Immersive experiences have become a swiftly expanding new form of theater, with creative encounters taking place everywhere from art galleries to escape rooms. A new kind of immersive experience can now unfold over the telephone, with an exclusive audience of one. Candle House Collective produces just such intimate audio experiences in choose-your-own-adventure plays over the phone. Evan Neiden is the founder of Candle House Collective and creator of the plays “Next Time” and “Claws.” Neiden joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom to explore this fascinating frontier of immersive theater.
Interview highlights:
On the allure of the immersive:
“I really love immersive theater, and it’s something that kind of lives at the intersection of most of the influences in my life, from growing up on “The Twilight Zone” and traditional folk stories to a love of alternate reality games online and haunted houses,” said Neiden. “Immersive theater was at the crossroads between all of them.”
“It was something I realized very quickly was pretty localized to very major metropolitan areas – New York, L.A., Chicago, London, and other places like that, and not much else, at least at the time,” Neiden said. “I had already been so affected by this flourishing art form, I felt what was wanting was a way to share it with anyone, anywhere, but not in a recording sense – that live, interactive experience where the lasers of focus really are on you.”
The beginnings of Candle House, now with over 25 plays produced:
“We started with a five-month-long alternate reality experience for fifty participants,” Neiden said. “It was a continuous story, one continuous story, that unfolded over the course of five months for these fifty people. And the whole thing was free; it was sort of a ‘proof of concept.’”
“With the first project or the first few projects, it was just or mostly me doing most of the performing, most of the calls. There were nights when I’d do fifteen calls back-to-back, and we’ve brought that number extremely down because I’m not expecting anyone else to do that. But the challenge of the work is also the privilege of the work. The challenge is intimate and immediate, and that’s also what’s so exciting about it.”
“We were either breaking even or losing a bit on production… but then ‘Claws’ came along. It was the shortest piece I’d ever created for Candle House, so it clocked in at thirty-five to forty minutes, a one-act, almost. It was this very succinct, highly interactive concept with a layer of choice that we expected to run for maybe a month, and here we are almost two years later, and it’s still going.”
On two acclaimed audio adventures, “Claws” and “Next Time:”
‘Next Time’ is a session with an entity called ‘The Bureau,’ and particularly a caseworker…. What becomes clear, about five seconds in, is what the purpose of this call is,” Neiden teased. “It asks you to take an inventory of your life so far and analyzes it, not necessarily in a psychotherapeutic way, but in an equal parts clinical and compassionate way to help you arrive at a very critical and, I think often, not really considered choice.”
“‘Next Time’ is a story about you. The caseworker is there… as a facilitator,” said Neiden. “‘Claws’ is not the opposite, but it is different because you are asked to take on the role of a helpline representative, and you are helping someone else…. The darkness of the subject matter and the scenario that the lead character, Danny, is in do lead to some very personal explorations and realizations, even through the lens of his own conflict.”
More on the current productions and upcoming projects of Candle House Collective can be found at https://candlehousecollective.com.
