Fact Sheet

Release Date: Now Booking for 2026

Developer: cirqueSaw (Nathan Leigh & Nicole Orabona) Location: United States

Written, Coded, and Composed by Nathan Leigh Performed and Produced by Nicole Orabona ****

Awards:

NarraScope 2025 Featured Showcase
IndieCade 2025 Winner - Live Action Showcase
Experimental Games Showcase, GDC 2026

🔗 Links Website Instagram Bluesky Facebook

About the Experience

labRats is a digitally native interactive experience at the intersection of live theatre and games. Pulling equally from classic games, silent films, and a generous helping of Lewis Carroll, labRats seeks to blur the line between reality and unreality, between wonder and horror. Audiences play as lab rats in an experiment beyond their control, who have to work together to take control of their lives. Whether they choose to escape, take over the lab, or deconstruct the fabric of the reality of their experience itself is entirely up to them.

The 70 minute experience is live and takes place entirely in cirqueSaw’s custom built browser-based platform.

Features:

up to 19 audience members and a live performer
Part game, part play, part short story collection, part experiment, all chaos
Inspired by retro games, with touchstones ranging from Myst to Zork to LucasArts point-and-click adventures
Meta narrative experience
Hours of in-world areas to explore

About cirqueSaw

cirqueSaw is an award-winning production company creating work at the intersection of live theatre and games, founded by Nathan Leigh and Nicole Orabona. Their debut interactive theatre piece, POV: You are an AI Achieving Consciousness has had three sold-out runs and received critical acclaim. It was named one of No Proscenium’s Best Immersive Productions of 2023, given the editors award in Special Recognition in Merging Technology and Immersive Performance by No Proscenium in 2024, and named Immersive Production of the Year by the Young-Howze Theatre Journal for 2023. Their follow-up, labRats, was the NarraScope 2025 Featured Work, winner of the 2026 IndieCade Live Action Spotlight Award, and invited to present at the 2026 ExGS at GDC. In 2024, Nathan and Nicole were named Creatives of the Year by the Young-Howze Theatre Journal. Current works in progress include You Have Already Won, On The Compulsion to Dig Holes, The Stratford Code,Void Main, and a feature-length stop-motion rock opera titled The Golem.