A Grown-Up’s Guide to Flying

Abstract

A Grown-Up’s Guide to Flying is one of three standalone escape room-inspired experiences featured in Outside the March’s 2019 production of The Tape Escape. Set in a completely immersive, period-perfect 1990s’ video rental store in the former Annex location of Toronto’s iconic Queen Video, the piece is experienced through a series of narrative escape room-style puzzles hidden among 5,000-plus VHS rentals. The audience follows Kelly as he plans a birthday treasure hunt for his movie-loving younger sister, all while navigating how we experience movies—and each other—when our sighted experience changes. The story was designed to be experienced by a group of up to four people at a time and ran approximately forty-five minutes. It began, as each of the “rental experiences” in The Tape Escape did, with the group being handed a VHS tape with a sticker on it that read “Watch Me.” A video store staff member would then guide the group to one of the store’s “TV-VCR viewing stations” where the group could pop in the tape and watch what, in this case, appeared to be a birthday video message. This article includes production stills and a script excerpt written by creators Vanessa Smythe, Mitchell Cushman, and Nick Bottomley with consultation from Blindness scholar and artist Devon Healey.