La Jolla Playhouse’s 2026 WOW Festival: A Celebration of Immersive Arts
The 2026 WOW Festival, hosted by the La Jolla Playhouse, has found its rhythm on the UC San Diego campus in recent years. This immersive arts festival draws a dedicated crowd, with ticketed shows selling out quickly and families with young children enjoying the wide range of free entertainment. First-timers often leave the event with a sense of wonder and excitement.
This year’s festival promises a mix of creativity and chaos, featuring an international lineup of performances that includes several premieres. The festival is spread across a sunny and accessible area of the university campus, with most shows taking place around the grassy Warren Mall. The location is convenient, with nearby restrooms, food vendors, and easy access from the Gilman Parking Structure. It’s never been easier to experience the magic of the WOW Festival.
Highlights from the 2026 WOW Festival
“Handle with Care” by Ontroerend Goed
This Belgian immersive theater company puts the audience in charge of the show. As attendees enter the auditorium, they are given only one instruction: there’s a box on the stage that someone must open for the show to begin. Inside the box are smaller boxes and lists of instructions for a series of scenes that guide the audience through activities like stringing up a clothesline, sharing favorite drinks, creating timelines, meeting each other, and engaging in six minutes of noisy chaos. This was one of the standout performances of the festival, as the audience came ready to play and interact. Ages 12 and up. 60 minutes.
Remaining shows: 12:30, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 25; 11 a.m. Sunday, April 26. Qualcomm Institute Auditorium.
“Again! Again!” by Mister and Mischief
This Los Angeles duo returns with performer Tiffany Ogburn for a new ticketed show that requires active audience participation. Inspired by their own lives as producers, parents, and performers, the show re-creates three days of their hectic schedule. The table at the center of the room balances like a top on a single point, symbolizing the challenge of finding balance amid chaos. Audience members are engaged in tasks such as shopping, cleaning, cooking, laundry, storytime, and date night. While relatable, the show could use some trimming. Ages 6 and up. 59 minutes.
Remaining performances: Noon and 2:30 p.m. Saturday, April 25; 12:30 p.m. Sunday, April 26. Qualcomm Institute Theater.
“Message in a Bauble” by Enemies of Time
From the Berkeley-based theater company Enemies of Time, this self-guided show requires a mobile phone. Audience members can either save or destroy a sentient AI being trapped inside a computer database and help her escape before a digital apocalypse. A gumball-style machine dispenses plastic baubles containing a phone number that you text to get started in your quest to find EDIN. She will instruct you to two locations in the nearby Price Center to use old-fashioned radio and TV sets to uncover codes to aid in her escape from VERSAI, an organization of aggressive tech bros who will also start texting you. Depending on whose side you choose, you’ll have a different experience. I found the data-rich texts fun and creative and loved the interactions. However, I had a hard time finding where the electronics were placed in the multilevel/multi-entrance Price Center. (If you get lost, here are some hints: For clue 1, enter the Price Center across from Yogurt World. And for clue 2, take the big staircase inside the center’s atrium to the second floor.)
45-minute self-guided walking story that can be enjoyed anytime from 11 a.m. to 9:40 p.m. Saturday, April 25, and next Sunday, April 26. Check in at the WOW info booth on Warren Mall for directions to the vending machine. Free.
“Carry On” by Cie Presque Siamoises
This French performance company created a musical and meditative outdoor theatrical piece inspired by the joys and responsibilities of parenting. Co-created with local parents and their young children, the show features eight parent-and-child pairs silently interacting to music and pre-recorded interviews about the challenges they’ve faced and the rewards they’ve enjoyed on their parenting journey. During the 30-minute show, these pairs dance, play, collect uggage and bags representing the burdens they carry, and then settle into “homes” for a cuddle. It’s a sweet and warm encounter. 30 minutes.
2 p.m. Saturday, April 25; 2:30 p.m. Sunday, April 26. Warren Mall. Free.
“Jam Side Up!” by the Kif-Kif Sisters
This physical theater duo from Montreal is a whimsical delight. In their family-friendly stage show, they do wacky acrobatics, dice vegetables with an electric fan, accidentally behead a stuffed bunny, unravel a rope made of bras, and create giant bouncing breasts from inflatable balloons. A big part of the magic is how the enraptured children in the audience leap into action to help the twins. 30 minutes. All ages.
Remaining performance: Noon Sunday, April 6. Warren Mall. Free.
Suzik by FORCE
South Korea’s FORCE acrobatics company presents this outdoor three-man show, where they first battle to be the first to reach the top of a tower of three vertical Chinese poles. Ultimately, they bond as brothers and climb together in some truly impressive feats of strength, balance, agility, and death-defying drops. 25 minutes.
Remaining shows: 2:30 and 5:45 p.m. Saturday, April 25; 2 and 4 p.m. Sunday, April 26. Warren Mall. Free.
“[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]” by Drew Petersen
This New York performance artist returns after presenting his wonderful audience interactive show “Inertia” at the 2024 WOW fest. In this show, Peterson talks about how photographs capture moments in time, but they can never preserve all of the beauty and wonder of the lived experience. With audience interaction, he creates a man’s life journey from his all-possibilities-are-open youth to his final years, where dementia has dimmed his memories. There’s some wonderful sound and onstage prop surprises that bring a magic to the storytelling. Audience members are invited to join the unfolding story and add their own “image descriptions” for what they’re seeing in their mind’s eye. 45 minutes.
Remaining performances: 4 and 6 p.m. Saturday, April 25; 1 and 3 p.m. Sunday, April 26. Qualcomm Institute Auditorium. Free.
“Tea Party at the End of the World” by IKantKoan Play/s
From Philadelphia, this audience-interactive play written by and starring Jessica Creane unfolds during a serene and mesmerizing tea party. While educating the audience on the world of tea, Creane tells a haunting personal story of losing her emotionally distant father to cancer and seeing up close the collapse of polar ice sheets due to climate change. As she steeps and pours three different teas for audience members, Creane asks attendees a series of existential questions about life, death, and what comes next, which left some audience members wiping away tears on Friday. Ages 16 and up. 75 minutes.
5 and 8 p.m. Saturday, April 25; 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Sunday, April 26. Qualcomm Institute. $25 (includes tea service).
“Night Watch” by Bee’s Knees
Designed by a team of L.A. theme park experience designers, “Night Watch” takes place inside a cargo van, where four audience members are on their first shift as overnight security workers at a mysterious manufacturing plant. The four workers must watch the security cameras on a monitor, fill out an event log, communicate via walkie-talkie, and track down several missing items in the van. Meanwhile, a strange creature can be seen on the monitor stalking plant employees. It’s part escape room, part interactive haunted house. I was impressed with the design and detail of the experience, particularly the lighting and sound effects. The actor in the show who acts as the boss is a good improviser, and the show definitely delivers some scream-inducing jump scares. Ages 18 and up only.
25 minutes. 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Saturday, April 25; 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Sunday, April 26. South Lab, 3185 Matthews Lane. $29. (All performances are sold out, but check in online during the festival for additional seats.)
