Lennox Mutual
“Without hitting narrative walls and careening into them full force, we wouldn’t have found arguably the most valuable element of the piece: how it weaves into people’s lives as a ritual, a routine, a confession, coaching, a puzzle.”
—Evan Neiden, Candle House Collective
Lennox Mutual originated from an experimental creative salon called The Hearth, hosted by Candle House Collective. Joel Meyers and Olivia Behr were randomly paired to create a five-minute experience combining elements from their lives. The idea was to explore the frustrating existential contradictions in corporate culture, culminating in an ironic and deliberately aggravating customer service call. At the same time, Evan Neiden had been working on a separate project about the hazards of health insurance bureaucracy. Experiencing Joel and Olivia’s piece, he saw an opportunity to merge their ideas into a surreal bureaucratic alternate universe. From this initial spark, the project evolved iteratively. The team kept expanding the premise, moving from a single phone call to a multi-session, deeply immersive experience that spanned months of engagement. The project quickly grew into a detailed and technically complex experience. Development involved not just scripting but also designing a system to track audience engagement over time. Early on, audience participation played a critical role in shaping Lennox Mutual. Many participants engaged not just with the structured narrative but also formed personal rituals around their interactions with the system. The team learned to embrace the unpredictable ways participants engaged with the experience, allowing the project to grow organically. What started as a disorienting interactive bureaucracy became something deeply personal for many participants. The team realized that some users weren’t just following the narrative—they were forming genuine connections with the experience. “People get near the end and start stalling, spinning their wheels, because they don’t want it to end,” said Joel. “They just want to show up and have their 20-minute Lennox Mutual call every week.” This unintended ritual aspect significantly shaped how the creators refined the piece: Instead of forcing linear progression, they designed pathways that allowed for personal exploration. Lennox Mutual taught the creators invaluable lessons in experimentation, adaptation and audience interaction. “We learned how to let the audience teach us what the piece wanted to be,” said Joel. “We started with something absurd and frustrating, then realized it had heart. The audience led us there.”
Founded by Evan Neiden, Chicago-based Candle House Collective is the award-winning creator of alternate reality theater: experiences that infiltrate an audience’s reality using immersive, choice-driven storytelling. The group’s signature remote experiences use analog communication methods like phone calls and physical deliveries to reach participants worldwide and infuse their everyday spaces with mystery, memory, and magic. Lennox Mutual was created by Evan Neiden, Olivia Behr and Joel Meyers and directed by Evan Neiden; system design by Joel Meyers.
IN THE MEDIA
“The premise of Lennox Mutual is that you are put in the position of a caller who must navigate an automated phone tree in an attempt to make an appointment with a representative. I am now six calls in, and I have not yet succeeded. At the end of each twenty-minute session, a loud bell chimes, interrupting you even if you are in the middle of a sentence, at which point you are asked to answer a single survey question: ‘Do you feel you have spent your time wisely?’ My answers to this question have varied widely, to the point that, at least once, I have practically shouted No! . . .
“And yet, cumulatively, the minutes that I’ve spent on the phone with Lennox Mutual have been among the most satisfying of this past difficult, infuriating year—for months of which I was on strike with the Writers Guild of America. Within the confines of that phone tree, I’ve played a game of tic-tac-toe; explained how I got my middle name; sung the opening lines of a Nirvana song; listened to a long, detailed, choose-your-own-adventure story about wandering through an abandoned village, and another that involved answering the cryptic questions of a king; and thought, seriously, about the last words I’d want to hear before I die. . . .
“With its tone of icy melancholy, punctuated by both flashes of flinty humor and the occasional burst of heart-clutching shock, Lennox Mutual reminds me a great deal of the TV show Severance. Both Severance and Lennox Mutual involve the nefarious activities of mysterious corporations, but they strike me as less interested in critiquing a particular form of white-collar labor than they are in examining the world view that has given rise to today’s techno-optimist corporate culture. . . . It is an instrumental approach to life which interprets every unproductive minute as a problem to be solved. In a world ruled by this philosophy, there is no trauma or dream or shame or pain or work of art exempt from the obligation to explain itself, and then put itself to work in service of the improvement of the self and others. Given how many times in the past century unspeakable horrors have been impeccably documented and openly discussed in corporate jargon, the fact that systems ruled by this shiny, organized, daytime logic can quickly descend into darkness ought to come as no surprise.”
—The New Yorker
“Since January, I’ve been willingly spending large chunks of my free time talking to a customer service line. The same customer service line, over and over. I will usually schedule my calls to take place around 5pm or 5:30pm, twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I wonder who I’m going to get this time. And what I’ll discover next. Because it’s not a normal phone call. . . .
“Each call lasts approximately 20 minutes: just you, the participant, and a customer service representative who reads out a menu of options at the top of each call. Would you like to make an appointment? Receive a promotional offer? Review our documentation? Or learn more about Lennox Mutual? The ensemble of actors is so good at sounding like an automated system, some attendees are taken aback, mistakenly believing they’re interacting with a recording. (They’re not, it’s live.)
“Lennox Mutual takes inspiration from all over, including but not limited to video games, alternate reality games, tabletop roleplaying games, meditation, poetry, fairy tales, music, ritual, horror, and more. It unfolds over the course of many phone calls. Lots and lots (and lots) of calls. The experience is epic and tragic and heartbreaking and messy and beautiful and strange and maddening and astounding, all at the same time.”
—No Proscenium
