The Salon at the End of the Century:
The Cardinal Assumption of Dark Library

H.G. Wells published The Time Machine in 1895, The Island of Doctor Moreau in 1896, The Invisible Man in 1897, and The War of the Worlds in 1898. Four books in four years, each one inventing a genre. He wrote them in his late twenties, fresh out of T.H. Huxley’s biology classroom at the Normal School of Science, and he called them scientific romances because the word science fiction did not yet exist. Forty years later, looking back, he gave the method a name. The fantasy writer gets one impossible premise. Everything else has to stay human and real. He called it the “cardinal assumption.” One break with the actual, then strict adherence. The trick was never the gadget. The trick was the cost.

Blaise Hemingway’s Dark Library: The Time Machine, now playing in North Hollywood, takes that rule seriously. Hemingway gathers Wells’s most famous obsessives into one Victorian salon and lets them argue. Dr. Edward Turner has built the time machine. Doctor Moreau stands nearby with his vivisection diagrams. Doctor Griffin broods over a chemistry bench that will, eventually, erase him. Captain Ogilvy, the astronomer from War of the Worlds, watches the sky. The playwright has read his Wells. He has also pulled in Ann Veronica, the 1909 suffrage novel that scandalized Edwardian England, and lifted Lady Ann Veronica into the room as Turner’s forbidden love. Wells readers catch the move. Everyone else gets a sharp woman in a room of obsessives.

Anyone who has stood masked on a staircase at the McKittrick Hotel knows the lineage. Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More rewired audience expectations. Movement, choice, proximity. Every immersive show since has had to decide how much of that experience it can afford and what it can build without it. Dark Library is working with a fraction of those resources and makes a clear decision: build one room well and let the audience live inside it.

Hemingway and director Jennifer Strattan assemble a parlor. Miss Watchett, Turner’s housekeeper (Janaya Jones), meets audience members at the door and ushers them in as colleagues in the Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge. Jones has the hardest job in immersive theater, which is to make a stranger feel like they belong. She does it almost immediately. The room is dim, warm, and packed with the right objects: skeletons, rocks, instruments, chalkboards filled with equations that would not hold up under scrutiny but do not need to. Production designers E.K. Dagenfield and D’Angelo Reyes understand that in a small space, density matters more than accuracy. Aiden Vice’s lighting pulls the eye to whatever the audience should be reading next without ever announcing itself. You can handle Moreau’s tools, read Griffin’s notes, and question Ogilvy about Mars. He will answer until you stop asking.

The scientists improvise until Turner arrives and the scripted show takes over. Will Riddle plays Turner as a man who mistakes obsession for purpose, which tracks. Paul Stanko’s Moreau is the standout. He keeps his voice low and his hands still, and the audience leans in to hear him describe what he has done to the animals. Ian Wolf broods on cue. Luke Rampersad’s Ogilvy operates on a quieter frequency the show could use more of. Then Turner unveils the machine and the production briefly locks into Wells’s narrative: a disaster at sea, a glimpse of the far future. Jones returns in that sequence and delivers the strangest, most memorable physical work of the night. It lasts under a minute and justifies the entire experiment.

Katherine Powers gives Lady Ann Veronica the only complete arc in the room. She is sharp, impatient, and not especially impressed by the men around her. The script does not deserve her. Gabe Oliva’s Lord Filby is a functional Victorian obstacle, and the romance driving the plot is conventional and predictable. Declarations replace tension. Conflict arrives on cue and resolves on cue. For a piece built on intellectual and moral risk, the central relationship plays it safe.

What carries the evening is the environment. Emily DePauw’s choreography moves bodies through a space that should not support that kind of motion and does. Cooper Baldwin’s score and the Johnstone-Baldwin sound design carry the time travel sequences, where the room seems to shift without actually moving. Robert Ramirez’s magic, built with Clayton Williams, holds up at close range, which is the only range that matters here. Liuba Randolph and Natalia Aksenova’s costumes give each figure a clear silhouette. The themed cocktails by Jeremy Needleman and Al Rahn are integrated into the action rather than parked on the side, which is harder than it looks.

The script needs to be shorter. Ten minutes. The romance could lose more. What the production gets right matters more. It understands Wells at a basic level. These are men whose ideas outran their judgment. Moreau cuts. Griffin disappears. Turner travels. None of them escape the consequences.

Wells died in 1946, several months after Hiroshima, having watched his nineteenth-century ideas turn into twentieth-century weapons. He spent his final years warning that knowledge was outpacing wisdom. Dark Library does not reach for that version of Wells. It stays with the younger writer and his discipline. In a small North Hollywood space, on a tight budget, that is the right choice. Go. The romance is what it is. The room, the cocktails, Moreau’s low voice, Jones’s minute of physical work, the moment the machine engages and the floor seems to give way: those are worth the trip. Turner’s machine works. The scientists pay. The drink in your hand tastes like 1894. You step back outside and, for a moment, the present feels slightly off.

✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦

photos courtesy of the production

Dark Library: The Time Machine
After Hours Theatre Company
5628 Vineland Avenue in NoHo
75 minutes
ends on May 31, 2026
for tickets, visit Eventbrite
for more info, visit After Hours

✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦