Introduction
Saboteur was a company-created, site-specific play combining elements of traditional theater and puzzles that the audience solved to advance the story. This was Walking Shadow Theatre Company’s second puzzle show, after 1926 Pleasant in 2006.
Saboteur was a spy story and a romance. The story was gradually revealed over the course of the evening, as the audience made discoveries about what was really going on and their role in the plot. As the play went on, we deliberately adopted a more lighthearted tone, incorporating traditional (and sometimes ridiculous) spy motifs such as the elaborate death trap and the double agent.
Saboteur was staged in a nondescript 3000 square foot warehouse space in an industrial/residental neighborhood. The building had originally been part of a 1930s research lab for General Mills, and its floor still showed evidence of that use complete with concrete ramps and peculiar six inch high walls to contain spills. When General Mills relocated, the 6.5 acre industrial complex became a Superfund site and was cleaned up in the 1980s. Now, these buildings are home to hundreds of artists and small businesses. The building’s murky past isn’t immediately apparent, but helped inspire the show’s conceit that this warehouse was actually a front for a secret organization.
The Audience
The audience capacity was limited to 16 people. While we could have physically fit more people into the space, we wanted to ensure that each audience member could, if they wanted, actively participate in the puzzles.
Though sixteen people is a very small audience by traditional theater standards, it's actually quite a lot when everyone must work together as a team. As with 1926 Pleasant, a major part of the show was the audience navigating group dynamics. Sometimes, a puzzle worked best if a leader emerged and delegated duties to others, but other times puzzles were designed so that no one person could see everything that was going on, and multiple voices were needed.
Every audience was different. Sometimes people knew each other already, and sometimes everyone was a total stranger. Some people identified themselves as good puzzle solvers and some were afraid they would be awful (as it turned out, people from both groups were occasionally wrong). In some performances, the audience cohered quickly and worked together efficiently, while in others, personalities vied for preeminence, adding an extra layer of complexity.
Beginning on the next page is a chronological description of the play.
Walkthrough photography by Dan Norman.