In ‘After the End,’ The Catamounts’ immersive production inventively explores the story of a lost novel

Having “real” characters get sucked into another world and a different story is the stuff of many a fantasy or sci-fi film. But how do you do something like that in a live performance while having audience members tag along?

Many might say it can’t be done, but it’s exactly the kind of challenge that’s bread-and-butter for The Catamounts — the Boulder-based immersive theatre company.

In After the End, the whimsical conceit from writer Luke Sorge is based around a long-lost Colorado novel titled Stranded in Snowy Hill. It was written by the grandmother of Lena (Min Kyung [Cecillia] Kim), and when she receives a mysterious library catalog card pointing to its possible location in a “Library of the Lost,” she sets out to find it.

What better place to start than in the funky Anythink Library in Thornton?

We last saw the effervescent Kim in The Cats’ spring production of Impossible Things. Here, she breezed into a room next to the magazines and immediately engaged our small audience and enlisted us in her quest.

As she did in Impossible Things playing a whack-a-doodle Ugly Duckling, Kim was able to quickly charm the audience into trusting her to do … whatever. The energy here is more, shall we say, library appropriate. We filed out the door through the kids’ room at the library armed only with the catalog card and the key that came with it.

A highly detailed experience

Directed by Catamounts Artistic Director Amanda Berg-Wilson with Leah Cardenas as assistant director, After the End is an enjoyable, ethereal micro-journey that poses some intriguing questions. Some are about life itself, while others ponder the meaning of stories that may have outlived their relevance.

The production team — led by Production Designer Matthew Schlief and Production Manager Lara Maerz — outdid itself with a series of small, detailed sets that we rambled through in support of Lena’s quest.

There’s that Secret Library, a classroom, a general store, a train, a town hall. Props Designer Linda Lea populated it all with period-appropriate gee-gaws and trappings (I think we’re in the 1800s somewhere) while Sound Designer Max Silverman adds a variety of well-timed creepy noises, blizzard sounds and more to set the mood.

As we got deeper into the story, the more we felt the Through the Looking Glass vibe that we were no longer observing; we were in it. As I sat at an old-timey classroom desk, a no-nonsense schoolmarm named Aunt Kit (McPherson Horle) addressed me by the name of the future mayor of Snowy Hill. Gray John, a bashful train porter (Fabian Vasquez), served us tea and cookies as we remained in the car stranded in a blizzard.

Meanwhile, Lena had us take turns reading from the copy of the novel we’d found in the Secret Library. She’s as confused as us until the dawning realization that a transmogrification has taken place, and we’d best buckle up.

Those forgotten words

Where we ultimately end up has something to do with that book in the shelf that no one has read in years; that book no one will likely ever read again. What might have happened next? In today’s world, fan fiction writers might take up the torch, but in the bailiwick of After the End, there’s a specific process led by adjudicators who determine if a novel is ready to be “retired” — that is, disappeared from this world.

The adjudicator in this story is played by the imposing, dark-suited form of Don Randle (also the mayor). If Lena is the perky daisy looking for something good, he’s the Grim Reaper of fiction determined to cleanse the world of forgotten tales.

It’s a lot to cram into an experience that’s only an hour long (there’s even a love story mixed in) but the result is a charming if occasionally awkward jaunt to a nether world that’s part old-time Colorado lore paired with an artistic exploration that jogs the memory of all those stories we’ve read — and forgotten.