Theater Without Actors

My feet are bare and so are my companions’. We are walking over cool deep-pile carpet and what feels like rough forest floor as we travel through Viola’s Room, an immersive experience created by London’s Punchdrunk collective, which recently wrapped up a five-month run at Manhattan’s arts complex The Shed. We are a group of six. We walk through corridors accompanied by the gloriously round vowels of actor Helena Bonham Carter, who speaks into each of our noise-canceling headphones. Her voice tells an odd fairy tale. We enter and exit a series of rooms. Beautiful rooms . . . empty rooms. This “immersive theater” experience features no actors at all.