Choices Left Within a Fixed Ending: When Watching Becomes Play
Creatrip Team
6 days ago
An immersive theater piece, Stay Alive In, transformed the entire HAB Center in Chuncheon into an interactive zombie disaster where audience members became members of a troupe and made real-time survival choices. Starting as a rehearsal, the staged outbreak forces participants to decide whether to hide, run, or trust others while actors, smoke, emergency broadcasts and roaming performances turn the building into a single, convincing world. The show borrows the tragic arc of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (a Greek tragedy about fate and responsibility) to ask whether individual choices matter when an ending seems predetermined. Although participants may not change the tragic outcome, each playthrough’s interpersonal decisions — who to hold hands with, whether to act humanely — make every performance unique, with actors adding improvisation to audience-driven narrative. Produced by Son Su-min, directed by Park Kwang-hoon with co-director Lee Do-ha, and sponsored by Hallym University RISE program, the production taps into shared pandemic-era fears and the revived popularity of communal street games like “police-and-thief” (a hide-and-seek role game) to deepen immersion.
