‘I wasn’t finding what I wanted out of theatre in terms of catharsis or impact, or even just attention, you know?’ said Evan Neiden.
Neiden is a writer, director, and the founding artistic director of Candle House Collective. He occupies a distinct position in modern performance. Nearly a decade ago, he began running his earliest narrative experiments straight out of a university dorm room. His only equipment was a personal mobile phone.
From those basic technical limits, he constructed an operation that now commands an international audience. The company builds remote, telephonic interactive performances. They strip away the traditional expectations of the stage. Callers engage from their own living rooms, cars, or offices. There are no physical sets. Neiden uses a specific descriptor for this framework: Alternate Reality Theatre.
Traditional immersive performance relies on inviting an audience into a curated world. Candle House Collective reverses that trajectory. The narrative forces its way into the participant’s established routine. These pieces are built strictly for an audience of one. They require agency. The story responds in real-time, branching with every choice, phrase, or hesitation from the caller.
‘The extent of my knowledge of immersive theatre had been more mainstream things, and then the world of haunts, which I came from a little bit. So I worked in some more traditional boo haunts as a kid, and then I worked in 2018 with Miasma in Chicago, which is an extreme haunt, and that really ignited something that had already been laying dormant. Between that and a love for alternate reality games, this feeling of wanting theatre that could—the term I found for it later was “theatre that could infest a participant’s reality”. Whereas most theatre is invitational, you know, it brings you into a space, it invites you in to sit down in a dark room to enter a space that is alien to you. In our case, the theatre superimposes itself on your day-to-day. And, you know, the most convincing lies have the majority of the truth inside of them. And so, it’s hyper-minimalist… the remote work anyway, is hyper-minimalist storytelling, engaging just mainly your ears to alter your reality. I call it alternate reality theatre. And make the show part of it rather than something you escape to.’
Lennox Mutual and Corporate Absurdity
The company’s primary ongoing installation is Lennox Mutual. The framework mimics a labyrinthine, deeply bureaucratic customer service interaction with a fictional ‘Life En-surance’ firm. Participants sign up for a minimum of three individual 20-to-25-minute phone calls with an assigned corporate representative. For some callers, the narrative loop closes quickly. For others, the project shifts into a massive structural fixation. Some participants have logged upward of 65 individual calls spanning several months. I spent 3 consecutive Fridays diving into my own altered telephone-reality and came away very impressed.
‘I wasn’t finding what I wanted to find out of theatre in terms of catharsis or impact, or even just attention, you know?’ said Evan Neiden.
Co-created with Joel Meyers and Olivia Behr, and co-directed by Jacob Leaf, the infrastructure depends on an active backend logic system. The team generates text mid-run to adapt to individual callers. The resulting tone carries a distinct flavour of corporate dread. It sits comfortably alongside television projects like the Apple TV series Severance. That show uses the cold, sterile monotony of office life to mask an underlying horror. Lennox Mutual targets the same psychological friction. It strips away the visual aesthetics of the office and forces the participant to confront the administrative nightmare entirely through their ears.
‘The genesis of Lennox Mutual… I have been working on a project called Lennox Mutual that was more of a one-off experience, which was a call with an imaginary hospital that exchanges time, basically. That allows you to give time to other people, donate it, receive it, etc., and kind of the consequences of that,’ said Neiden.
The early iteration changed when Meyers and Behr introduced a rigid, diagnostic questionnaire during an internal workshop session. Neiden merged his original temporal concept with their administrative framework. The resulting piece grew into a complex machine. It moved away from simple interactive tropes and began examining human vulnerability under well structured pressure.
‘A great deal of it was also born out of my own experience with major life-altering illness. So in 2019, I was diagnosed with cancer. And then I was declared in remission, then COVID happened, and then in 2021, I was diagnosed again. And the experience of living through that, especially since I was 20 at the time the first time I was diagnosed, it was sort of one of my worst fears made very real. You know, I had always been scared of any kind of illness like that, of my body turning against me. I had worked very hard to stay healthy and to be a guardian of my well-being in terms of physical health, and then this happened and it all kind of felt wrong.’
Processing Medical Trauma through Scripting
The physical realities of chronic illness informed the structure of the performance. Neiden rejects the conventional language used to describe medical crises. He frames the experience of treatment as an exercise in a complete lack of control. The constant administration, the waiting, and the institutional coldness found their direct mirror in the fictional mechanics of his life insurance bureaucracy.
‘People talk about cancer like it’s some sort of battle, but in reality, you’re just sitting in a chair, and it feels like nothing is within your control. And a big part of the core of Lennox Mutual comes from that experience and from the relentlessness of the feeling of I don’t want to die, which lives at the core of a lot of pieces I write. Despite how bad things get, we as humans, as living things, cling to life. And there’s something sort of beautiful and tragic about that.’
The performance became a vehicle for processing a reality that simply would not conform to standard narratives of recovery. The onset of global pandemic restrictions further isolated Neiden from typical support structures. He had to handle the psychological aftermath independently. The writing reflected that isolation.
‘I think there was an element of trying to piece together something that refuses to be pieced together. Trying to understand something that passes understanding. It’s just cancer. You know, it doesn’t make any sense, and there’s no rhyme or reason, and you don’t, unless you’re a smoker or something, you don’t do anything to get it. It just happens. Cancer doesn’t care how good a person you’ve been or what you’ve done or haven’t done in your life, or how many friends you have or what you were planning to do, it just is there.’
The Success of Telephonic Suspense
Lennox Mutual stands as Candle House Collective’s 25th or 26th distinct project. The company did not build its audience through massive infrastructure or traditional marketing budgets. Instead, it relied on a calling card piece titled CLAWS. Written and constructed by Neiden over a four-day span at the start of the 2020 lockdowns, CLAWS established the company’s operational viability. The premise is a tight, 45-minute single-act thriller. A participant answers a phone call from a panicked young man who insists a monster is trapped in his closet.
‘It’s a one-off, unlike Lennox Mutual, which is a serialized experience, CLAWS is a one-act. It’s 45 minutes and it’s for one person. And it’s a thriller,’ said Neiden.
The project swiftly secured the Performance Award at IndieCade 2021. Six years later, the piece continues to run intermittently, selling out every block of tickets. It proved that remote performance could maintain a dedicated audience without physical venues.
‘So I had been doing remote experiences since 2018. So before the pandemic, but then when the pandemic hit, the first piece I wrote was CLAWS, and that took off. And then Lennox Mutual sort of exists, the initial and continuing audience for that, a great deal of it came from the audience that CLAWS brought us. So that’s kind of our calling card a little bit just in terms of it’s accessible, it’s self-contained, it’s something that has a much lower barrier to entry and something that is much easier to wrap one’s head around. And it’s also just fun. I think. It’s like a fun, spooky time.’
The early success of that short thriller built a foundation of trust. Callers who survived the closet monster were willing to gamble on a broader, more confusing experiment.
‘That was sort of responsible for getting us a large part of where we are, and I think laid the groundwork for people to trust something like Lennox Mutual, which truly was an experiment of an experiment. It was completely out of left field, and enough people trusted it to get through it and then were able to spread the word. And there’s nothing like word of mouth with stuff like this.’
The Mechanics of Unscripted Performance
Managing a performance that changes with every phone call requires an entirely different approach to classical theatrical direction. Neiden avoids traditional staging methods. He treats his role akin to that of an athletic coach preparing performers for a match. The script cannot account for every human variable. The actor must remain flexible.
‘You’re not directing a scene that exists already. You’re not preparing people, and you can’t prepare people for everything; there’s no way to do that. The person who comes through is completely different. You’re going to get surprised. It’s not about preparing for everything; it’s about preparing for anything. It’s creating a kind of boxing neutral from which you can reach any position, you can respond to anything, you can parry, you can hit back… and I use confrontational language because that’s been my MO as a creator and Candle House’s MO since we began: confrontation. Making a mess. You know, it’s work that keeps you safe but doesn’t keep you comfortable.’
The company selects its actors from non-traditional paths. They look for multi-hyphenate artists who bring unusual perspectives to the telephones. The current ensemble includes a voice actor with a background at Nintendo, a performer from the interactive hit The Twenty-Sided Tavern, and an actor fresh from a run at the Public Theater. These performers must balance structural objectives with massive real-time improvisation.
‘Because that’s how you create something genuinely interactive, is if the person on the other end of the line is bringing something as opposed to just responding. You know, it takes two to tango,’ said Neiden.
Expanding Formats and International Audiences
The remote nature of the work allows Candle House Collective to cross borders easily. Callers from the UK, it seems, often bring a dry, sarcastic sensibility that contrasts with American callers. Neiden does not adjust the scripts to match national characters; instead, he relies on a rigid philosophical stance regarding his audience.
‘The pieces are designed to accommodate not everyone, but anyone. And when I say not everyone, seriously. I’m a firm subscriber to the church of not everything is for everyone. I think any good piece of art is going to turn some people off, is going to have an audience that self-selects. Because that means it’s decisive, that means it has a point of view. I think that if a piece of art doesn’t really have a point of view, it could maybe attract everybody but the attraction probably won’t be that substantial. But the goal isn’t for everyone to enjoy the work; the goal is for anyone to be able to enjoy the work. That’s accessibility, I think, is not it’s for everyone but it’s for anyone.’
‘I use confrontational language because that’s been my MO as a creator and Candle House’s MO since we began: confrontation. Making a mess. You know, it’s work that keeps you safe but doesn’t keep you comfortable.’
His creative influences reflect this uncompromising line. He inhales the work of Simon McBurney and The Wooster Group. He listens to Billie Holiday for her ability to turn any song into a ghost story. But his structural foundation rests on classic American television anthologies.
‘That was extremely formative in a lot of ways. I sort of consider myself, or other people have, maybe jokingly, maybe not, said that Candle House is like the Twilight Zone of theatre. Which I take, which is the highest compliment anybody could ever pay,’ said Neiden.
The work looks to be expanding beyond the telephone receiver. A wall of Post-it notes behind Neiden’s desk tracks concepts ready to mobilise. They recently staged The Pineapple, an in-person experiment inside a New Jersey Motel 6, centred on an alien abduction narrative. More surprisingly, Neiden is moving toward traditional theatre. The collective is currently conducting workshop readings for The Grandma Play, a conventional stage play.
I suggest that Evan really needs to bring something to the Fringe someday — the audiences would lap it up. I didn’t get him to commit, but never say never!
Despite the shifting formats, Neiden’s core objective remains constant. He intends to penetrate the thick blanket of modern media saturation. In a culture carrying global horrors in a pocket-sized screen to bed every night, scaring or unsettling an audience requires an entirely different level of precision.
‘I think it’s harder than it’s ever been to scare people. You know, everyone says oh people are so sensitive now, I kind of think the opposite is true. I think with information at our fingertips and the horrors of the world in a little box that we carry to bed, I truly think we have much thicker skins as people than we would be led to believe.”
He might be talking about CLAWS, but his final words seem to sum up everything that makes Evan Neidle the creative he is:
‘And I think it’s very difficult to create change, to get under that layer of skin. But that’s why we’re here. Why would it be worth doing if it wasn’t difficult? You know, sometimes we do things just because it’s hard. And that’s not a bad thing.’
Featured Image: Evan Neiden
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