The Crying Room: Exhumed

Created by Marcus McKenzie in affiliation with Club Greg International

Commissioned by The Substation, presented February 2024

AVAILABLE FOR TOURING 2025/2026

Marcus Ian McKenzie - Lead Artist / Performer
Anna Nalpantidis - Creative Producer / Dramaturg
Romanie Harper - Set / Costume Designer
Richard Vabre - Lighting Designer
Derrick Duan - Cybernetics and Oracle Engineer
Jacinta Anderson - Production Manager / Technical Stage Manager
Maria Moles - Musician
Ciaran Frame - Technical Consultant (SensiLab)
Performers – William Strom, Daniel Szesiong-Todd and Jacob Abela

“One of the most complex unpackings of grief and loss that I’ve ever seen.”
- Anador Walsh, Performance Review

“McKenzie demands attention, here and in the future.”
- John Bailey, RealTime (on Hyperspirit)

“Glitched out, hilarious, touching, terrifying… just absolutely fucking mind blowing.”
- Cara Donnelly, Across The Aisle (on Subliminal Massage)

“...a cluster-fucked grief spiral”
- Chelsea Hopper, Memo Review (on The Crying Room)

A crying room is a small, soundproof chamber at the back of a theatre auditorium where you can experience an event via one-way glass and live audio feed. As the name suggests, it’s a place you can go if you are crying so as not to disturb the audience. But what if a crying room was actually a site dedicated to emotional extraction? A place not to conceal tears, but to invoke them?

The Crying Room: Exhumed conjures a world of hyperspiritualists, clairvoyeurs, psychobabble and cybergrief. Prophecies will be scried and spectres will be divined - all for a nominal fee. But some fortunes ought to remain untold, and even the dead are buried with their mobile phones.

In this deeply personal and form-bending adaptation of his award-winning online work The Crying Room, Marcus Ian McKenzie scours infinite planes in search of his lost brother.

“An ingenious remount... This is a sprawling solo performance reminiscent - in its use of technology and its focus on memory - of the work of New York’s experimental Wooster Group. The show has no real form: it’s just one coup de theatre moment after another.”
- Andrew Furhmann, The Age

“The finale of The Crying Room: Exhumed is intense and heartbreaking with a rawness and genuine vulnerability that catches you off guard and sits with you for quite some time after the show has concluded. Shows like this site-specific work at The Substation don’t come around often and not only is The Crying Room: Exhumed a stunning work on time, trauma and memories but it also solidifies McKenzie's exceptional skills and knowledge around language, performance and experimental theatre.”
- Myron My, My Melbourne Arts

“Marcus McKenzie is one of this country’s cleverest brains, most tender hearts, and most audacious artists. This work is just delicious - turning on a knife’s edge between sublime beauty and brutal irony. Grief. Ritual. Digital haunting. And I’ve never see The Substation used to its full potential like this.”
- Sarah Walker, Independent Artist on The Crying Room: Exhumed

life indeed is a
precious gift
but i often think
it seems to send the wrong man
- Ren Hang

Photography: Damien Raggatt