CR 070: Andy Crocker on the Importance of Play, Pretend, and Participatory Adventures
The live experience designer and director discusses the creative process behind her immersive theater projects.
Andy Crocker has held many titles over the course of her career—among them, Creative Facilitator, Immersive Experience Director, Artistic Associate, and Casting Associate. But what is probably the most apt is the one she includes in her professional bio: “passionate goofball for hire.” A lifelong self-proclaimed theater nerd and half of the creative duo Mister & Mischief, Crocker has co-created numerous award-winning immersive productions, including Escape from Godot and 40 Watts from Nowhere. Independently, she served as a 2024 Creator in Residence for the Los Angeles Public Library and has directed immersive experiences for a wide range of clients, including Disney, Six Flags, and Knott’s Berry Farm.
Regardless of the title or the client, her work, at its core, is about one thing: playful, heartfelt, human-to-human connection. “It’s incredibly empowering to tell stories not for an audience, but with an audience,” Crocker says. “To co-create with strangers is holy. I think playfulness is another form of being present with each other. I believe in it. I don’t do political work outright, but I think the act of creating with each other and activating people’s imaginations in a really impactful, unusual way is training us for a world I would prefer to live in.”
Over a recent Zoom call, I chatted with Crocker (who, full disclosure, is a former colleague of mine from Center Theatre Group) about her background, her work on Disney’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, and why she feels hopeful about the future of live theater in our AI-obsessed world.
SANDRA EBEJER: Before we start talking about your career, I’m curious about your background. Were you always interested in theater? Did you grow up in an arts-loving household?
ANDY CROCKER: I’ve been putting on shows at the dining room table since I was itty bitty. My mom was a teacher, and my dad was literally a mad scientist. He was a laser physicist and then did stand-up comedy after work. He was never home. And when he was home, his garage was a laboratory with lasers and whiteboards with mysterious equations and antique radios and contraptions.
He was Doc Brown.
Yeah, Doc Brown, perhaps a little Wayne Szalinski from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Lovable, truly a mad scientist, but also a stand-up comedian. So art was a part of our life, but it wasn’t like my mom was wearing a beret and painting. It was more heavily wacky.
I tried piecing together your career through your LinkedIn page, but like most creatives, you often juggle multiple roles simultaneously. When you were first starting out, did you have a specific career path in mind?
I have wanted to be a director since I was 15 years old. I did plays, but that was because if you were a kid that wanted to do theater, you were either a tech person or you were auditioning for the plays. There weren’t a lot of opportunities for a kid to direct. I’ve wanted to be a director since I was in high school, so I went to school for that. I started doing improv professionally while I was in college.
I don’t come from a background where you don’t work, so [after college] I had to get a job. I call it a job-shaped job. I got this incredible opportunity at Days of our Lives as a production associate. It’s a combination of a script supervisor and a second AD [assistant director], because soaps tape 90 pages a day, so everyone’s doing at least two jobs at all times. It wasn’t directing, but I felt like it was part of my continued path. It didn’t feel off track. But also, at that time, being a theater director didn’t seem like a job I would have because I’m not going to grad school, I’m not rich, and I’m not from New York. It didn’t seem possible. So I was like, what are the things that seem possible, and what are the things that I feel activated by?
Jumping way ahead—you do all these various jobs, and then in 2017 you and your husband launch Mister & Mischief. How did that come about?
Jeff [Crocker] is my husband, partner, person. We always say we collaborated on a life and a house and a wedding and a baby, and then we collaborated on theater. We did a lot of things before we collaborated artistically, so we had a lot of practice on negotiating and knowing what the other person’s pain points are and what the other person is really good at. One day, Jeff was texting snarkily with Mike Sablone, the producing artistic director of Warehouse [Theatre], and Jeff and he were making jokes about absurd over-the-top escape rooms. And Jeff said, “Do you think we could get funding for our Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot escape room?” They both laughed about it, and I was like, “We should actually do that! That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. That’s so stupid. I love it so much.”
We applied for the Hollywood Fringe Festival and in order to fill out the application, we had to come up with a company name. We were like, “I guess we’re a company.” We designed it to run for 24 hours, and it ran on and off for two years. Part of the reason we were like, “We’ll run it for 24 hours,” is we had no idea if anyone else would think this is as funny as we do. We were perfectly happy if it ended up being like, “Did you hear there used to be a Samuel Beckett escape room?” We were perfectly happy to be an urban legend. We had no expectations that this would become our lives.
For anyone who isn’t familiar with the show, can you give a brief synopsis about what Escape from Godot is about?
The premise is your friend invited you to a play, and you’ve told them that you’re going to be there and you’re going to sit through the entire show, and you’ve promised them you’re going to stay. And you get there and you are told that the stage manager has quit, and lawyers are going to come sue everyone in the theater if you can’t call the cues and get through the show before the lawyers arrive, and you have to see the whole show as fast as possible. We call it a puzzle play, because unlike a traditional escape room, the clues and puzzles and interactivities are embedded in the performance. So you don’t rip apart seats to find things. You have to listen and watch the show in order to get through it. It’s not a needle in a haystack. You have to actually pay attention to the actors, which is great.
The other project I want to ask about is The Bureau of Nooks and Crannies, which sounds so fun. Can you share how that came about?
In 2024 I was named one of the Creators in Residence for Los Angeles Public Library, and the project that I pitched and eventually built for them is, as you said, the Bureau of Nooks and Crannies. It’s a series of site-specific and site-responsive installations that are across the 72 branches of Los Angeles Public Library. There are six physical installations and two audio pieces. It’s really an exploration of imagination in public space. The intention behind it was based on watching my daughter, who had just realized she could read anything in the library, not just the things in the kids’ section, and being jealous of how hyped she was and wanting to create that feeling for adults. So these installations are a little bit of a role-playing game, a little bit meditation, a little bit guided walk. I will say, it drives me nuts when people are like, “It’s a scavenger hunt.” It’s the opposite of a scavenger hunt because there are infinite answers, whatever you make of it is correct, no one’s checking it, and it’s extremely personal.
Each one has its own genre and its own vibe. One of them, you end up writing a love letter. One of them, you end up giving advice as a time traveler from the future. One of them is a ghost story where you are a ghost that is haunting the library, and you are discovering if you are alone or not. And one of them, you are an advocate for tiny creatures that live in the library, and you’re trying to find them safe spaces to exist because they keep moving the books around. They’re all very whimsical. It’s to make you feel like a kid, but it isn’t necessarily designed for kids.
It’s still happening?
Yeah, as long as the branches want to have them. I spent a lot of time talking to librarians and making sure it would not be annoying to them, because they are my heroes. I don’t want to annoy them. It also was about local branches post-pandemic, where people had gotten used to putting books on hold and then coming in, grabbing their books, and leaving, and not lingering, not realizing that there were cookbooks or sheet music. There is one library that has a sub-section of Black history that’s got its own Dewey Decimal System within it. Incredible stuff. I had no idea it was there. So [it’s about] getting people to go to the parts of the library that’s off their own personal beaten path, and very specifically choosing branches that were under-noticed—the architecturally not as interesting, possibly less haunted, less hip libraries.
How do your other projects typically come about? Do you and Jeff come up with the ideas and then try to find a home for it? Or do organizations or venues approach you and you work with them to create the piece?
It varies project to project. 2024 was nuts, because we opened so many projects at the same time of having great personal turmoil—being sandwich generation and taking care of our parents and our kid and our artistic practice and capitalism and the world is on fire. 2024 was the year of everyone being like, “You guys are killing it,” and us being like, “We’re dying!” Yes, we are killing it, and it is killing us.
So in 2024, after we closed an independent run of Escape from Godot—which went great, we got a great write-up in the L.A. Times—I was like, “I don’t want to do this without partners that have dollars anymore.” And I am going to say that until, of course, we come up with an idea and are like, “We have to do it anyway!” We’ve been really lucky to work with partners like La Jolla Playhouse. They’re supporting us in our next developmental pipeline and treating us like playwrights, even though we don’t have normal scripts that you can read at a music stand. So, working with La Jolla Playhouse and the INVERSE Festival in Bentonville, Arkansas, just trying to find people that want to host actors in strange spaces and stories told in participatory ways.
What attracts you to more site-specific, interactive theater versus straight-up narrative productions?
When I applied for college, my essay was about María Irene Fornés Fefu and Her Friends and August Strindberg’s Miss Julie. I didn’t even know the word for immersive theater. My application essay was like, “We have TV and we have technology. The only way we can compete with that is to physically be in the space with the story and be a part of it, because otherwise we can’t offer what these other storytelling mechanisms have, and realism in a proscenium theater isn’t gonna cut it.” What a little brat I was, but also it was what my career ended up being. So, I agree with 17-year-old me, but she was really pretentious and a brat. [Laughs]
When you’re doing work with something like Disney, an entity that has all the money and a lot of red tape, how does your approach to the work differ from when you’re working with a library or small venue?
Well, creating for the library is fun because anybody who hates the library is very clearly a monster. So that is great, because everyone’s hyped for you, and that feels really good. Disney is both a giant corporation with lots of money, and it’s also intellectual property that people care deeply about. I was working on Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, which is a whole interview in itself. It’s sordid tales of dreams dashed and dreams achieved. It was a two-day immersive story. People used to call it the Star Wars Hotel, but it’s not a hotel. It’s basically a spaceship cruise, but you’re not in space, you’re in Orlando. You’re in a cement building. Once you stepped inside it, it was incredible. They had 48 hours of original footage of space going by you—nothing repeated, nothing looped—and it connected with the story. It was really cool.
But Star Wars makes people nuts because people care. I love that about it. I love working on something that people care deeply about. But intellectual property that has that much weight attached to it is really hard when your expertise is play and generosity. It’s a fascinating puzzle of, what edges can I push on and where can I let the guest take the lead? Where can I let the participant take the lead versus the actor that has all the rehearsal and the training? It was incredibly stressful. I’m really proud of the work we did. I also feel lucky because I worked on all the stuff that was just human-to-human interaction. So, it would be like, “Chewbacca does some shenanigans from one part of the ship to the other.” I’m like, “Give it to me! Yes, please!” [I wanted] things that involved shenanigans and sharing real human moments together.
Given the improvisational, interactive nature of the things that you do, I would imagine that things could go horribly awry, especially if you have people who are coming in who don’t quite know what it is that they’re getting themselves into. So when you’re planning a piece like Escape from Godot, do you take that into consideration as you’re developing it?
When I’m designing something that allows for unscripted moments, we try to think about many kinds of participants, so everyone has the ability to have a hero moment. Everything is opt-in. We never throw the spotlight on a person. We don’t usually say, “Can we get a suggestion from the audience?” It’s not that direct. It’s these gentle invitations that are designed in an order of what might feel risky to someone that might be a little shy.
In Escape from Godot, for example, you could literally sit there and do nothing for the whole show and only do one thing at the very end and have a totally satisfying experience. That rarely happens, but it is available to you. There’s only eight people at a time in the whole theater because we want it to feel like that show that you go to that you can’t leave because it’s very obvious that you left. It feels intimate enough [where] you don’t know people before you get there, but 15 minutes in, you’re all in it, so the chances of participating are higher.
Who are your influences? Who or what do you turn to for inspiration?
I think a big turning point at Center Theatre Group was working with Burglars of Hamm on The Behavior of Broadus because they were the first folks that I was like, “Oh, experimental theater can be hilarious and mischievous.” I thought we all had to wear black turtlenecks and do spoken word. I didn’t realize you could be extremely experimental and absolutely wackadoodle. And so they were a huge moment of realizing I didn’t have to split myself in half, that it wasn’t Chekhov by day and improv by night. There was a way to synthesize all of these parts of my brain so that I could make people feel things and think things in the style that I speak in the world, which is funny and irreverent, but not frivolous. There is an artist named Risa Puno out of New York who created The Privilege of Escape, which was an escape room about white privilege. She’s a sculptor and conceptual artist, just an incredible person. Anyone that is using mischief and has a twinkle in the eye of their artistic practice while they are doing their art [inspires me]. And when I’m feeling low, I try to do things that have nothing to do with theater directly.
When you think back on your career so far, what are some projects or moments that stand out?
I still use the tools that I learned doing an unhealthy amount of improv shows in my directing all the time. So I can’t not honor that part of my life. I feel like ComedySportz and improv was my boot camp; Center Theatre Group was my grad school. Obviously Escape from Godot was the moment where it synthesized into a more compact path. And then last year, doing The Apple Avenue Detective Agency, which was a playable kid detective memoir about my own experiences as a childhood detective with my friends—I still can’t talk about it without crying—was really special, because it was about, at its core, my guiding principle, which is just because it’s pretend, doesn’t mean it’s not important. It came at such a tough time in my life, and I’m really proud of it.
Are you guys working on anything now?
We made a zine called Infinite Right Answers. It’s an interactive zine, so it’s part workbook. It has things like photocopied CVS receipts where we had ideas, but also inspiring things about confidence and generosity and how to be good creatives to each other. It’s intended to be the answers to the questions people always ask us about our process. We don’t have time to write a book, because we’re sandwich generation and we are making art, so we were like, “Well, we could make a zine...” So we did.
Is there anything you haven’t done yet that you’d like to attempt?
Pay off my credit cards.
I meant realistically, Andy. Come on.
Oh, okay, okay, okay. I’m always excited about the next thing we’re doing. I love the work I do with theme parks. I love the work with museums. But the work that we’re doing with Mister & Mischief is kind of like having an indie band. I love it so much, and the next album we’re working on is always my favorite album. That feels like the closest analogy.
It’s a tough time to be a creative right now, especially with AI taking over so many creative roles. What would you say to someone who wants to eventually work in theater?
I wish you well. [Laughs] No, we had our first intern this summer, and he was struggling with these questions of technology and theater. And I said I use what I learned in that education constantly. When I am working with Disney, when I am working with my husband at the dining room table, when I am parenting my child, when I am parenting my parent, I use what I learned through theater school and working in the theater community every day, so I don’t regret it.
I have a lot of friends that are really impacted by the AI of it all, and I do feel very safe, because literally, it cannot do what I do. I feel very protected, because my entire career is driven by human connection, and I do feel there is power in that. I feel like theater is going to have its own special spot, because there could be AI integration, there could be tech, there could be all sorts of stuff, but in the end, when the apocalypse happens, we can still be together making art. I feel like we get to be cockroaches in that way. And that is bleak as hell, but also kind of hopeful.
To learn more about Andy Crocker, visit her website.
To learn more about Mister & Mischief, click here.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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