When I think of the phrase “spending time wisely,” I get shot back to school, to a teacher checking in on time that should have been spent studying or reading but was instead being spent talking or doodling. “Are you spending your time wisely?” It’s a gentle prod to not let the mind wander, to focus on the task at hand. At least, that was the association I had before participating in Candle House Collective’s immersive, telephonic experience Lennox Mutual. Now that question carries an almost unfair amount of weight.
Created by Evan Neiden, Olivia Behr, and Joel Meyers, and directed by Neiden and Jacob Leaf, Lennox Mutual turns a customer service call with the titular company—a “Life En-surance” company, as they call it—into a participant-driven exploration of legacy and existence. This unique production traces its history back three years to a Candle House workshop focused on creating short, immersive, interactive experiences that met Candle House’s goal of using remote tools to work their way into an audience’s reality. As Neiden recalled, Behr and Meyers went off during the workshop and came back with “this exercise in corporate frustration,” as Neiden put it.
“Jacob and I both participated in it, and the resulting conversation was more or less, ‘Cool, that was awful. How do we see more?’” Neiden said. “It was the most frustrating thing I’d ever experienced. I was put on hold three times because I wouldn’t answer the question correctly, and it was on the third time—when I started to scream and yell at the phone, realizing that I had forgotten that I was doing an experience—that we kind of knew we had something.”
Years later, Lennox Mutual indeed comes with a warning that you may find yourself feeling frustrated. It’s an experience that’s difficult to describe, both because there’s a lot that I don’t want to give away, but also because each experience is so personalized that there’s a good chance that your experience will be vastly different than mine.
The basics: You sign up for 20-ish-minute phone call slots. You receive a call from Lennox Mutual, you’re met with a 20-minute timer, and you’re off. You’re greeted with some seemingly standard customer service menu options, like finding out more about the company, scheduling an appointment, directions to their location, and hours of operation; you’re even prompted that you can provide an extension at any time.
From there, depending on your choices, you may be asked questions that make you examine how you perceive time, or you may be dropped into a scenario where your representative describes a room and gives you the freedom to explore, building the narrative as you go based on your answers, questions, and impulses. Some moments can feel like playing D&D, minus the dice rolls.
Regardless of your choices, the 20 minutes fly by. I participated in three calls for this report and still feel like I only scratched the surface of what Lennox Mutual has to offer. Indeed, when you get to the end of a call, it’s easy to wonder what would happen if, say, you took a different door or gave a different answer. Do all roads lead to Rome, or did I manage to set out on a path that leads nowhere? Speaking with Neiden and Leaf, I tried to prod them on just how vast the script is.
“We had sort of play testers, preview audiences, if you will, who experienced the show as we were building it,” Neiden said. “People who would book three, four, or five sessions would run into walls, and we were terrified.”
There was a fear early on that people were going to hate the experience when they hit that wall. Instead, the producers found that, when people hit a wall, they’d just start talking to their representatives, sharing things about their day.
Of course, Neiden and Leaf don’t want to give away too much about the experience in its current state, but they do note that what feels like a “conclusion” to the Lennox Mutual adventure may differ based on the individual. While I spent my time trying to get a taste of everything, they noted that participants may find themselves drawn to deeply exploring one section because it feels conversational, or drawn to a different section because it’s poetic and more meditative. Regardless, every road is paved with in-depth experiences, Leaf said.
“It’s very much participant-driven,” Neiden said. “We’ve had people ‘complete’ the experience in 30 sessions, and we’ve had people ‘complete’ the experience in closer to 65. It’s really about how you play. There are rules, and, as one learns, you gain more agency over your experience. Like learning to play a game that plays you back.”
There is certainly a learning curve. After just one session I found myself jotting down notes. Was going to that menu option really worth my time? If I want to accomplish one thing, I have to find these two pieces of information—but when I went to the menu option to find that information, I was met with frustration. Is it worth revisiting? Or should I spend my time elsewhere? I very quickly understood why some people have signed up for dozens of calls with Lennox Mutual. The experience is vast enough that a Reddit community has formed for folks looking to swap stories, get advice, or commiserate in their frustrations.
“We very carefully guide people and curate individually in order to allow for more complex conversations,” Leaf said. “We do a lot of work to provide an entire world that is interconnected and very personal, and one that holds you responsible, which a lot of people find to be really exciting. And that’s what is kind of fun. What if the play spoke back to you and said, ‘What do you think?’ What you think matters and affects the things that are happening. That is what we’re trying to give our participants.”
To perform this work, Leaf said, the Lennox Mutual team goes through a rigorous training process. It isn’t your standard play rehearsal process; there’s no expectation or requirement to be fully memorized. There are documents (a lot of documents), and they teach their actors how to navigate and work with the mass of text. “The thing is just too damn big,” Leaf admitted. There’s also a certain amount of custom curation: A writer may be assigned to you behind the scenes, crafting something specifically for you, and you’ll never know.
“It’s something that is magic, and we love to keep it magic,” Leaf said, noting that there are some secrets they won’t reveal, particularly around how they keep track of things from one call to the next. “But Lennox Mutual remembers, and so do we.”
Indeed, each call starts with a confirmation of name and birthday, like pulling up your account, and narratives would pick up where I left off on the previous call. In that way, it becomes a little addictive, even a bit therapeutic, with some folks making weekly appointments with Lennox Mutual. It’s hard to blame them. Even with only three sessions under my belt, my mind races with what I and my representative could potentially dive into in a subsequent session.
Much of it comes back to that one little question: Do you feel like you’ve spent your time wisely? My answer, each time, was a resounding no, turning the simple question into a challenge, a responsibility to try again and spend my time more wisely next time. There’s something exhilarating about being forced to be that present, to truly think about every second as it ticks by to determine if it’s the best use of that moment.
“Ultimately, what we’re looking at here is a one-on-one connection,” Neiden concluded. “For those 20 minutes, it’s you and the voice on the other end of the line, and everything else fades into the background.”
Jerald Raymond Pierce is the managing editor of American Theatre.
