“I wonder what might have happened if we’d intervened,” an audience member mused at the end of Shaking the Tree’s latest production, Dancing on the Sabbath.

At check-in, we'd received a note on letterhead from the Office of Royal Protection—its black logo depicting an eyeball wearing a crown—explaining we would surveil five misbehaving princesses through an invisibility cloak. As Crown-sanctioned Watchers for the night, the audience's task was to discover how the King’s daughters escaped their locked chambers and to follow them wherever they went.

The letter might have been surprising were Shaking the Tree not known for its immersive approaches to theater. Earlier this year, The Antipodes and The Brother and the Bird demonstrated the company’s knack for unconventional staging. Dancing on the Sabbath, directed by Shaking the Tree’s founding artistic director Samantha Van Der Merwe and adapted from the 1815 Grimm fairy tale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” offers something more participatory still. The audience becomes the investigator, free to move from room to room in the first act, trailing the princesses and their captors as they piece the story together.

Harp music twinkled ominously, fake taper candles cast a moody glow, and a giant philodendron filled one corner of Dancing on the Sabbath’s multi-room set. The plant wasn’t out of place—the play’s first act unfolded in Shaking the Tree’s office and rehearsal space, just around the corner from its Hosford-Abernethy theater. In this shadowy Center of Compliance, a stone-faced Guard (Kai Hynes) patrolled the rooms in slow, deliberate loops, bearing an assault rifle and jangling keys that served to alert the audience—and the princesses—to his location at all times.

Under the Guard’s watch, the young women scribbled in matching diaries; when he walked away, they broke into whispers and frantic gestures. Later, the mysterious Praying Woman (Laura Cannon) led the princesses in a ritualistic dance before wrapping each girl’s mouth in white linen fringed with red embroidery. The choice felt on-the-nose (and arguably Handmaid’s Tale-adjacent), but it underscored the intentional silence of the work. Language was mostly absent—as was, more often than not, clarity. In Dancing on the Sabbath’s first act, the full story hovered just out of reach.

On a logistical note, while the crowd was able to move between rooms, attempts at navigating those rooms met constant friction. Our freedom of movement seemed meant to contrast with the princesses’ confinement, but rustling coats, shifting bodies, and whispered apologies broke the spell.

Action mounted when the princesses freed themselves from their bedrooms as the Guard slept, shedding their plain nightgowns for vintage tulle, tiny hats, and devil’s horns. They dashed into the night, fairy-like and giggling, lanterns aglow. As the audience trailed them down SE Grant Street in the rainy darkness, Princesses Winnie (Kailey Rhodes) and Saffron (Sammy Rat Rios) remained fully in character, their grounded performances among the night’s most compelling.

Dancing on the Sabbath’s locations grew increasingly surreal. In a nearby courtyard, the five princesses twirled beneath jewel-laden trees, plucking shiny accessories from branches like ripe fruit. Inside Shaking the Tree’s main theater, the audience navigated the creaking ribs of a ship’s belly—translucent fabric shimmering blue-green above, watery sounds filtering in. This portal opened into the play’s final stage, a secret grove draped with white flowers.

In the original Grimm tale, the princesses sneak off to dance with princes at a castle ball—not so here. After a brief blood pact (sealed with finger-pricking and a salt packet), the girls danced to Missy Elliott, changed costumes, whispered conspiratorially, and giggled. They giggled a lot. The scene’s playful, ecstatic strangeness offered relief from the Center for Compliance’s oppressive atmosphere, but it also felt long—surprising for a show with a 90-minute runtime.

Dancing on the Sabbath closed with the Crown’s final letter to the audience. “Your night watch has ended. You have served well,” it began. The remainder of its contents implicated us in the play’s tragic ending.

To interpret a fairy tale effectively, one might break it down to its core components—the emotions that connect us, the fundamental experiences and challenges that persist and make us human. In Dancing on the Sabbath, we see these threads plucked loose from the tapestry of a 200-year-old story. Its protagonists tug at the binds of patriarchy; they desire freedom; they experience the thrills of youth, risk, and escape. Its villains are forced into their roles by an inexorable governing power. The play thinks about autonomy and that which silences us, particularly femmes.

But Dancing on the Sabbath refuses to stitch those threads into a tidy narrative. The story doesn’t resolve, because the systems it mirrors haven’t resolved, either. 

Dancing on the Sabbath plays at Shaking the Tree, 2136 SE 8th, through Nov 8, 90 minutes, $10-$45, tickets and showtimes at shaking-the-tree.com.