Introduction: "What Have You Learned Today?"

Interactive Theater Can Take Many Forms If "interactive theater" is taken to mean shows where the audience gets to speak up, either in the house or onstage, playing a role either assigned or chosen, then a piece like You Me Bum Bum Train, reviewed along with other New York shows in the Homans' "The Interactive Theater of Video Games: Gamer as Playwright, Director, and Actor," is conventional, if that adjective can ever be confidently applied to this otherwise different, sometimes radical form of theater. Jennifer Flaherty in "Dreamers and Insomniacs: Audiences in Sleep No More and The Night Circus" cites letters, blogs, websites on the play, responses, and online communications about this popular show where audience members describe their "trips" through the McKittrick Hotel, as visitors, as detectives, as participants in that, while they don't have dialogue and are rendered "invisible" by wearing white masks, they do chart the two-hours traffic of their progress through the hotel's rooms, some choosing to follow a specific character (the choice called "the Tail") loosely based on one in Shakespeare's Macbeth, others moving randomly, still others pursing a specific object ("the Search").