“Immersive theater is here to stay. And The Tower is defining why. Presented by AntiMatter at HERE Arts Center, this sensory adventure with the Donner Party is everything immersive experience should be. Director Philip Gates and his extraordinary team transformed the space into a hauntingly magical Donner Lake where the past and present collide. Young artists who want to tackle the immersive world will need to strive to reach the glory of this production.”

“The TOWER is an amazing collaborative production where each of its parts are as strong as the next. It’s inventive and expertly written, directed and acted, with eye-popping props (Dan Daly, Stephanie Cox-Williams) and wonderfully cohesive set (Pieyi Wong), lighting (Alana Jacoby), sound (Sam Kusnetz) and costumes (Summer Lee Jack). It perfectly reflects the Sublet Series@Here vision of offering productions that are “Fresh, Adventurous and Unexpected.””

“The show is an ambitious, sensational and consistently surprising piece of immersive theater. . . It’s a heady, complex brew, but there are intimate passages that arrestingly portray the minutia of daily life under the harshest of conditions. Each and every member of the terrific ten-person cast — garbed in Summer Lee Jack’s period-evoking costumes — captures both the look and essence of hardy people unmoored by nature and their own inclinations.”

“What’s so smart about The Tower is that the psychedelia that the audience experiences can be read as a direct reference to the insanity that the characters experience, and the crazy, outlandish numbers where, for instance, a bunch of hood-masked pioneers take the stage and cradle imaginary babies, wash imaginary laundry, and itch feverishly to the beat of electronic dance music, are both entertaining and evocative of the mentality of a starvation-crazed pioneer.”