There’s a running joke on multiple seasons of “Dimension 20,” the genre-mashup actual play series streaming on Dropout, where the cast references shooting in a freezing warehouse somewhere in Los Angeles during fraught or tired moments. But game master Brennan Lee Mulligan and the “Dimension 20” production team are now excitedly spending some time in a warehouse in New Jersey to prepare for “Gauntlet at the Garden,” a live show entry into their “The Unsleeping City” campaign at Madison Square Garden, which sold out in under an hour.
The proposition, and great pleasure, that actual plays offer is a dual immersion in storytelling where audiences thrill at the tale created by the cast and the tale-spinning improv dynamics of them as players at a table, working through dice-rolling rituals and reacting to failures and successes in real-time. But the number of people helping to make this new entry into the story of heroes living in a magical version of New York City happen in New York City is much bigger than even fans of “Dimension 20” might realize.
The series has toured live in the U.K. and Ireland, producing “Dimension 20: Time Quangle,” as a set of stand-alone episodes, or one-shots, for Dropout; but to put it in D&D terms, Madison Square Garden has a much higher Challenge Rating than performing at 2,000 and 3,000 person venues. “When you go on tour, you have to work out an entire workflow for lighting, sound, video, projections, animations, music, and it’s gotta be LIVE,” co-executive producer Carlos Luna told IndieWire. “You might not have the same people on the fourth night that you trained the second night. It was totally a trial by fire, both for the new live crew and our staff.”
For “Gauntlet at the Garden,” that crew includes Luna, production designer Rick Perry, director Michael Schaubach, producers Clinton Trucks and Ebony Hardin, executive producer David Kerns, and makeup department head Denise Valentine, as well as folks for whom Madison Square Garden and other live-to-tape venues are their favored terrain: Director Sandra Restrepo, and production manager SJ Grevett, who also worked with the D20 team on their U.K. tour. Creative Director of Art and Design Paula Searing and head of post-production Lauren Stone wait in the wings, as well, to take what happens at MSG and make sure it doesn’t stay at MSG. And working on this scale is part of the leveling-up that Mulligan is excited to do with “Gauntlet at the Garden.”
“If it were up to me, I would just be on a little toadstool in the woods making up stat blocks for different kinds of dragons,” Mulligan said. “But I think that the brass ring of Madison Square Garden is really special for what it can hopefully do for all the amazing people who have worked on the show.”
“Madison Square Garden” is one of the magic phrases that can act as a bridge between Internet-native series and legacy media and create the context for a series that otherwise might be siloed in its own domain, outside of which, Mulligan said, it’s hard to talk about why something is worthy of accolades. The “D20” team’s planning for making the most of the experience has been ambitious and sometimes fantastic — which is saying something particularly for “The Unseelping City,” where Stephen Sondheim (yes, that Stephen Sondheim) has been kidnapped by pixies and ridden into battle on a bear.
“There were some crazy ideas, especially before we settled on a ‘show,’” Luna said. “What if Billy Joel is lowered down from the ceiling while he plays ‘New York State of Mind?’ What if Run DMC started singing ‘Walk This Way’ but we change the lyrics to ‘Roll This Way!’ None of us know Billy Joel or Run DMC. So people will have to settle for the fun game stuff we have planned.”
One lesson of the “Time Quangle” tour has been that the fun game stuff is decidedly different, if adjacent, to the regular rhythms of the “D20” dimensional dome, where Mulligan and the cast can tease and stretch storylines over 10-20 episodes. But their highly condensed nature can the storylines work for both complete newcomers and “Dimension 20” veterans without needing to bend or adjust the “canon” of the regular series.
“Foreshadowing something that’s going to come in 15 episodes is very different from foreshadowing something that’s going to be resolved in 90 minutes,” Mulligan said. “The scenarios [for the live shows], by definition, have to be compact. So it’s like, ‘Here’s a problem; let’s solve it in the next two hours, right?’ That’s great for people that are new coming in. I think you also want to reward the people who have watched it all.”
Those rewards are less about shutting up and playing the hits than understanding that the relationship to the audience is slightly different. “You are moving from a space that is, I think, very tailored for a kind of theatrical, almost like black box theater-y [experience] when you’re in a studio; and then you go to a live event and it is Thunderdome,” Mulligan said.
The response to the intricate cosplay, rowdy cheers, and even some well-intentioned rules corrections shouted from the crowd (please don’t do this) that happens at live shows is a slightly adjusted performance and storytelling style. Cast members Emily Axford and Brian Murphy have toured with their play “NaddPod” (Not Another D&D Podcast), and Mulligan cited them as showing how to keep the story progressing while hitting one-liners and keeping the crowd’s energy up.
“The energy from the crowd is a lot more like a sports crowd than people who are, let’s say, in a passive place where they’re consuming a play. When you’re watching that kind of theater, you’re trying to get to a place of total immersion, ego death, ‘I’m just absorbing the art here.’ And I’ll tell you, that’s not what’s going on at a live show,” Mulligan said.
To continue the sports metaphor, “Gauntlet at the Garden” will be both a home and away game; home in the sense that New York is the setting for the show, and there was no other choice, really, for what “Dimension 20” would do in Madison Square Garden. “[Doing Unsleeping City was] like ‘Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade’ where he’s in that room with all those different chalices, and he knows exactly which one is the Grail. All the other ones don’t make sense, you know?” Luna said.
But being away from their home studio and working with a different shooting time scale has meant that the “Dimension 20” has had to prepare differently. “We learned a lot [from the U.K. tour]! Mainly to overprepare a little more, and really overthink what we do for this show,” Luna said.
The trick is to overprepare a little, but not over-rotate on what’s fun about “Dimension 20” and “The Unsleeping City,” which is why Mulligan thought that two months was a good amount of time to get ready for “Gauntlet at the Garden.” Part of that is the fine art of having fun playing games with your friends. “I’m actually doing this interview from a hotel in New Jersey. Today was the first day of prep and testing, and we all just came back from having dinner at Red Lobster,” Luna said. “It was Rick’s [Perry] first time going and he thought it was just, ‘Fine.’ (Please print that!)”
New Jersey may have only rolled a 10 on its Performance Check, but the “Dimension 20” team will roll its initiative at Madison Square Garden on Friday, January 24.
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