Netflix is not just a streaming video platform anymore. It is now yet another example of immersive theater. There are new “Netflix Houses” – in Philadelphia, Dallas, and soon in Las Vegas — where theatergoers participate in person in theatrical re-creations of Netflix series, including “Bridgerton” and “Stranger Things.”

It is one of the surprising examples in “The Future of Storytelling: How Immersive Experiences Are Transforming Our World” (Artisan, 320 pages) a book by Charles Melcher that overwhelms us with the innovations in storytelling that are already out there. Even the dust jacket is innovative and overwhelming: There are twelve different cover designs to choose from (including the four above.)

Melcher, the CEO of Melcher Media (a book packager and multimedia producer), devotes eight pages in his new book to the Future of Storytelling Summit, which he founded in 2012 at Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island, and expanded into the Future of Storytelling Festival, aka #FostFest, which ran annually through 2019.

“I was craving a new type of storytelling, one that is participatory, multisensory, interactive and highly personal,” he explains in the book’s introduction. ”I have come to call them living stories.”

  I attended the first #FostFest in 2016 – mesmerized by such exhibitions as “Riot,” an interactive video in which I (actually, my avatar) got pummeled to the ground by an irate cop because I had failed to mollify him; “Famous Deaths,” where I experienced the deaths of JFK and Whitney Houston through sounds and smells alone; a hologram of  Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter who answered my questions about his experiences as if he were there in the flesh, but he wasn’t there. So much of what I saw was impressive cutting-edge technology but without any actual, live human beings. When I went again to the festival the following year, I had one question in mind: Will the future of storytelling include what we now consider theater? 

Many of the fifty or so examples of “living stories” in the new book (such as Netflix House) suggest that the answer is definitely yes, but that my question is outdated: Theater is an inextricable part of the synergy of living stories. Forgive the lingo. The vocabulary for describing the current evolution in storytelling is itself evolving, as Melcher’s book demonstrates, not always elegantly: He has coined the word “actience” for those people who “experience” living stories, because “audience” is too passive.

In “The Future of Storytelling,” Melcher seems to be engaging in the arts and entertainment version of the quest for the Theory of Everything, taking in video games, art installations, escape rooms, interactive museums, theme parks, sports venues, “immersive hotels,” VR,AR, XR (that’s Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality), you name it – and yes theater. (Several examples featured in the book are familiar to New York theatergoers, such as Punchdrunk, the creators of “Sleep No More,” and Third Rail Projects, the creators of “Then She Fell“; Lin-Manuel Miranda makes an appearance in a photograph at FoST performing with Freestyle Love Supreme.)  Melcher makes no effort to consider these platforms/media/venues/art forms separately. Instead, the examples, regardless of form, are grouped into six categories, each category getting its own chapter, and each of the six what Melcher considers one of the essential characteristics of living stories. 

The future of storytelling, he tells us in Chapter 1, is “agentic.” In such stories, we the people formerly known as the audience have agency to affect the trajectory of the story.

He says in Chapter 2 that living stories are “immersive.” We are physically and emotionally part of the story.

 Chapter 3: “embodied.” All our senses are involved, not just sight and sound.

Chapter 4: “responsive.” The story takes into account each individual’s personal preferences and emotions – assessed through increasingly sophisticated technology, especially Artificial Intelligence – making the experience “unique and intimate” )

Chapter 5: “social.” “Living stories don’t just entertain; they build trust, empathy and a sense of belonging…”

Chapter 6: “transformative.” Living stories can change an individual’s perspective and perhaps the world.

Each chapter offers six to nine examples, all of them diligently described and accompanied with gorgeous, often full-page photographs.

I don’t find Melcher’s effort at classification all that useful; the examples don’t always fit neatly, or exclusively, into the categories to which they are assigned. It was unclear to me, for example, why Punchdrunk is in the “agentic,” and not the “immersive” chapter.

The strength of Melcher’s book is not in its effort to sort through and make conclusions about what’s happening — it may be too soon to do that — but in its introduction to the breadth and variety of innovative projects, many of which are not widely known; some of which are paradoxically considered off-beat even as they have inarguably achieved mainstream success. “Sleep No More,” which began in London in 2003 and spread to Boston, Shanghai, and New York (where it closed at the beginning of 2025 after a 14-year run) “has had more than 5,000 performances for 2 million fans; and has grossed upwards of $240 million globally.”

In something of a companion book, “Acting the Part: Audience Participation in Performance,” (University of Michigan Press, 266 pages), author E.M. Hunter explains how she produced Shakespeare’s “Henry V” in an abandoned 20-acre industrial site in Birmingham, Alabama that had been turned into a public attraction but was still in a dilapidated state. The audience was so inspired that, unbidden, they joined the professional actors in the charge of the English army against the French. Hunter’s book, she writes, is her effort to try to understand what it was about the production that got the audience to engage so fully. She devotes a chapter each to Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, the new Globe playhouse in London, social virtual reality and augmented reality.

She discovered that four conditions in combination are particularly effective in encouraging audience participation – “A site with historical resonance” (such as the Great Wall of China, a 9/11 memorial, or the new Globe); “the presence of a canonical source” (for example, Macbeth, which is the story adapted for Sleep No More);  a performance space that is immersive (by which she means a space in which the theatergoers are not separated from the performers, such as they would be in a theater with a proscenium stage); and “a production-specific economy” (I don’t quite get why “economy” is the right word here, but she means that audience members are in some way rewarded for performing specific tasks that producers want them to do depending on the show; for example, in Sleep No More, “attendees are prodded to open drawers, rifle through books, and stake out performers, all in service of finding clues to the grand narrative the production purports to have.”)