At The Arnold Arboretum, A New Interactive Experience Channels ‘Restoration, Healing And Joy.’ But Don't Call It Theater.

Summer L. Williams wouldn’t call her interactive production at the Arnold Arboretum theater, per se, though there are performances to see (and hear). And it’s not a music concert or meditation tour either, though there are elements of both strung throughout.

As Williams, who directed the “ The Arboretum Experience” puts it, the season-long event is just that: an experience.

“At every gate, there will be some welcoming information letting folks know that it’s happening,” she said on GBH News’ Boston Public Radio Tuesday.

Visitors will be able to scan a QR code through the camera app on their smart phones to listen to scene-specific stories or take part in what Williams calls "movement meditations." If they choose to show up on a weekend afternoon, visitors can also check out the live performances and pop-up shows that’ll take place throughout the Arboretum’s vast expanse of gardens and green hills.

“It’s a lot of fun, but really meant to be an experience that you can stumble upon and enjoy, [and] plan and curate an afternoon around. And it’s something that allows you to keep going back and experiencing it as the season shifts,” Williams said.

The production, which is a collaboration between the Arnold Arboretum and Cambridge’s American Repertory Theater, had its soft opening over the weekend and will remain open to the public through the fall. Williams said that, in creating the “Arboretum Experience,” she wanted to help visitors to embrace a new sense of ownership within Boston’s public spaces.

“Wouldn’t it be great if folks felt like they could come to our common spaces and our public spaces and really feel invited, really feel like they can have an experience there that is meant for them?” she said. “Really feel like there’s an opportunity to sort of grow and be stretched in that place?”

Part of that ambition, Williams explained, came from a forced reimagining of what theater can provide in the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Theater-going audiences may not have getting back into the theater as their top priority coming out of COVID,” she said, looking back on her thought process over the past year. “And it would be so presumptuous to believe that would be someone’s number-one goal.”

So, she asked herself, “how might we figure out a new way of being — a model adjustment, so that we are saying [to audiences], ‘you come back when you are ready; we are here, we are gonna help you, and here’re all the ways that we’re thinking about doing so'?”

Choosing to create something at the Arnold Arboretum, then, was the natural solution.

“There’s a wonderful cross section of folks who come into the arboretum,” she said. “And there’s also the natural beauty and vibe... there’s something about the energy that pulls everything together.”