By Lauren Emily Whalen
Introverts beware: Theater of the Mind may push you out of your comfort zone. But rest assured, it’s worth it.
David Byrne (Here Lies Love, The Talking Heads) and tech and engineering maven Mala Gaonkar’s immersive theatrical experience invites you to be part of the action. Be ready to shake hands with your neighbor (and introduce yourself with a name not your own), taste a substance from a cup (don’t worry, it’s vegan and gluten-free!), and play a game tossing metal washers into a bucket (with and without funky sight-altering goggles).
This introvert walked away from Theater of the Mind with a new perspective on the stories we tell ourselves—and the power that lies within us to change them.
From the disco floor to small-town Texas, going backwards never felt so forward
Unlike An Ark, where audience members sit in a circle to witness photonic projections of Ian McKellen through mixed-reality glasses, Theater of the Mind keeps its crowd moving. Follow The Guide (one of a rotating cast, at the performance I attended, multidisciplinary artist Lucky Stiff displayed remarkable charisma and empathic calm) through a series of rooms. Go backwards in time, from a funeral home to a security job in Glasgow, back to a small-town Texas childhood both whimsical and tortured, as all childhoods tend to be.
Whether bopping around a disco or sitting in the dark for five minutes with a mirror in your lap, Theater of the Mind invites participants into The Guide’s life in reverse chronological order, encouraging introspection and reminding us that “you can change the story at any time.”
Untimately, immersive experiences succeed or stumble on three things: a cohesive story, a world that holds up under scrutiny, and the right ratio of gravity to delight. Theater of the Mind delivers on all three, blending the tangible and technological with an ease that hones and elevates the enormous amount of work behind it.
Co-creators Byrne and Gaonkar, director Andrew Scoville, and the cast and production team are magicians, drawing us into a world both fantastical and deeply human, only to deposit us back onto the streets of Chicago forever changed.
Is ‘Theater of the Mind’ worth seeing?
5 out of 5 stars
David Byrne and Mala Gaonkar have built a funhouse for the subconscious: disorienting, delightful, and quietly profound in ways that don’t announce themselves until you’re back on the street.
- Reid Murdoch Building, 333 N. LaSalle St., Chicago
- Running time: Approximately 75 minutes with no intermission
- Performances through July 12, 2026
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