone who worked in the room could only be described as picturesque. They seemed perfectly placed to match the beauty of the room, the bartenders and the actors all bringing forth a sparkling irresistibility about them.

I began musing with Brendan that these were the kind of people I picture when I write my stories. I joked that the bartender looked like he could be written in as some sort of Grecian God, or fairy. Brendan agreed, he would fit into my story as Hade’s son or an angel of the night. Little did I know I was about to experience storytelling on another level, a night that really would inspire my next story.

Memory can be a slippery thing. Exact dialogue and words, pictures and senses can get blurred and lost in the elusiveness of a memory. As this was happening and immediately afterwards, I was desperately working to immortalize every moment of this in my mind, exactly as it happened. However, I think the fact that part of this will always remain secretly in the moment, sleeping in a deep recess of my brain is very suiting and almost the purpose of Fitzgerald’s story. Beauty too can be found in the things we can’t quite remember.

So, parts of this story will remain my secret, either by choice or because they have found a place to live within me that I cannot recall. But I will tell it the best that I am able.

It is something like a dream, this whole experience. As the soft beats of the music drifted through the room, we were discussing the different types of dances of the 20s and how we should’ve brushed up on our moves before we came to this dance party. We were already getting into the character of it all; donning New York accents and speaking as if we were really in this mansion, pining for a sighting of Gatsby. Brendan told us he knew how to dance the Charleston, so he stepped away from the bar with Leah and they began to dance together. This immediately attracted the attention of one of the actresses. A beautiful woman with short blonde hair and a scarf tied around her head. She was radiant and bright. I was immediately drawn into her. She chatted with us for a bit, and we were so pleased to have already gotten to talk to an actor before the show had even started. She asked all of us for our names and told us that hers was Myrtle.

She pointed out her husband who was one of the men working at the bar. I told her that she must be a lucky woman and she made a face and responded, “not so much.” She vented her complaints about him, including that he wouldn’t buy her a new dress. I told her that if I could buy her a new dress I would. She lit up and laughed with me. She leaned in and whispered that she has heard if you ripped your dress dancing that Gatsby would buy you a new one.

“Good thing I’m not wearing a dress I particularly care about then!” I joked. She laughed with me and after a bit more chatting, she went to go mingle with the rest of the guests, promising to find us later.

We took our drinks to the staircase and settled in a back corner, waiting for the show to begin. Myrtle came out of nowhere and grabbed us from our spot. “You all are too pretty to be stuck at the back, come up here to the front.” She pulled us by the arms to the front of the bar, a central seat to see the piano that had been pulled to the center of the room. Myrtle’s husband was no longer behind the bar and had taken his place at the keys. She called out our dancing skills to the whole room and asked her husband to play us something more upbeat so we could get into it! She pulled our group to the center and as the music began to pick up Leah and Brendan started dancing.

“I don’t know how to do that dance.” Grason confessed to me.

“Neither do I, let’s make it up as we go!” I responded, and we jumped in. The music was fast, and our feet were faster. Myrtle was thrilled as she watched us. For the next song she asked her husband to slow it down, and Grason and Brendan switched partners, so Brendan and I were dancing together. The man at the piano began jokingly playing an off-tune song about hanky panky, and we all laughed. Then he began playing the real slow song, and Myrtle invited everyone to dance. Afterwards the show began. The lights shifted dramatically, and Nick Carraway entered the scene and began monologuing, the same text from the beginning of the book! Gatsby could be seen out on his platform above the crowd, watching for Daisy. Then all the actors began talking to each other. They were alive, bouncing off each other and the audience with such spirit!

After their performance different characters pulled different sections of the audience into different rooms. Myrtle pulled our group of four aside and asked us to hang back with her. I was elated that we had made a friend at this party! She seemed to be coming to us for everything, and I loved it. She pulled us into the hallway right outside of one of the rooms and told us her lover was in there. “Who’s that man in there with him?” she asked, peeking through the door’s window, “he looks like a fish out of water!” She was referring to Nick Carraway of course. She asked us how she looked, it was important to her what the man in there thought of her. She asked if she should keep the apron or lose it and we advised that she should leave it in the hall. I began to catch on that this show was going to be even more interactive than I thought. She gave us a devilish grin and asked, “Should we make a big entrance?”

So, on her count of three we burst into the room, cheering, and shouting and yelling. Then we found our spots to stand in the room as the show continued. Although at this point it really didn’t feel like a show anymore. This room we had been pulled into was decorated completely differently, everything in red. It really did seem like a room in the house. We watched as Myrtle had a grand time, teasing and toying with her lover, Tom. Then Tom was teasing with Nick, the man he roomed with in college and told Myrtle to play with him a bit. She caught my eye and winked and then she went for it! This woman truly was a wild cat, jumping on top of Nick and pinning him to the couch, laughing wildly the more uncomfortable that he got. This continued until Myrtle and Tom decided that they needed to take a ‘phone call’ in the hall.

“Four minutes! Keep my friends in here entertained!” Tom instructed Nick. When he saw the look on his face he said, “Fine! Two minutes!” After some more poking fun at Nick, he left the room with Myrtle and the door began banging ferociously as Nick struggled to hold it shut, laughing awkwardly over the noise of the two lovers outside… taking a phone call. I’ll leave some of the next lines out for the sake of the cleanliness and classiness of this blog post.

When they came back in, after some more playing around, Myrtle began quizzing Tom on when he was going to get her those apartments, he had promised her. He scolded her for bringing it up in this context and their conversation escalated, her further pressing him until he got frustrated and struck her across the face. I was very taken aback and felt immediately sorry for Myrtle. I wished I could go to her. Nick tried to cover up the tense moment by talking to us. Then Daisy burst into the room. Tom’s husband. She asked if Nick had seen him anywhere and he lied right to her face. She seemed eased by his fib and left to go find him. He was forced to go back on his profession from earlier about what an honest man he is and asked us to keep what we had just seen a secret from Myrtle’s husband and Daisy, his cousin. He ushered us out of the room and to the hallway, where Daisy was waiting, and we did another little skit together in the hall where we let Nick practice flirting as if he was flirting with Jordan. Daisy was so charismatic and as she stood next to me, I was entranced. She asked me if I thought we should give Nick a hard time and I said that he needs to be prepared for anything that might happen.

“Oh, I like that. You have a very Jordan Baker way of thinking.” She told me. I felt like a little kid after receiving that praise from her. After this humorous scene was over, we went back to the party.

They performed another little scene with some fun music and then we were all pulled into separate rooms again, except our group got singled out again! This time by Tom. He pulled us into the corner and asked us to do him a favor. It was at this point that we began to be pulled between our real values and morals and what it would take to play along with the show. He asked us if we’ve ever told a white lie, and Brendan told him yes. He told us that we were standing outside of Myrtle and her husband George’s house. He told us that he could not be seen conversing with them and started a rant that was ‘scientifically proven’ about how poor people have fewer braincells and are much less articulate than us. He grouped us in with the people who he saw to be like him, and rather than say what we really wanted to say to him we all smiled and nodded along. He gave us a note to give to George about a deal he had made with him to sell him a car. With a mischievous grin, “if you want to have a little fun, make sure his wife finds the note first.” He then sent us on our way inside.

We came in to find a group of people listening to joyous music, George, and Myrtle among them. This room was altogether different, a picture of poverty; everything brown and grey, dusty, and worn. Myrtle grabbed the note out of Leah’s hand and it began a whole scene. She was furious with George, and he was denying that the note meant what she thought it did, he told her that she was reading it wrong, so she had an audience member read it out loud to her. The note said, “The deal is off.” They weren’t getting the car that they thought they were, meaning they weren’t going to be able to leave this place and start the new life that Myrtle wanted. The only thing she wanted throughout all of this was freedom. Freedom from this place, from this poverty, and from this man. He was quite awful. So, he left to go sort out the deal and Myrtle began commiserating with the audience, and I really felt for her. She didn’t know what to do, or where to go. She asked if anyone had ever been in love with two people at once. No one said anything, but she was very perceptive as she looked around the room and saw my slight nod.

“You have?”

“Yes, a long time ago.” I answered her.

“Well come up here, come here!” She exclaimed as she pulled me to the center of the room with her. “What was it like? What happened in the end, what did you do?”
I told her a small bit of my story from my younger years and finished, “I ended up losing them both. Too much love will kill you.”

Now I want to interrupt the story here because you might be thinking that I was trying to spoil the story right here for everyone in the room. SPOILER ALERT FOR GREAT GATSBY AHEAD! If you know that Myrtle dies at the end, you might be thinking “Oh no, don’t ruin the interactive experience by telling her she’s going to die.” But this is not at all what I was trying to do. I was honestly just quoting the Queen song, trying to think of something deep and meaningful to say. I want you to keep this in mind as I tell the rest of my story: I did not know that Myrtle dies at the end. I’ve read the book, but I totally forgot what happens, it was a forced read a long time ago. I was really and truly experiencing this story live, for the first time. So yeah, it was about to get rough for little ol’ me.

Thankfully it was at this exact moment that Tom burst into the room, causing a riot with a couple of the audience members. Myrtle teased him and made a backhanded joke asking if he was going to hit her again to make her feel better. Tom apologized and asked the women he had come in with to show Myrtle what he had gotten for her. They opened the box, and it was a dog leash inside. Myrtle had been asking George for a dog, and never got one. It seemed to mend everything between them.

Then we played a riotous game of truth or dare. I won’t detail this because what happens during truth or dare, stays in truth, or dare. However, the audience all participated, and Myrtle spun the bottle to see whose turn it would be next. At the end she forced the bottle to land on Tom and again began quizzing him about her apartments. This ended in another uncomfortable conversation between them, and Myrtle became very upset. Everyone else went back to the party and she asked us to hold back.

She began asking for our advice, she was emotional, and my heart reached out to her. I gave her what comfort I could. Sadly, I can’t remember the exact words that we shared but I do remember how she made me feel: important, heard, connected. I was willing to go to the ends of the earth for this woman. At this point I couldn’t convince myself that these people were actors if I tried. It was the most believable and real performance and character work I’ve ever witnessed. She asked us to talk to Tom for her. This woman who longed for freedom and escape wanted to know that her scapegoat wasn’t going to fail her again. We promised that we’d talk to Tom for her and go about it in a way that wasn’t obvious but also to know for sure that he was being truthful. She had brought us into the first room with the red décor and we were sitting around the room with her, just the four of us and Myrtle. The level on which we got to connect and interact with her was so cool. This part was not scripted at all, we laughed with her, and had deep emotional talks with her.

Then she left us alone in the room to go get Tom. We all shared a look, very invested, and surprised at how this was going for us.

I shared my own mischievous smile and shared with the group “I’ve got a plan.”

Tom came into the room, and I immediately jumped up to shake his hand. I was committed, I was going to do what Myrtle was asking of me to the best of my abilities for her. We joked about the game of truth or dare and made sure that we connected with him first before we threw him into the fire. While we were discussing what had happened in the other room, I subtly slipped in the subject we were there to discuss.

“That woman of yours, Myrtle. She’s a firecracker of a woman.”
He agreed with me, and we discussed how admirable she was. We then began discussing what she was asking from him. We talked about George and how he couldn’t give that to her. Then, I brought up Daisy. I put him on the spot a bit, asking him what his plans were. He confided in us that he was torn. What he wanted was to give Myrtle what she wanted and be with her, but he has a wife and a daughter. He really seemed genuinely sad and upset to be putting these women in this situation. He asked us what he should do. I shared some of my advice with him based on the story I had told Myrtle earlier. I told him that he needed to make a decision and figure out what he wanted, or he would end up losing everything.

“You’re very wise,” he said. “Are you a guru or something?” I laughed, and really took that compliment to heart.

“A woman like Myrtle doesn’t deserve to be kept waiting. And a woman like her won’t wait around for you forever.” I told him.
“Deserve. That’s exactly the word for it,” he told me. “You’re right.”

The group and I pressed him further and tried to get a sense of whether he was telling the truth. He gave us ‘scouts honor’ that he was, and that he wanted to do right by Myrtle.

He asked us to tell her to wait for him. “Just one more week,” he promised. “I’ll make the deals I need to, get everything together. Tell Myrtle that George is suspicious about us so she has to keep all of this subtle and low.”

“And you’ll leave Daisy?” I asked.

“Yes, yes. I’ll talk to her, and I’ll leave her with some money.”

We took him at his word, so he went back to the party and Myrtle brought us back to her house. We gave her a recount of what was said, and she got so excited. I said, “remember when George mentioned something about Tom earlier, and you asked that man if you thought your reaction was noticeable when you heard his name and he said yes? Well Tom thinks that might’ve raised some suspicion and George might be on to you.” I can’t lie I was quite proud of myself for being able to tie in previous audience interactions with the current story. She asked us several times if we believed him and made us confirm that he really said those things. Then she was elated, and said she needed to start packing.

We went back to the party room.

“You’re brilliant.” Brendan whispered to me. I felt amazing.

This was one of my favorite parts of the night. Gatsby was in the room and Nick told him that he had someone he wanted him to meet. Daisy came in. She was stunning, wearing a different dress from before. She walked up to Gatsby, and I couldn’t help but vocally react with an “Ooooooh,” right as she was asking Gatsby what he thought. She turned her head and found my eyes in the audience and gave me the sweetest smile.
“Well, someone likes it.”
I told her she looked gorgeous, and she told us that someone in the audience had helped her pick it out and she thanked me. I felt so special.

We got to watch Daisy and Gatsby meet for the first time since all those years ago. The lighting was theatrical magic. The music was gorgeous. The way they looked at each other was pure love, undeniable and strong. It was like there was no one else in the room and they had never separated. I cried, of course. I had never seen two actors connect in such a deep and real way before. They were in love. They had their conversation and then they danced. It was amazing! Gatsby spinning and lifting Daisy, allowing her to fly. When they kissed at the end, flower petal confetti rained down. When the lights came back up, I grabbed a flower petal from the ground. I want it to be sewn into the inside of my wedding dress when I’m married, it can be my something old and my something blue. Yes, seriously it was that impactful.

Afterwards, George came in to clean up and began complaining to the audience about how ungrateful his wife is. He whined about how hard he works for her and how she never lifts a finger. Then she came in with her coat on, headed to the exit. He stopped her and asked what she was doing.

“I’m going to get a dog.” She told him.

This infuriated him. Really, he was mad to see her strong willed and standing up for herself. They fought and when she tried to leave, he grabbed her. The way that he was so aggressive made me want to jump in and help her. I felt this way several times, where I had to restrain myself from saying something or coming to her defense when he was becoming abusive. He screamed at her and demanded that she go back inside. She stormed back into the house.

At some point after all of this they called a little break for everyone to grab more drinks and mingle. I’m a bit fuzzy on the order of how things happened but I will never forget the peak of the party.

Daisy, Nick, Gatsby, and everyone came back in, joyous and ready to party. The lights changed and they asked if we were ready to dance. I quickly finished my drink and jumped onto the dance floor. The music picked up, fast, lively, and full of spirit. It was truly the roaring 20s! The lights were flashing, and everyone was moving and dancing without a care in the world. The next thing I knew I was in the middle of the crows and when I looked up Daisy and Gatsby were dancing with me! They were cheering me on, and we all laughed together as we danced. It was pure bliss. I felt more at home in my heart and soul than I have in a long time. Now I can say that I’ve danced with Gatsby and Daisy!

After the party, Brendan was pulled off. He ran back in to grab us and told us to follow him. I saw Myrtle standing at the bar looking upset and so I stopped to ask if she was alright. She told me that she wasn’t but that she’d be okay, and I should go ahead with my friends. We entered George and Myrtle’s house where a drunk George was waiting for us. He monologued and asked a couple in the audience how long they’d been together and if he thought his wife had ever been unfaithful. It was raw. He talked about the poverty they were facing and revealed his true hurt. Then Myrtle came in. She was not happy, and she really stood up for herself. She communicated her wishes. But then, George accused her of what we all knew to be true. He had found the leash in her dresser. She denied it. He got violent with her. This was all happening a foot in front of me, and I was livid. Suddenly the walls of the house were thrown open to reveal the party room. The walls of the bar turned into doors that opened onto the house. We could see the party room full of guests that hadn’t been brought into this room with us. We had to go back to the party but again, Myrtle asked us to stay behind and help her pack. She was going to leave. I grabbed her things and her coat and helped her stuff them in her suitcase. As she talked to us my heart was aching for her.

Somehow, we ended up back in the party room where we watched the final scenes of everyone doing business at the table. Tom and Gatsby got in a physical fight, after the famous lines of Gatsby telling Tom that Daisy never loved him. I was proud of Daisy for taking over and not letting them talk about her like she wasn’t right there. She claimed that she had loved Tom, but she did choose to go with Gatsby—in the yellow car.

Now I think we know where this is going at this point. The walls of the bar flew open. There was a car where the house used to be, headlights blaring. The fog came in. George came in holding Myrtle’s limp body and laid her on the table. I was distraught. I wanted to run to her, I wanted to cry. It might sound silly, but I felt true grief as she lay lifeless on the table. George threatened Tom until he told him that it was Gatsby who was driving the car.

George sat down at the piano and played a heartbreaking ballad he had been working on to his wife who could no longer hear his music. Only in death did she ever find escape.

We watched the end of the story unfold, where George shoots Gatsby. The prop gun was loud. Just like the beginning, Nick gave the monologue from the book and told us the rest of the story. We saw all the characters standing together, Tom and Daisy still there by each other’s side.

Then, all the characters came back out to sing one last song. Myrtle came out from right behind me and climbed up on the platform right above my head. How fitting. I watched her with admiration as she sang. One of the lines of the song was “There will always be a piece of me that is the version of myself I am tonight.” That line hit like a wrecking ball and I immediately latched on to it. That’s how I felt about tonight. I wanted to lasso the moon and the stars so I could turn it into an endless night. I never want to forget it.

After the show closed the actors bowed, the actor who played Nick spoke in a British accent which shocked us all. The accent work was incredible, I thought they were really from New York. We took pictures in the room after the actors left and then headed out. I saw the actors who played Nick, George, and Gatsby outside having a smoke and a drink. I waved at them and told them they had just given me the best night of my life. They were very flattered. I couldn’t stop thinking about it on the train back. I didn’t feel like I had stepped back into this reality yet, and I didn’t want to. It made me sad. I wanted to live in the world of dance and love where everything was roaring, and Myrtle Wilson was my best friend.

I found the actress on Instagram. I’ve discovered my new dream job. I would love to play Myrtle one day. I posted the pictures of us in the room, and she commented on my post! I was overjoyed. That reality I longed for wasn’t so far away after all.