How Candle House’s Immersive Theater Show ‘The Pineapple’ Became a Spooky L.A. Hit, Playing 76 Shows With Just One Ticket for Each Performance

Part of the thrill of theater is that you’re taking part in a one-time experience, never to be recorded or repeated, in which anyone who wasn’t part of that live audience with you will simply have to take your word for how it was. Still, you may seek out clues about whether your experience of the show was widely shared or unique to you — taking note of how the audience is audibly responding, or listening in on mid-point reactions in the restroom during an intermission, or looking over at a companion and comparing notes on the ride home.

But what if there were no other audience members? (As in, deliberately… not because it was a night of badly promoted equity-waiver theater.) No friends or strangers to share immediate laughs or gasps with, let alone notes afterward? Just a small cast of actors and you, paying for the privilege of being an audience of one?

Add to this the idea that the play — about which you’re meant to know little in advance, beyond the fact that it may involve supernatural elements — takes place in a secret location, revealed only at the last minute, and even then not through anything so obvious as an actual street address. For anyone with a shy bone in their bodies, it can sound a little intimidating, knowing a band of actors is going to collectively train its sole attention on you, even before getting to the scariest aspect of all: There will be audience participation. That means you, bub.

That, in the most basic outline, is what you needed to know about “The Pineapple,” an immersive theater production that just wrapped up a 76-performance run — for, you guessed it, a total of 76 audience members — in North Hollywood. It was put on by a company called Candle House, which, though little-known as of yet in the theatrical mainstream, has enough of a cult national reputation that nearly all of the 76 shows sold out pretty much just on word of mouth, at $247 a pop. (These sellouts occurred even before the show got its first piece of substantial L.A. press, via a slightly unnerved Los Angeles Times review that was published late into the Sept. 15-Oct. 5 production.)

There are no immediate plans to bring “The Pineapple” back — which allows us to get into spoilers — but suffice it to say that this was a big enough hit, on its own strange scale, that Candle House’s next L.A. production will arrive with a much, much bigger profile, even if what they do naturally benefits from a sense of being on the down-low.

I attended one of those shows… although, already, “attended” feels like the wrong word for a production in which there are very few moments over the course of an hour where your participation can be considered passive. There is no way to overstate just how subjective everyone’s experience must have been, but right off the bat, I can state a few things: (1) I thought I was understanding what was going on in the show’s narrative, until I arrived at a point of being fairly baffled. (2) I didn’t mind the bafflement so much; confused or no, I had one of the best times I’ve ever had in a theater production. (3) I felt so disoriented after coming out, in a pleasantly buzzed kind of way, that I proceeded to drive down Lankershim Blvd…. and then keep driving for quite a way, blocks past the freeway on-ramp that was supposed to take me home, because I was somewhere else. A review doesn’t get better than that, right?

I should also mention that I can easily imagine people for whom participating in “The Pineapple” would be, like, one of the worst nights of their lives… although I don’t imagine them being the types of people who would take a chance on spending $247 for something that sounds spooky and potentially challenging, so the self-selection probably works out fine.

I did a debriefing days after the show with Candle House founder Evan Neiden (who was also, I didn’t realize til our phone call, one of the actors I’d been interacting with). One of the first things I asked him was whether any of the audience members in this or their other productions has ever used the “safe word” that will end the show. Not surprisingly, he said it was very rare and that most ticket-buyers have a good idea that a show like this will make some demands of them.

“The reactions have really impressive depth and breadth,” Neiden told me, “but all the reactions I’ve heard have been intense in one way or another. Ultimately, what I’ve taken pride in is hearing that regardless of how people felt about it, that they’ve never experienced anything quite like it. Even if they had seen a lot of experimental theater, maybe the themes in this were different, for instance… Most people that I’ve spoken to have found it in equal measure scary and silly, and maybe cathartic, and that’s the best-case scenario for me.

“Not everyone is going to like it,” Neiden continued. “And sometimes I don’t think there’s any way to fully know if something’s for you before going in. I’ve seen shows that I thought would be 100% up my alley, and then I saw them and it was maybe not so much, versus seeing something that seemed totally out of left field but like, ‘Oh, give it a shot,’ because I heard something good, from someone I trust. This is a place to take a risk, to surrender, and at the very least, to experience something that can only happen for you in that moment — something altogether fleeting that is just yours. You know, the most tangible souvenirs people walk away with from ‘The Pineapple’ are a lei and a memory.”

His reference to the actual lei that attendees leave with does require some setup, so now’s as good a time as any to attempt a plot summary. (I was about to say “fruitless” attempt, but well, you’ve seen the title.) Everyone exiting the show had a Hawaiian-style plastic flower chain placed around their neck to send the off into the NoHo night, which might seem like an unexpectedly comic touch at the end of a show that is focused on … aliens. Even though the narrative is sci-fi/horror-oriented, and participants are promised an actual alien encounter. It appears the aliens in question have become convinced that one thing all human beings love is beach culture, and that our national or global anthem is the Jimmy Buffett song “Margaritaville.” When an alien baby is finally produced, it takes the form of… a pineapple. So there’s an extent to which you might call the final subgenre the show lands in as, for lack of a better term, tiki horror.

But that’s getting ahead of the initial setup. When you sign up for the show (and sign waivers), you are ostensibly answered a classified ad for someone who needs a fellow believers in UFOs to help participate in a ritual that will bring the aliens out into the open. On the day of your encounter, you start getting texts from the young man who placed the ad, berating you if you don’t seem enthusiastic enough. He also sends coordinates about which back street parking lot to show up in, and which unmarked door to knock on (“underneath the State Farm sign”) at exactly the appointed time. Once admitted, after being sure I’d shown up at the wrong place, he shined a flashlight in my eyes, made certain I knew the safe word, recorded me giving consent, and relieved me of shoes, phone, and ost everything else. I was led into a dingy room that served as his bedroom, with a sleeping bag, walls full of conspiracy theory cutouts connected by thumbtacks and string, and kitchen tools to squeeze pineapple pulp into juice.

Without recounting every amusing or harrowing detail, a good deal of interactive psychological grilling ensued. I was asked questions about living and deceased family members, failed relationships, religious affiliations, etc…. all of which I knew could and would be used against me later. The young man spilled some details of his own, like how he was abandoned in a superstore parking lot when he was 8, and had lived a sad and itinerant life since then before eventually coming to realize that his real family was from space, and now it was time to meet up. My hands were taped together and I was made to crawl on all fours to a bathroom, where another man was soaking in a bloody tube, handcuffed, revealing that he’d been the previous respondent, chosen to be impregnated with an alien baby, but failed the attempt when it turned out he had lied about not having an allergy to pineapple juice. Then he, too, asked me personal details, asked me to hold his hands in prayer, and…

Perhaps it’s OK to stop there, as things got considerably weirder from there, including the introduction of the cast’s one woman, who is some kind of operative for the aliens… and whose otherworldliness is apparent, apart from the maniacal grin on her face, by the fact that she is wearing a sticker identifying her as “WOMAN.” I had learned ahead of time, from reading the L.A. Times’ review, that my encounter would likely involve some kissing on the lips, massaging and (no lie) spooning. I had a sneaking suspicion all of this would happen with the gnarlier male cast members and not the beautiful woman, which did turn out to be the case. (Names of the very improv-capable cast members were released only after the show concluded its run: Rett Keeter, Cece Kelly, Ian Michaels and Neiden.)

I had expected the show to be frightening, but apart from one moment where a flashlight came on to reveal a figure in the dark inches away, there were no jump scares, or anything that even induced very much anxiety. (The only truly scary moment was when someone pulled some opaque goggles off my face and my brand new $400 glasses went flying off with them. “We want you to have your spectacles,” a voice said quietly when I expressed panic about having them stepped on, and eventually I was able to rejoin the land of the sighted.) I think you can only experience so much fear in a show in which, toward the end, you will be dancing to “Margaritaville.” I laughed out loud a few times… maybe most when, not long after I was played back the recording of myself saying “I consent,” the tables were turned on my tormentor and someone played back his consent recording.

The one thing I was asked not to reveal was how the show ended for me; even though the production is over, there are different ways it can end, and Candle House didn’t want anyone who got a different ending to have their experience of that compromised by comparing it with someone else’s. Fair enough. I would only add that, for as funny and un-terrifying as my show turned out to be, it was never so amusing that I stopped being in at least a mild state of genuinely creeped-out. And I found some resonance in the underlying themes, at least as I semi-understood them, about loners’ search for chosen family and belonging, forgiveness, and… well, alienation.

I asked Neiden about the show’s script and improvisation teetering between humor, dread and sheer curiosity. “Peanut butter and jelly go great on their own, but together they are something else entirely,” he said, “and horror and comedy going together is a timeless way to get people squirming in their chairs in more ways than one. They get people to open up a bit and connect with teach other, because both comedy and horror appeal to our more visceral or primal instincts. They activate the things that we like doing or that we’re wired to do — laugh and flee. And participating in a kind of cat-like hunter game, being entertained in a way that animals do for each other, can be very simple. And that universal language is part of why I love that combination. You can find the comedy and find the fear in the things that make us human, regardless of the differences that would make maybe another story harder to parse.”

I was curious what tradition Neiden saw himself drawing on most for “The Pineapple.” Is it classic immersive theater? (Decades ago, I had a transforming experience at an early production of “Tony and Tina’s Wedding,” the happy memory of which played into my eagerness to sign up for this one.) Or does it have a combination to the world of “haunts”? Looking up the coordinates for my arrival, I saw that the back door connected to a multi-room theater venue that was soon to be used for a traditional haunted house, and Neiden said in an earlier interview he had worked in such a place before. Or, for all the horror-adjacent trimmings, does he see it more as experimental theater?

“I think it’s really truly at the nexus of all three,” he said. “Which equal parts pulls on my experiences — scaring people in the dark, and growing up in New York and seeing offbeat and experimental theater, Back then, the mentality in the experimental theater scene was: There’s always another way to do something. There’s always another kind of formation we can try, and that the trying and the process is as much of what makes the art as the product itself. So it was the experimental theater and then sort of classic interactive stuff — everything from ‘Tony and Tina’s Wedding’ to ‘Tamara’ that was at the Armory all those years ago, to all the other immersive experiences, big or small, that got us where we are now. Especially in L.A., which has a very rich and storied history of seeing all the different ways that people can can move through a world and be moved through a world, all of it has informed ‘Pineapple’ in equal measure. I don’t think ‘Pineapple’ exists in the way it does without any of those.”

Not everything Candle House has done has had a supernatural or otherworldly element, but a good deal of it has, and there’s an obvious antecedent for that. “‘The Twilight Zone,’ in particular, what (Rod) Serling and (Charles) Beaumont and others did with that show to create 20-minute alternate realities for the viewer to step into, is such a guiding force. There would be no Candle House without ‘The Twilight Zone.’ It’s such a guiding factor to me in terms of how some stories are laden with meaning and have palpable morals or conclusions behind them. Others are more like that joke that was going around about ‘The Twilight Zone’ online — ‘if there were two guys on the moon and one hit the other with a rock, would that be screwed up or what?’ Not everything has to make sense. Not everything has to have a clear message, and the mess is part of what makes the work exciting.”

Neiden says Candle House has four live theatrical productions already written and in the works. But before “The Pineapple,” that’s not what the company was known for. They first made their name with remote interactive experiences, first through seeking out new ways to involve people in collective storytelling on the internet, and then, most famously, through telephone experiences. The phone encounters were conceived before the pandemic, but once quarantine began, the idea of entertaining people through interactive phone plays really began to pick up steam.

Although “The Pineapple” is over, as Neiden looks to move onto the next live/legit production, Candle House still has two long-running phone experiences going for anyone to buy a ticket for, wherever they may be: “Claws” and “Lennox Mutual.” They could hardly be more different, apart from both being twisty. “Claws” is a one-time experience, of just under an hour, in which you fulfill the act of being a hotline phone counselor, talking to a teenager who is convinced he has locked a monster in his closet. “Lennox Mutual” is less tense and more whimsical, and something that can be experienced in one session or across dozens of calls, as actors on the other end take you through a bureaucratic system that some have compared to a phonic equivalent of “Severance.”

I haven’t indulged in “Lennox Mutual,” although, based on user reviews I’ve read, I’m dying to. I did do “Claws” and can testify to how rattled it’s possible to get if you buy fully in. Unlike some of the other Candle House productions, “Claws” has an inevitable ending most people will reach, as they typically counsel the kid to confront his fear. (But not everyone: A New Yorker journalist wrote, “In the end, after I had finally persuaded him to walk downstairs, go outside, and ask a neighbor to call the police, my heart was racing. As I hung up the phone, I felt a surge of triumph, followed by an immediate adrenaline crash. Only then did I think, Oh, wait, that wasn’t how that was supposed to go.”)

“‘Claws’ and ‘Lennox Mutual’ are sort of our installation pieces. ‘Lennox Mutual’ has been running for four years; ‘Claws’ has been running for six. Those are pieces that are designed to be calling cards for what we do, and hyper-accessible —truly all you need is your phone. Over the almost 10 years of being in operation, I’ve created over 20 remote experiences.