David Byrne's “Theater of the Mind” and the Science Behind It

A man with gray hair wearing a blue suit jacket stands against a blue brick wall, looking at the camera with his hand partially covering his mouth.

David Byrne/Photo: Goodman Theatre

I don’t expect to be embarrassed at the press conference for David Byrne’s “Theater of the Mind,” an immersive production that premieres this March as part of the Goodman Theatre’s hundredth-anniversary season. But that emotion suits Byrne’s goal, which is to upend what we believe about reality and ourselves.

The polymath artist and former Talking Heads front man has reporters close their eyes to listen to a sequence of musical tones. If the sequence goes up, we are to put our hands on our heads. If it goes down, we are to put our hands on our hearts.

I am sitting next to Mark Caro, a friend and fellow journalist. When I open my eyes, I find to my surprise that Caro has his hand on his head, while I have mine on my heart. I feel panicky. I play the piano! I’m a church cantor. I know about notes! Am I wrong?

Byrne explains that nobody is wrong—what he has demonstrated is called the tritone paradox, an auditory illusion. Some people hear notes go up and some hear them go down. Scientists think your response may be related to the speech patterns you heard growing up.

A woman with long dark hair and a slight smile stands outdoors wearing a light beige belted dress. The background is a blurred cityscape with buildings and soft sunlight.

Mala Gaonkar/Photo: Elizabeth Lippman

This is the kind of unsettling scientific mystery that captured the imagination of Byrne and writer Mala Gaonkar and led to the “Theater of the Mind,” which combines neuroscience experiments, art and storytelling. The show was a hit in Denver, where it premiered in August 2022 and played more than 2,700 performances. It will run in Chicago from March 11 to May 31, though Byrne hopes the project could become a permanent fixture as word gets around.

“It’s an immersive theater project that leads you to experience the unreliability of your senses and therefore your own memories and your identity, which sounds like a negative,” Byrne says. “But at the end of the show you realize that’s what allows us to change and evolve and become the people we are.”

A person in white clothing stands in a brightly lit, circular hallway filled with red light, facing slightly backward toward the camera, with illuminated lines on the floor leading to an open doorway.

Annie Barbour in “Theater of the Mind”/Photo: Matthew DeFeo.

Each seventy-five-minute production will take sixteen audience members through a succession of rooms at the Reid Murdoch Building at 325 North LaSalle, says director Andrew Scoville. An actor calling him or herself David will take the audience through actual neuroscience experiments while telling a story of a life from the end to the beginning. The story contains elements of Byrne’s own life, and the actor is dressed the way Byrne did in a photograph from when he was a toddler, though it’s not an autobiography.

Byrne says the project evolved over a decade.

“I was interested in neuroscience and how our brains make us who we are,” he says. In Stockholm, participants were offered an experience called “Being Barbie” that allowed participants the illusion of being embodied inside a doll. “I read about this and I thought, ooh, I’d love to experience that.” An attempt to bring the experience to New York City didn’t pan out, but Byrne realized that there were other experiments and experiences that involve your perception of reality.

“I talked to my friend Mala, and thought ‘How can we do this? Can this be some kind of presentation?’” After workshops involving different actors and different rooms, “A lightbulb went off,” Byrne says. “This has a story. It’s not a series of experiences. It’s a story of a life being told backwards.”

A man with a shaved head, mustache, and glasses wearing a black short-sleeve button-up shirt stands in front of a metallic, textured background. He has geometric tattoos visible on his arms.

Andrew Scoville/Photo: Goodman Theatre

Byrne says the trick was to find a balance between instruction about neuroscience and an emotionally engaging human tale, which took a lot of writing and rewriting. To realize the idea, Byrne and Gaonkar approached Andrew Scoville, a director originally from Elmhurst, who has experience with immersive theater.

“When David and Mala approached me, the ask was very clear,” Scoville says, “which was they wanted to move the experience of this neuroscience from a more clinical art installation experience into something that felt more like theater and was using storytelling to land the points of the implications of all this neuroscience.”

All of this sounds strange and unnerving—is this a theatrical production or an acid trip? I was curious about the science behind the show, and how it works on participants’ ideas about themselves. So soon after the press conference, I interviewed the two technical leads for “Theater of the Mind”—LeeAnn Rossi, the show’s technology producer, and Heidi Boisvert, an artist and scientist who is the show’s technology designer.

Rossi, who has run Byrne’s studio and produced his projects for more than a decade, has been there from the beginning of the “Theater of the Mind” project. She says Byrne’s experience in Sweden made him realize that the languages of science and art mirror each other.

His team visited scientists at universities in Sweden, Barcelona, London, New York and California, as well as reading research papers about how the brain works. Their research included phenomena like the tritone experiment, which shows how two things can be true at the same time. “That’s such an important concept to know, especially now, in the world in which we live,” Rossi says.

Part of what Byrne and Gaonkar studied is the science of proprioception—one’s perception and awareness of the position and movement of your body in space. “We have a lot of unconscious signals and patterns that we’re not often in touch with,” says Boisvert regarding our sense of being in a particular body.

It’s not a surprise that Byrne would be interested in the science of perception—his lyrics frequently deal with ideas about unreality and things not being what they seem. You can hear it in the questioning lyrics of a song like “Once in a Lifetime”: “You may ask yourself/Am I right or am I wrong?” and “This is not my beautiful house/This is not my beautiful wife.”

There’s a playfulness and jokiness in these lyrics, but also an urgency to grasp what’s real, and how our ideas and perceptions can change.

In Stockholm, Byrne was able to experience both being a doll and being a giant through use of both a virtual reality headset and sensory phenomenon that fooled the subject into thinking his body was different than it was, Rossi explains. In other words, the “doll” experiment messes with a subject’s perception of embodiment.

Two women wearing virtual reality headsets sit in a cozy, vintage-style room with wooden walls, paintings, and warm lighting from standing lamps. Both appear relaxed and are holding controllers.

“Theater of the Mind”/Photo: Matthew DeFeo

In that experience, the subject sits in a chair, puts on a VR headset and sees another body in the same position. That second virtual body could be greatly enlarged or greatly reduced. It may be missing a leg, or have four legs, Rossi says. A pointer would touch the same spot on your leg and on the virtual reality leg, and the subject’s brain starts to react as if it is experiencing the world in that shape and size.

Something similar will be used with “Theater of the Mind” audiences, though not with the physical touches, which proved too complicated. There will instead be smells and the feeling of wind on the cheek, though Rossi and Boisvert don’t want to give too much away.

Rossi says that the experiences will not be “hokey,” in a circus-trick kind of way, but are both artistic and destabilizing.

“There are these things that really question the core of your beliefs, not in scary ways, but in ways that sort of open you up to other lived experience,” Rossi says.

In this context, being destabilized is a good thing, because it allows for a sense of openness and empathy, Boisvert says.

People dance in a dimly lit nightclub with green and purple lights, a disco ball overhead, and a DJ at a booth in the back. Colorful light spots are scattered across the floor and walls.

Jenna Moll Reyes in “Theater of the Mind” Disco/Photo: Matthew DeFeo.

This doll illusion and the tritone paradox are only two examples of the experiences in the show. One of the rooms will be a disco and involve dancing—Byrne says he created new music for this part of the show. Scoville promises the tune will be a “banger.”

How is a production like “Theater of the Mind” different from seeing a great movie or proscenium theater play, or reading a book so powerful that it can also take you out of your body and into another person’s experience?

Boisvert says a significant difference is that the audience is participating in the immersive theater experience together and everyone has a role to play in the production.

“I think the embodiment, the situatedness, like the movement through space, is important in terms of creating a deeper imprint and a sort of experiential engagement,” Boisvert says. “I think why it’s deeper is because of this kind of like a communal embodied situated engagement and experience.”

Rossi agrees that the fact that audience members are interacting with other people as part of the show makes it a “more deeply felt” experience.

It also feels safe and fun, Rossi says. They both have gone through the “Theater of the Mind” experience several times while putting the show together. And both believe they have had some changes in their own perspectives as a result of their exposure to the experiments.

“We all look for the right or the wrong, the binaries in our lives,” Boisvert says. “And I think that one of the benefits of ‘Theater of the Mind’ is that it shows you that to some degree there is no right or wrong, like your experience is your experience… And also that we can change, that we’re malleable.”

Rossi says that as she has done the experiments multiple times, what started out as “delightful sensations” have become more deeply meaningful, though she’s not sure how much of that is the experiments themselves, or how much has to do with changes in her own life over time.

A group of people gathers outside a green house decorated with colorful pennant banners and a Happy Birthday David sign. Some sit at a picnic table with a red checkered tablecloth while a woman, possibly the host, stands on the porch.

Jenna Moll Reyes in “Theater of the Mind”/Photo: Matthew DeFeo

The show uses a custom remote-control system that automates everything, including lights and sound and the technology that powers the experiments, taking the cognitive burden off the “David” actors. “There are lots of things talking to each other,” Boisvert says. There’s also “about a mile of cable” connecting the parts.

One advantage of immersive theater is that it cuts through barriers, engaging people who may feel like they understand theater. It won’t be at the Goodman Theatre, but in this custom-built 15,000-foot space on LaSalle just north of the Chicago River. “It feels like walking into an amusement park,” Rossi says. She believes having the show offsite will create a feeling of openness. She also thinks the show will appeal to many different kinds of people—young and old, Byrne fans, families, people on a date, and people curious about immersive theater.

Scoville says that while dismantling your idea of yourself does have serious implications, the way you’ll experience it in the show is with a “communal sense of joy. All of these experiments—they’re real science but they’re also so fun and sometimes silly, and it’s fun to do.”

Byrne notes that people’s views change over time—you don’t feel the same way about life as an adult as you do when you’re ten years old. “You can evolve and change because that’s the way we are. That’s the way we’re made.”

Being on social media, as so many of us are, can encourage a sense of rigidity in people’s personalities—as in, “This is my brand and I can’t change.” I ask Scoville if a show like this could be an antidote to that.

“I do, yeah,” Soville says. “I think there’s a lot of pressure to define who we are, to say what we are and how we participate in the world and this show offers a beautiful, flexible version of yourself that you can shift into to meet the moment… It just gives you the freedom to change your mind. It gives you the freedom to be in a constant state of discovery with yourself.”

Some of today’s political arguments also can encourage binary thinking—this is right and this is wrong, this is evil and this is virtuous. Boisvert says the “Theater of the Mind” is not necessarily political. “But at the same time, it could potentially meet the moment in terms of fostering conversation about moving across these divides… We do live in these media bubbles, these filters, these silos, right? But in this shared space, we’re having a communal experience that’s challenging us to question those bubbles and those spaces. So I think it is very timely, and I think it’s going to play differently because of the social political moment that we’re in.”

The LaSalle location will include a gathering space for after the event, so that people who went through the experience can have drinks together and talk about it. Rossi says this is an improvement over the show in Denver, which didn’t have this kind of space. “It will be a real opportunity.”

The Goodman has seen strong early interest in the show—it expects to sell out all twelve preview dates before the official opening on March 25, in addition to post-opening sales, according to spokeswoman Beth Silverman. Goodman artistic director Susan Booth says the theater wanted to try something different as part of its hundredth anniversary.

“We wanted to take on the very definition of theater—what does it mean? What might it mean?” She sees “Theater of the Mind” as a way to have small audiences have a deeply transformative experience. “You have to hunker down with the people you shared this journey with and say, ‘What happened to you? Let me tell you what happened to me. A deep, connected conversation right now is pretty valuable, maybe even pretty essential.”

Tickets are priced from $66 to $96. Each show will be seventy-five minutes long, starting every fifteen minutes, with continuous performances every day except Monday. A complete schedule can be found at theaterofthemindchicago.com.

Published in the print edition of the February-March 2026 issue, with the headline “‘Am I Right? Or Am I Wrong?’ The Science Behind David Byrne’s ‘Theater of the Mind.’”