On Making Fake Friends, The Personalized Experience, and ‘Lennox Mutual’ (The NoPro Review)

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.

This is Candle House Collective’s Lennox Mutual, a serialized, long-form immersive theatre telephone experience posing as a “life en-surance” company’s customer service line. 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.

(What follows contains logistical and structural spoilers for the work, but minimal plot spoilers. This is based upon my own personal experience with the piece; however, since the show is heavily personalized, one’s journey may differ considerably.)

Lennox Mutual is a show that reaches wide, exploring the meaning of a single individual’s life and our all too fragile existence on this planet through a maze of corporate bureaucracy. An extremely ambitious project, Lennox Mutual asks, what and who do we leave behind when we go? And what does it mean to spend one’s time wisely?

It is not an easy immersive experience to grapple with, especially given the subject matter, its personalized nature, and the amount of trust it asks from its participants. Lennox Mutual has a learning curve. Some folks will bounce off the surface right away. It likes to test your limits and your boundaries. Lennox Mutual also wants to be interacted with in a very specific way. Expect to be provoked and experience intense emotions; a character may also be mean to you at times or say cruel things to you or ask extremely invasive questions. And it will potentially be a difficult experience for you if you have any history with a serious illness in a friend or family member, or have experienced the death of a loved one, particularly if they were young when they passed.

Over the course of my many months with Lennox Mutual, I have had moments of soul-aching sadness. I also had moments of profound joy.

I played games. I waffled over decisions. I sang (no, really) multiple times. I was uncomfortable. I sought advice. I wondered where this was all going. I filed complaints. I was (lightly?) stalked.

I said and did things and those things were later used in conversations with me, sometimes quite unexpectedly, even though I was informed all calls were recorded. I sometimes questioned why I was even doing it. I was pushed and I pushed back, sometimes to unsatisfying results.

Sometimes, though, words failed me. And I could only sit in silence.

And, sometimes, I just listened.

Lennox Mutual has a narrative to uncover and also a meta-narrative around that central story. The meticulous worldbuilding has both a remarkable depth and breadth, each detail implying layers that go levels and levels deep. The content can get very intense and personal at times, more so than the other Candle House Collective shows I’ve done. The experience feels like it has an insatiable appetite for personal information about you. It’s as much about you, the participant, as it is about the world they’ve created, weaving together an epic adventure with incredible characters and breathtaking moments, as well as multiple mysteries about this so-called “life en-surance” company and its founder, Thomas Lennox. You can tell them everything about yourself if you wish — things not even your best friend or partner might know — and I’m guessing some participants go ahead and do that.

But even as I thought I was making progress on figuring out the show’s mysteries, Candle House Collective would periodically put me in a holding pattern; I would have multiple sessions in a row where I made no progress at all, not for lack of trying. At times they put the experience on pause, with mandatory breaks in between sessions. The company would also on occasion cancel my booked sessions, sometimes on very short notice. Once I waited over two weeks between scheduled calls; another time I was asked to await further instructions and a month passed by as I waited for them to contact me. That’s a long time to be on the edge of your seat, waiting to find out what happens next in the story.

The experience is both highly structured, as you’re essentially on rails during the main narrative beats, and not really structured at the same time, with the freedom to go off script with your customer service representative during a call.

Like all things, it eventually ends.

For a lot of people, the sheer level of commitment — be it time, financial, and/or emotional — to finish Lennox Mutual will be quite challenging. I’ve racked up an absurd number of calls over this year, even for someone who attends a lot of immersive theatre. As of this writing, I have reached the conclusion of the story, but it took around 20 hours of intimate, interactive, personalized sessions to get there, spread out over the course of 10 months.

Folks in it for the long haul can get discounted three-packs (currently priced at $47.50) and the company offers an “all-you-eat” Eternity plan for new callers (priced at $675 for as many sessions as you wish, though it’s typically sold out). I try not to think about the cumulative amount I’ve spent on Lennox Mutual this year. I must also acknowledge I’m very lucky enough to be able to afford the show at all.

The experience is self-paced for the most part, with caveats for the lulls I mentioned earlier. Participants can start at any time that they wish and they are able to take breaks at any time. The experience will “remember” you and wait for you to return. One participant I know only does a single call a month, whereas my pace was closer to two, sometimes three, calls a week. It has taken me 10 months to finish Lennox Mutual but some audience members may end up stretching this experience out to 11 or 12 months or more.

One reason why participants may be inclined to slow down their progress is the ability of the extraordinarily talented performers to improvise. You can simply ignore the menu options and chat with the customer service representative instead. And the company doesn’t exactly discourage participants going off script during their calls. One of the taglines they use is “your time is yours to spend” (literally, given the price of sessions, I suppose). So if you enjoy vamping 1:1 with a talented actor and have both the time and budget to do so, you might be one of the folks going at a snail’s pace. Fans of interactive theatre will probably recognize the inclination; at times, it’s just more fun to verbally spar an actor rather than do the thing you’re “supposed” to be doing. Especially when the customer service representative remembers your name and what you said during a previous session.

Over the course of my experience, I began to learn my reps’ names and recognize their voices. Soon, I started to suspect that their jobs working the phones at this “life en-surance” company held a tragically deeper meaning or purpose, though they were cagey about it, giving me very little information about themselves while asking for a lot of information from me. Over time, I started to get to see the customer service reps as people. To become familiar, or, even, friendly at times. Try to make them laugh now and again, perhaps. Start to pick up their hobbies and interests, such as Dungeons & Dragons, or the characteristics of black holes, as well as try to investigate the ties that bound them all together.

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There might be a temptation to compare this kind of relationship to the kind of “parasocial relationship” that a fan may have with a celebrity or public figure. First described in the 1950s by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, a parasocial relationship is a one-sided relationship where one person is completely unaware of the other’s existence, often mediated through television or other media platforms. You might, for example, form a parasocial relationship with the members of your favorite band via Instagram or your favorite influencer on TikTok over time. And yet there is a stigma around people who form parasocial relationships, with public perception typically viewing these kinds of relationships as “toxic” because of the lack of reciprocation. It is estimated that about half of Americans have been in parasocial relationships, though only 16% of them will admit to it. The Cleveland Clinic says that these relationships should be viewed as neither good nor bad, they just are.

But, while there are similarities, my relationship with the characters of Lennox Mutual feels different from a parasocial relationship. And it certainly feels more complicated than I would have expected.

Performers in Lennox Mutual are acutely aware of the participant’s existence, in 20 minute increments, with interactions that are frequently introspective and intense. The show knows a frighteningly lot about me, to the extent where the company could probably steal my identity if they wanted to. I also have no idea what becomes of my information now that I’ve finished the show nor how the company safeguards participant data from misuse.

The characters in Lennox Mutual address callers by their names and remember where they are in the story. A customer service representative will often say that “it’s good to hear your voice” at the start of a call when the participant is a regular caller. One actor even playfully scolded me for misidentifying them. I started out with one representative as being my favorite and eventually shifted loyalties to another one over time. (Sorry, J. It’s not you, it’s me.)

They know my birthday, my email, my phone number, and the name of my dog. They have notes about my vision problems and my chronic illnesses and more. So it’s tough not to start to form quasi-relationships with the same set of characters, when you end up speaking to them a few times a week, week after week, even if you’re not sure if you like their characters. Especially if you have a somewhat adversarial relationship with one specific, prickly customer service representative. But I digress.

I don’t really know what to call it. A “fictional friendship,” perhaps. An attachment or emotional connection to a fictional character in an interactive/immersive theatre piece, in which the character acknowledges your presence and responds to your actions in a genuine, meaningful way and remembers your past conversations.

With Lennox Mutual, these characters might even become vulnerable with you in a seemingly unscripted moment. Or shock you with something you said weeks or months ago. Or mention a fact about you that you’ve never explicitly told the show about. The Lennox Mutual characters have been a regular presence for me in a world that is often unpredictable. Not always a comforting presence, but a regular one nonetheless.

And, it is indeed a two way street between character and participant in Lennox Mutual. I have sometimes refused to answer a question in a way they wanted me to. I have also accused a character of enjoying giving me a hard time. When a grieving character appeared to be upset and lashed out at me, I tried to do what I could to comfort them; and, perhaps more meaningfully, this was the same character who I had been combative with in a previous call. His words still stung but my perception of this character changed significantly after this interaction. The company is taking big risks in this piece. There were sessions where I just wanted to yell at a fictional character or two or swear with frustration. And the format of a phone call can often make these interactions feel extra intimate or intense.

Make no mistake, this is still a not-real “relationship” with a not-real “person” that only exists in the liminal space of a theatre piece. But just because it’s not real doesn’t mean the emotions aren’t real. Is it weird to miss someone who wasn’t even real in the first place? Is it odd to feel sad that you won’t get to speak to your favorite characters any more? Is it wrong to feel empathy for fictional people going through a fictional trauma? After all, isn’t feeling real emotions within a heightened context — and a safe space — often what makes immersive theatre so compelling in the first place?

I do want to pause here for a moment and discuss the final call, which takes a turn which I found to be somewhat unexpected. Participants who complete Lennox Mutual are encouraged to share their experience if they wish but are asked not to spoil the details of the ending. So I’ll just say that the ending contains material I believe would be very triggering for some. It is content which is introduced only in the final minutes of the experience and narratively comes a bit out of nowhere. This fact alone makes it difficult for me to out-right recommend the show without significant caveats.

I was advised in real-time by the performer that the following scene might be “upsetting” or might “hurt me,” and that I had a choice to hear it or choose an alternative. (This was the first time during the experience where I can even remember a choice like this being offered.) But this choice was offered without any specifics as to the category of content I would encounter: be it sexual assault, suicide, murder, violence against children or animals, self-harm, verbal abuse, or something else entirely. So I didn’t feel like I was making a totally informed decision, and I was under time pressure to make it.

I did choose to listen to the material without knowing what exactly I was consenting to, as I was eager to get to the end of the story having already invested so much time and effort into Lennox Mutual. I also felt like my experience would have been incomplete had I declined. And I already was in a heightened emotional state, knowing it was my final call. But I really would have liked to have the ability to review more specific advisory information in advance, such as a detailed written content warning — even hidden/collapsed by default on their website — so I could judge for myself ahead of time whether or not I wanted to proceed, and mentally prepare myself. Instead, I was making a choice in the moment without all the information necessary. As a result, I felt underprepared to engage with disturbing material.

When purchasing a Lennox Mutual session, the terms and conditions at the bottom of the ticketing site merely state that the session could contain “personal or intense content” and that attendees of the experience who want to know about content warnings are directed to contact the company via email. I personally did not reach out during my experience so I can’t comment on what happens if you do email them. I’ll also note that participants can also always choose to say the safe phrase on a call to end their session at any time, which I never did. However, I also have knowledge of at least one participant in the immersive fan community whose experience with Lennox Mutual crossed the line for them (and I became aware of it in real-time as it was happening). Overall, the lack of transparency is troubling and I sincerely urge the company to reconsider its policies on pro-actively providing content warnings ahead of time (like so many other companies do) and its approach to participant safety, particularly since this experience is so tailored to each individual person and nearly all the interaction happens in 1:1s. Being clearer about audience expectations would not diminish the experience, at all, in my opinion, having completed the entire show.

I now look back at my time with Lennox Mutual with a mix of emotions. I’m sad my journey is over. I’m jealous of folks just starting their experience. I have concerns about participant safety and data collection. The experience is not for everyone. It asks participants to give a lot of themselves. It will make you wait. It will poke at your soft spots. It may upset you. It will ask questions you potentially can’t answer. It might make you cry. It’s not perfect. There are parts of my experience I’ll treasure forever. There are parts I’d rather forget. There are parts of my experience I’ll be haunted by for years to come. And it contains some of the best work Candle House Collective has ever created, in terms of both performance and storytelling, but only if you can get deep enough to experience them.

But one question still lingers for me, as I reflect back on the last 10 months: would I call my Lennox Mutual customer service representatives my “friends,” now that my experience is over? I’m not sure. I don’t think I would even recognize most of the performers if I passed them on the street. I don’t know all that much about them, the real-life actors. They know a hell of a lot about me.

I’d probably recognize their voices.

And I would hope they’d recognize mine.

What I do know is this: I’m going to miss each one of them. I’m so grateful for our time together. Because at the end of the day, that’s all we have left: time.

So let us use it wisely.

Lennox Mutual, from Candle House Collective, is currently booking through Dec. 22, 2024. Sessions are $20, with discounts on multi-call packages.

As of December 2024, the creators of Lennox Mutual, Candle House Collective, have reached out to No Proscenium stating that they have implemented a much clearer content warning and alternative path for the experience’s finale, as well as making the show’s Privacy Policy more evident to participants and eliminating any waiting periods.

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