Jeff Grygny: It has to do with the dynamics of a secret society and the possibility of joining one and achieving entry into the status of one of the illuminated.

TMA: When you say "secret society," people will think of the Rosicrucians, Hermetics, maybe the Golden Dawn I understand that Aleister Crowley is one of the characters?

JG: That's right. We have representatives of the Order of the Golden Dawn and the Theosophical Society and the Dada Movement. Gurdjieff is represented, too; his Society for the Harmonious Development of Man. They're all part of our secret society. This is a fictional society that could be considered to be the granddaddy of them all.

TMA: This isn't to say that these luminaries actually did participate in a society together, is it?

A Ph.D. in Humanities and a teaching position at Columbia College Chicago add to the mystique of playwright and artistic director of The Mystery Caravan, a new performance group ... which is presenting an audience-interactive metaphysical comedy in Chicago.

JG: No, this is fictional. We're making up this possibility. The show takes place in the present time, so when the audience comes in, the actors are themselves. We are playing modern-day shamans who form a seance to call in the spirits of these figures from the turn of the century. The Mystery Caravan is this group of people in the present day who become the earthly channel of these nineteenth century people who, because they've transcended the physical plane now exist on another level, an astral level, say. From time to time they manifest in obscure little places like the theatre where we're performing in order to fulfill their mission which is for the evolution of the human race at this particular very crucial time in our history.

TMA: And audience members are drawn into it?

JG: That's right.

TMA: How does that occur?

JG: We do it in a very classy way. It's essential to the play that these figures are from the nineteenth century and from Europe. We could talk a lot about what that means because the elegance and dignity and the decorum and the courtesy that we conduct our ceremony in, I think, is not peripheral to what the secret society is about but it is actually essential. We draw them in by being respectful and by using the dignity and the manners of the old world which is actually part of a traditional mode of human behavior that all cultures have but, I feel, is really lacking in our current American society.

TMA: How do you pick the audience members that you bring in?

JG: It's done very organically. The actors choose their own people so they're in character, they've contacted the spirits of the characters they're playing, and it's self-organizing. It's an example of Chaos Theory in action because we have independent intelligences operating according to a plan which [you might say is] in the structure of a game. The whole play is really a game but the thing is, the audience doesn't know what the rules of the game are. The performers know.

TMA: Sounds like it would be a lot of fun to be one of the audience members drawn into it.

JG: When we did the show in Dallas, the audience had a lot of fun. They were uplifted by the whole thing, too, just because of the elegance.

TMA: How big an audience might you have?

JG: I think we'll have, say, 75 people, 100 if they're really breaking down the doors. But I don't want it to be much more than that. We have fourteen actors as well as a few support people who are also in costume.

TMA: How many of those characters come up from the audience?

JG: They all can! They're all working at the same time. We do these little performance routines, sketches that are based on the writings of these turn of the century mystics. Between acts is where we mingle freely with the audience and invite them to have a little snack and a glass of wine and we chat with them and see what develops. It's great fun.

It's really based on my experiences with Tibetan Buddhism, bizarrely enough. That's where I got the idea for doing the show because in Tibet, they have a hierarchy of stages of spiritual development. Being an American, you know, we live in a very un-hierarchical society so to go into a situation where it's very normal for some people to know the secrets and other people to be the initiates, the seekers, creates a very unusual social dynamic. There's the fascination with the dynamic that actually led me to focus in on secret societies as the Western equivalent of that order.

TMA: I was glad to find that you weren't out to make fun of these things.

JG: We have fun with these people. We do not mock them. Well, you know, you have Swami Beyondananda in The Monthly Aspectarian who says that a sense of humor is really one of the most important parts of enlightenment. Lightening up is really important! It think people who are really interested in the future evolution of mankind are prone to take themselves very seriously, and these people in the nineteenth century were no exception. They knew exactly what they were doing. They knew that they had some understanding of where the human race needed to go. At the same time, they were all very human people and I think that creates some irony and we do have fun with that from time to time.

TMA: Is there a mystery in the play that needs to be unraveled?

JG: The mystery is the secret of life. That's the mystery of the play, really. In this way, the Edwardian Mysteries are just like the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece where for thousands of years people could go who wanted to find the answers to life's mysteries. They would see performances, they witnessed symbols, they'd hear sounds and see visions that would reveal the truth to them. Well, it's the same thing with our play. We do deliver on that. The attentive audience members will discover the secret of life. I should say, re-discover it, because everybody knows what it is already.

I think it's interesting that we're doing this play around the turn of the millennium and are using characters from the turn of the century. It was a critical time in human history and we're living in a critical time in human history again.

I'm trying to do performance that relates to higher consciousness without being too heavy-handed about it. I think in general, the performing arts is such a powerful means of communication and that to try to make performance that happens in real time with people sitting in the same room together is really an important project. We're giving it our best shot!

Jeff Grygny has a Ph.D. in humanities and has taught at Columbia College, Chicago. The Edwardian Mysteries will be staged September 11-October 18 at The Performance Loft.