Peale Museum to host H.T. Darling’s Incredible Musaeum

BALTIMORE – Submersive Productions, the Baltimore theater company that presented award-winning The Mesmeric Revelations! of Edgar Allan Poe at the Maryland Historical Society in 2015, announces it will once again partner with a historic Baltimore building to present an immersive theater experience. The Peale Museum will be the site of Submersive’s new science-fiction theater experience, H.T. Darling’s Incredible Musaeum Presents: The Treasures of New Galapagos, Astonishing Acquisitions from the Perisphere.

Musaeum will have performances April 1 to 30, 2017, Thursdays through Sundays at The Peale Museum at 225 Holliday St. in Baltimore.

H.T. Darling is a high-society explorer who has just returned from an expedition to an area of outer space, “The Perisphere,” and a planet he calls New Galapagos. Darling will share his curious discoveries at The Musaeum, where each audience member choses their own path through the evening’s strange events.

The creative team includes co-directors Susan Stroupe, Lisi Stoessel and Glenn Ricci, who are working with visual artists, puppet makers, a museum display carpenter and a taxidermist, among others. Submersive Artistic Directors Ricci and Ursula Marcum are producers of Musaeum.

“As both a set designer and puppeteer, I’m interested in how an environment can be activated to become an important character within a narrative,” says Stoessel, who originated the concept of the new show. “In the case of Musaeum, our environment will become an entire second cast.”

The Peale Museum, built in 1814, served a variety of functions, from City Hall to a public school, and, after other incarnations, back to a municipal museum before being shuttered in 1997. It recently has been opened to the public for special events on occasion.

“The Peale family and their contribution to the establishment of American museum culture was a fascinating topic in my Museum Studies graduate program,” says Submersive Productions Co-Artistic Director Ursula Marcum. “We are thrilled to be able to create new work in this building in a way that embodies its original purpose. This is about as ‘site-specific’ as a production can get.”

Musaeum is made possible with support from the Baltimore City Department of General Services, and a generous grant to The Peale Center from the PNC Foundation. Tickets go on sale in January.

Submersive launched an Indiegogo campaign Nov. 15, in conjunction with Fractured Atlas, to raise the remaining funds for Musaeum. For more information about the campaign, visit https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/h-t-darling-s-incredible-musaeum-presents/x/659887#

H.T. Darling’s Incredible Musaeum (Campaign Appeal) from Submersive Productions on Vimeo.