New frontier for immersive theater: the home

Three never-moving mourners, played by Annie Larson (left), Bruna Palmeiro and Iris Stone, watch over the body of a young woman (Haley Roth-Brown) in “The Mariner.” Three never-moving mourners, played by Annie Larson (left), Bruna Palmeiro and Iris Stone, watch over the body of a young woman (Haley Roth-Brown) in “The Mariner.” Photo: Carlos Barrera, Third Cloud From The Left Photo: Carlos Barrera, Third Cloud From The Left Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close New frontier for immersive theater: the home 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

If you’re the sort of theatergoer who’s always seeking the new, you’ll have heard instructions like these before. “Formal, Victorian and period attire highly encouraged, but not required.” “You’ll receive an email on the day of the show with further instructions,” including the address of the venue, which is not a traditional theater.

Excepting the “Victorian” part, those directions could equally apply to “The Speakeasy,” the long-running immersive theater piece set during Prohibition in a secret venue on the border of Chinatown and North Beach. The chief difference with “The Mariner,” the fourth production by 3-year-old company Third Cloud from the Left, is that the secret venue is a private residence, the Forest Hill home of producers Carlos Barrera and Josh Pelham, who are also partners.

Barrera and Pelham’s home itself is extraordinary. Enormous candles perch atop towering columns. Meticulously arranged dioramas of beaded dresses and dead flowers and colorful butterflies sit in glass display cases. Plush fabric covers everything. It’s a little like being in a coffin — an apt introduction to a show about three sisters sitting vigil over a dead body.

For Barrera, who directs “The Mariner” and also translated Fernando Pessoa’s enigmatic 1913 play from the Portuguese, the idea to make theater in his home sprang from a love of hosting parties coupled with the feeling that, working as an actor on other producers’ shows, not every project “was worth three months” of his life.

Barrera also dislikes the assumption that a show must be over and you have to leave right when the lights turn back on. That “cuts the magic,” he says in his kitchen after the Friday, Oct. 13, opening night of “The Mariner.”

“I love the conversations afterward,” he says. And for audiences, “even if they hated it ... there’s the food.” Preshow offerings include wine, cheese and charcuterie. Postshow a whole buffet is served, including miso beef short ribs, roasted Brussels sprouts with grape glaze and anchovies, pickled beets with honey tangerine, and white truffle macaroni and cheese. (Unlike “The Speakeasy,” all food and drink at “The Mariner” is included in admission, which makes the rush ticket prices in particular a relative bargain for a whole night out in San Francisco.)

The actual play takes place in Barrera and Pelham’s basement. Descending steep stairs, you’re greeted with a tableau of three watchers (Annie Larson, Bruna Palmeiro and Iris Stone) and one dead woman (Haley Roth-Brown), all with their eyes closed, all so still you involuntarily quell your own urges to stir. (The basement is a space so intimate you become acutely aware of who among your fellow 20 or so fellow audience members are mouth breathers.) The scene is as thoughtfully arranged, as highly stylized, as the dioramas upstairs, evoking a vision of death as a beautiful, feminine ideal. Makeup, by Kate Richards, hollows out eyes, evoking characters in a Tim Burton movie, an effect dramatically heightened by Nicholas Torre’s macabre lighting. Each sister’s hands lie daintily, as if posed for a portrait. Dried flowers bloom everywhere, including from one sister’s hair. (Diego Gómez did the sprawling wigs.)

The actors never move, not a flutter, except to speak or to shift their eyes. When Palmeiro utters the show’s first words, it takes a few syllables to realize that’s she’s speaking English, so bottomed-out is her inflection, so elongated each ghoulish syllable.

The content, the meaning of words is always suspect in Pessoa’s play, which is more concerned with philosophical questions than with narrative. The watchers talk to wonder why they persist in talking. They think to attempt to grasp their dreams or the passage of time or their own stream of consciousness. Mentions of the dead body lying before them come only obliquely, especially at first, suggesting that even the show’s apparent premise, of three women mourning the dead, is not at all certain.

Even in a play without narrative, Barrera’s direction could do more to distinguish what makes one sequence different from another. Steven Bolinger’s repetitive sound design grates, and toward the end, the performers moan like ghosts for what feels like minutes on end, when their more restrained performances earlier in the show were both sadder and creepier.

At their best, performers mine a mighty range out of that restraint. Larson, in particular, can go from sooty to piercingly clear in her vocals, and she has that otherwordly quality of the fully committed gaze. When her character sees a mariner in a dream, you instantly see him, too.

Characters wonder why they even bother recounting dreams and telling stories, when “nothing is worth the trouble.” But the Third Watcher, played by Stone, offers a wise answer, one that also encapsulates the joy of live theater: When something’s not worth doing, but you do it anyway, that’s what makes it “beautiful.”

Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak

The Mariner: Written by Fernando Pessoa. Translated and directed by Carlos Berrera. Through Nov. 4. One hour, plus pre- and postshow conversation. $40-$65. Private residence near Forest Hill Muni Station, S.F. www.thirdcloudfromtheleft.com

To see a trailer: https://vimeo.com/236511921