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.
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