Settling into The Nest: Rich Immersive Theater in an LA Storage Locker
a no-spoilers review of one of LA’s coolest (and priciest) experiences.
When you arrive at the immersive theater experience The Nest, the email explains, you should stand on the sidewalk graphic of a cassette tape, the well-suited logo of the project, and ring the doorbell, which is also suitably chosen, a Ring video doorbell because Immersive Theater and Escape Rooms like to keep their eyes on you. You have also been instructed not to bring your mobile phones with you through the experience, no doubt to prevent taking pictures or videos but also perhaps to further the immersion. (Think here about those little movie theater messages. We professors used to try similar prohibitions to keep our students’ eyes on us, as if students came to universities to gaze at their professors. Ha!) That restriction also sends you back to the era of landlines and rotary phones. Having not read any reviews or heard much about the experience other than “soak it in” and “take your time,” I didn’t know what to expect from there. So as far as I knew, the experience started the moment we pressed the doorbell. What happened next, was at once comically off-kilter and perfectly on point.
When we rang the doorbell at the start of the immersive experience The Nest, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. What happened next, was comically off-kilter and also the point.
Within seconds of us pushing the button, a car alarm began blaring further up the street. A-ha! I thought. Next, an SUV backed down the street. Yes, BACKED DOWN till it was parallel with where we were standing. The car, a dark-colored SUV, was driven by a couple, maybe in their thirties, and the man hopped out of the driver’s side, rushed over to a parked car that was also directly in front of us, opened the trunk, rooted around, and then went back to his car only to have a slight disagreement with the woman in the passenger seat. She clearly instructed him to go check the inside of the car, which he proceeded to do, albeit without enthusiasm. Ah, this was so rich already!
Had they noticed my wife and I putting our valuables in our trunk? Had they heard us kibitzing or bickering over where to stow things?
As this transpired, my wife lepttelling me not to stare. (The two-person limit on the event encourages you to come with a significant other, date, or friend.) Why not? We had paid dearly for this immersive experience, and I didn’t want to miss a moment of it. So what happened next only confirmed my suspicions.
Down the block from us, maybe about a quarter of the way to the next street, a light was bobbing its way toward us. Soon, it became clear that the light was on the head of a man who was carrying his two weiner-shaped dogs. Actual dogs. A character straight of central casting, he walked right by us with his dogs, turning his head and head lamp side to side as he walked and, if I remember correctly, muttering to himself. This was INCREDIBLE! I was in the game. The GAME!
It all was so clever. You ring the doorbell, the car alarm goes off loud enough for the whole street to hear or see their cues. Who could miss the themes raise by the couple in the car, searching for something dear to them in the other vehicle, while you turn you head away from the building where the event takes place, and then their small disagreement over THINGS in a CAR, all to get you thinking about your relationship to stuff. Think back to the car alarm, a tool we employ to protect one big item we own that has EQUAL value to someone else, as opposed to our items of personal value. And then, the piece de resistance, the man with his quirky headlamp and comically shaped DOGS. His personal treasures, so dear to him he walks for them! Perfection.
I was so proud of myself for noticing all of these carefully wrought symbols. Only, later, the docent explained to us that what we had seen was pure coincidence. Hmm. I grudgingly accepted that for the sake of politeness. But if that were so, it couldn’t have been more perfect. Or perhaps, the effect of The Nest only reinforces our ability to find meaning in everyday, ordinary things. Let me backup along this street a bit and explain.
The Nest, written and directed by Jeff Leinenveber and Jarrett Lantz, is a 60-to-90-minute immersive experience that takes place in a storage locker that you’ve just inherited upon the passing of its main character. As you arrive on the scene, you are told that it’s yours to explore, though the space is unusual. That’s the premise at least. You’re given instructions about some of the interfaces you will encounter: there will be cassette tapes (yes, actual old-school cassette tapes) to play in a (real) cassette player and occasional keys and other locks. Each key has its lock and the combination locks, well, you’ll have to figure those out yourself. The main instruction was don’t search too deeply. What you need to see will be in the vicinity fo the cassette tapes. Don’t hunt for deeply hidden clues, just look and KEEP IT MOVING. Also, like most escape rooms — not that this is an escape room — The Nest has its own way of giving you assistance to keep it moving.
Indeed, as I had been told by No Proscenium’s Kathryn Yu of No-Proscenium, The Nest is NOT an escape room. Hmm, that’s up for debate.
The premise of The Nest, exploring the space of a disappeared occupant has a long lineage in electronic literature. Stories from Gabriella Infinita by Jaime Alejandro Rodrigo Ruiz to Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Fun House by John McDaid to more contemporary video games like Gone Home involve sifting through the stuff of life in deserted spaces. And similar to those stories, rather than a treasure hunt, The Nest has you sorting out the treasure that is the residue that remains on the everyday objects of our lives.
Is it an Escape Room?
This was the subject of a long debate between my wife and me. Well, like most debates between us, she was sharing her opinion, and I was responding in my head, as we sipped on some terrible Jack in the Box dessert drinks in my cluttered car while waiting for our private showtime.
“Not and escape room? Then why did we have to solve puzzles to move on? Why did we have to follow the light from [spoilery things]? Why did we have to find the keys, find the combination lock numbers, and [do that rather cool thing] in the room that looked like [you’ll see]?”
Also, there was the matter of premise slippage. The Nest is a storage locker with twists and turns made mostly out of boxes, expanding in surprising ways like House of Leaves. It seems like the owner (and experience design crew) has created a space straight out of Hoarders that could also be considered a response to LA’s housing crisis. Someone has been nesting (get it?) with all of their treasured mementos.
At least, until it stops being that and starts being a path of recreated spaces from the life of the character. Had this person recreated these spaces in the storage locker? Or were we now somehow traveling through spaces and memories, along the lines of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Most of the time, I didn’t care about the slippage as I was caught up in a very rich and moving story. Afterward, in discussion with my very rational wife, it did trouble me a bit.
In our conversation, my wife added a few other questions about the logic of the story, having to do with the age of the character, what happens to our missing protagonist, and how clearly that is indicated in the materials. Surely, there are some gaps, which I think the participant can fill on their own how they will. Still, I also am okay with both a bit of uncertainty and even slight inconsistencies in favor of supporting the overall project here, tending to see filling in gaps as my part of the participation — in addition to all the crawling around through smokey passages with a flashlight.
But the biggest criticism my wife raised was: why not make a real Nest? Why not make such a story out of the real items from some deceased Angeleno’s life. Surely such storage lockers COVER Los Angeles, the myriad minor pyramids and oh-so-common burial chambers of all of us hoarders (I feel so seen), full of obsolete media technology, nicknacks, postcards, velveteen rabbits, faded polaroids. And if not, if this is to be a fiction, why not add even more story to the nicknacks? For example, postcards often were blank on the other side. Why not fill in some text to fill out the story?
Seeing how we took 90 minutes and had to keep being spurred on by the experience runners, I can understand why they have chosen to reduce the amount of in-story text. And if you’ve ever seen me FROZEN staring at some ticket stub from 1987 in my garage, having been sent there by very organized and minimalist wife, you’d know why they wouldn’t want to introduce such paralyzing content.
And, in response to my wife’s critique, all I could do was look down at our discarded Jack-in-the-Box desserts or the broken-off metal car logo preserved in my cup holders (the ELA and NTRA of the Rojo Mojo). The theme was all right there. Maybe all we need to do is go back to the couple we’d seen at the start of (or just before) our experience and their quarrel about something lost in that car, the kind of thing you have to search twice for, even if you don’t hold much hope it’s still there. And this message is also in an after-show experience that gets you to reflect on the stuff of your life.
And, then you see the power of The Nest, the power that its simple but powerful notion holds, that lifetimes of stories reside in our every day things and our own peculiar attachment to them, our headlamps and our clutched weiner dogs. Not to mention, its little encouragement to relish your 60–90 minutes on this Earth because it all goes by too quickly, as the great show-runner of time always keeps moving, though perhaps not always so helpfully, from those moments, both treasures and trauma, that fill up the storage lockers of lives.
