By Matthew Wexler
If you’ve ever wanted to sit within arm’s length of legendary actor Ian McKellen, now’s your chance. Sort of. McKellen appears in the world premiere of An Ark, a “one-of-a-kind theatrical encounter” viewed through mixed reality glasses. The catch? He’s not actually there. Just his photonic projection, hovering in your field of vision like a very expensive ghost.
Conceived more like the Elysian Fields than Purgatory, audiences are asked to remove their shoes (footwear isn’t allowed in Heaven?) and enter what feels like a hotel conference room in one of The Shed’s adaptable spaces. Chairs surround an enormous white globe suspended from the room’s center, but the real action unfolds through a headset, in which McKellen, along with three other actors, is layered into the space, sitting in a semicircle in front of you.
What happens next is both eerily intimate and oddly disconnected. Simpson Stephen’s script, written in 2nd-person with an emphasis on “you,” attempts to lure the reader with a laundry list of life experiences, hoping that some will resonate as if the late psychic Sylvia Browne were in the room. When McKellen references a childhood memory of “the bubble of blood on your knee as you fall on hard concrete,” I was, indeed, catapulted to the time I fell off my bike after just having learned to ride.
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But there’s a lot of ground to cover among our lived experiences, and the fissure between what resonates and what feels like someone else’s story entirely becomes too laborious, even for the production’s concise 47-minute running time. The technology, if your eyes wander to the actors’ periphery, feels like it’s in its infancy, akin to Princess Leia’s hologram in Star Wars. And unlike the maximalist The Wizard of Oz at Sphere in Las Vegas, don’t expect any apples to fall out of the ceiling or a tornado to blow through.
Director Sarah Krankcom attempts to wrangle a more intimate, humanistic approach, with varying success. McKellen’s vast film experience pays off, as does Golda Rosheuvel’s (Bridgerton), both understanding that this is, essentially, film work. But as for being a piece of theater, An Ark is lost at sea.
2 out of 5 stars
It wants better content.
Fast facts: ‘An Ark’ at The Shed
An Ark‘s mixed-reality experiment offers proximity to Ian McKellen, but a genuine connection requires more than advanced optics.
- The Shed, 545 West 30th Street, New York City
- Running time: 47 minutes with no intermission
- Performances through March 1, 2026
