‘There’s no wrong way to play’: Immersive theater event at Quonk offers unique fantasy experience

Victor E. Everwin knew he might die at the Dark Magic School reunion — and he welcomed it. Fourteen years ago, he’d entered a time loop fueled by a “Dark Pact,” and only winning the “Most Nefarious” superlative could break the cycle.

On a cold December night at a brick-lined tavern in Paradise Valley, Everwin bided his time, having the exact same conversations he’d had there literally countless times before.

“I’ve conquered worlds,” Everwin said. “I’ve saved the world. I’ve found love.”

The only thing standing between him and eternal rest was his main opponent: a chicken. Fortunately, no lives were actually at stake. Everwin was a character portrayed by Holyoke actor and theater teacher Tom Roché during an immersive theater event at Quonk, a Northampton venue redefining performance art at 122 Main St.

Learning to play

Quonk, which is both the name of the company and the venue itself, is the brainchild of Jonathan “Jon” Pedigo, the company’s founder and owner, who also co-owns the bar and music venue Haze in Northampton.

Pedigo grew up south of Chicago, where some of his most treasured childhood memories involved playing make-believe with his friend Steven Clark, who has since passed away. The pair loved creating fantastical worlds in their basements, then showing those worlds to their families.

“It was always about bringing other people in,” Pedigo said.

As a kid, Pedigo said he learned that Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy weren’t real from TV programs, but he appreciated the efforts his parents made to act as if they were and help him believe in the fantasy.

“They thought I was being tricked into thinking that they were real, but I knew the whole time, and I realized what I really loved about that, ultimately, was the grand gesture of it all — the grand gesture of dressing up and putting on an experience for somebody,” he said. “And that, to me, is what immersive theater is. It’s putting on an experience where you’re including someone else in it.”

In high school, Pedigo made short comedy videos through his school’s broadcasting club, but he wasn’t involved in theater and didn’t see performance as a viable career path for himself. As a student at Hampshire College, he studied software engineering. His Division III graduation project involved a series of websites that could only be accessed at the college. He said he was “obsessed with things that are unscalable, essentially” — by creating something site-specific, he was making “something special that just can’t be touched by capitalism.”

Beyond his education, Pedigo’s engagement with immersive theater at the college and through trips to New York City proved transformative. He found that active participation in these productions disrupted his rigid work routine and restored a sense of creative play, and the exposure opened up the possibility of a viable career in immersive performance.

“Immersive theater transformed me and made me realize that I do want to play,” he said.

‘Bar of Dreams’

Pedigo graduated in 2015 and moved to New York City, where he worked in an office and instructed aspiring developers at a software engineering bootcamp. In 2017, he moved back to Northampton and launched his inaugural immersive production, “Bar of Dreams.”

“I asked my roommate [Alex Leff], ‘Can I do a show in our apartment?’ He said no, so I said, ‘I’m going to do it in my bedroom,’” Pedigo said. Leff eventually changed his mind and joined the show.

The original show involved a sleeping man who needed the audience’s help to wake up so that he could open a bar.

“We had no idea what we were doing. We were changing the plot every weekend,” Pedigo said.

Pedigo and Leff moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 2018, bringing “Bar of Dreams” with them and further revised its plot after they’d moved. For a period, Pedigo sustained himself on savings before securing a new software development position.

By late 2023, a desire for community prompted his return to the Valley. In April 2024, Pedigo found an ideal fit at the former Oh My Sensuality Shop, located at 122 Main St., under the Pinocchio Pizza awning, through the door on the left. 

“I walked in and thought, ‘This is amazing … it’s time to do this,’” he recalled.

After initially hosting DJ nights and a movie screening, Pedigo has since produced nine other immersive events besides the Medieval Fantasy Tavern. While he balanced software work to fund the venue’s start, Quonk is now his full-time occupation.

What is ‘Quonk?’

The name Quonk is as eclectic as its origin. While Merriam-Webster defines it as a disruptive broadcasting noise, founder Jon Pedigo views it as a “mini fun quest” — a subconscious portmanteau of “quack,” “honk,” and a nickname for his favorite protein chips.

In any case, Pedigo said, “Like getting this venue, it just felt right.”

Though it utilizes theater, Pedigo explained that he sees Quonk as a company of “transformative experiences and experience design,” he said. Every show features central narratives and character backstories, but there are no rehearsals — only “playtests.” The entire modus operandi is choose-your-own-adventure.

“There’s no wrong way to play,” he said. “The world needs more play — playing more and getting together more and getting off of our screens. I like screens; I’m a software guy, I like games, but I want to see a journey from screens to being in person being really an exciting one for people.”

Building an event

To bring the college reunion at the Medieval Fantasy Tavern to life — much like any college reunion, perhaps, but with conversations about dragons and curses thrown in the mix — the Quonk team had to audition performers. Six of them, a group largely made of self-described nerds and theater people, gathered at Quonk the Monday night prior to the event to showcase their improv skills.

Pedigo was joined in person by team members Jake Gibson and Erin Fitzgerald; a few others joined via a video call. Everyone who’s part of the cast at a Quonk event is paid, but Gibson is the only member of the leadership team who is paid for his monthly work; everyone else is a volunteer.

Unlike a typical theater audition, this one had no sides to read or songs to belt — instead, the team wanted to see how well each actor could give and receive information from someone else.

In improv, this is referred to as “yes, and,” a principle that involves continuing and building onto what another performer says to you to continue the scene. If, for example, someone says, “Hey, I remember you from potions class!” the other person might reply, “Yes, and you once spilled a love potion on my hat!”

Of course, Quonk has its guardrails. “Yes-anding” everything could mean, for example, that someone could come to the Tavern and declare they were from the future, and then derail the medieval fantasy. Pedigo said it’s not a common problem, in part because the audience demographic naturally self-selects for people who want a fantasy experience and because the events are designed to keep the story’s universe intact.

“Ninety-nine percent of the time, if you establish core facts very early and very clearly, people … will take them with them throughout the night and treat them as real, as long as they’re continually reinforced by every performer,” he said.

During auditions, actors, who performed under the premise that they hadn’t seen each other in a long time, improvised scenes ranging from a man hiding that he was a werewolf to a summoner berating another character for bringing a “low-quality goat” to the Devil’s Sacrament.

Ezra Wilde, a western Mass. resident who later joined the cast as a character named “Olly,” shared that they felt play was an opportunity to learn and develop as a person.

“I think that play is such a valuable part of the human experience and that, for some reason, our society hammers this idea into us that we’re supposed to outgrow it, and I think that that’s silly and very bad for mental health,” Wilde said.

A dark party

At the Medieval Fantasy Tavern on the evening of Saturday, Dec. 6, the reunion crowd swelled to nearly 50. Marilena Vulpes (played by Fitzgerald), a vampiric redhead with dark lipstick and a Bela Lugosi-inspired accent, and her fiancé Dionisie “Dio” Georgescu (Fitzgerald’s real-life boyfriend, Ray Tannheimer, who is also a member of the Quonk leadership team) were poised to take the stage.

The duo announced the evening’s superlatives contest and gave instructions on how to vote using color-coded stars. To cast a ballot for the “Most Nefarious,” for example, participants placed a red star sticker on their chosen candidate’s name tag.

As the votes began to be tallied, the chicken named “AI” — a stuffed chicken in the real world, but a real one in the show’s universe — nearly swept “Most Nefarious” with eight red stars. AI was bested, however, by Rodney, who had collected 22 red stars by nefarious means. In fact, Rodney was the school’s headmaster in disguise. He allowed the students to bargain to renegotiate their Dark Pacts, with Sammy Sacrificed (played by Pedigo) as his own lawyer — his literal “devil’s advocate.”

Once the contest had wrapped and the crowd transitioned into a dance party, Everwin walked over to the stage and sat down. He hadn’t won the award, so he was still stuck in a time loop. He’d had a good night anyway.

“I had my reasons for coming here, but this day will always hold a special place in my heart,” he said. “In a way, it is kind of like an ending, y’know? Tomorrow, I’m gonna watch the movie again, I’m gonna play the song again, but maybe what I should learn from this is, even though I have to repeat this life over and over and over again, a song on repeat still has a beginning and end, even if you have to listen to it over and over and over again.”

For more information about Quonk, visit quonkhampton.com.

Beyond the fly on the wall: Immersive reporting at Quonk’s Medieval Fantasy Tavern

For one night, I had to abandon not only my usual journalistic approach, but also my name.

Rather than covering the Medieval Fantasy Tavern the way I normally cover theater — being a “fly on the wall,” reading the script in advance, and, if possible, watching a dress rehearsal, for instance — I had to be part of it myself.

All of the Quonk team members knew in advance that I’d be there with the Gazette’s photographer, Daniel “DJ” Jacobi II. He and I also spoke to Pedigo a few days before the show (after I’d already interviewed Pedigo, watched the auditions, and interviewed several of the actors earlier that week) to figure out how we’d play into this. We agreed that DJ could be a fly on the wall, but I’d be a character with a brief backstory: I had been a reporter for the school newspaper, and I was doing a follow-up story about the reunion.

In the onboarding process, all participants were told that when we were admitted to the school, we’d had to make a “Dark Pact,” a sacrifice to the Dark Headmaster. I chose something low-stakes that wouldn’t impede my reporting: the spelling (but not pronunciation) of my name, which became “Chxrölhynne.” I didn’t dress up in Ren Faire-y garb – mostly because I don’t own any — but I wore a flowery dress from my work wardrobe and borrowed a simple cloak from Quonk’s costume collection.

Throughout the night, I wandered around, interacting with and interviewing performers and attendees. I always had my reporter’s notebook, pen, and phone (for recording audio) with me, clearly visible and often in use. If I wanted to talk to someone I didn’t already know, I’d hold out my Gazette business card and say that they might remember me from school as a reporter for the student newspaper and that I was now writing an article about our reunion, and so on. They got it.

Some people only gave me their character names, not their real names, which was fine. I also didn’t record every conversation. That’s not what my character would have done, after all. I, Carolyn, was there for a story, but Chxrölhynne was there for a story and to connect with friends she hadn’t seen in a while. Sometimes, it’s just nice to grab some mead, pull up a chair, and listen to your old classmate tell you about their plans to literally destroy the world.