I Was Humiliated, Spooned and Kissed on the Lips at L.A.’s Strangest Sold-Out Show

My instructions via text message were to meet at an abandoned alley in North Hollywood at precisely 8:40 p.m. I was told, rather ominously, not to “talk to anyone outside” and to knock on the black door under a State Farm sign.

What the instructions neglected to mention was that there were two State Farm signs in the alley.

I knocked on the door beneath the first one I spotted. Nothing. With my appointed time approaching, I texted the number I’d been given. A response came quickly: Wrong State Farm sign. The correct door was about 50 feet down.

I made it. But the disorientation turned out to be an appropriate introduction to The Pineapple. When the door finally opened, an agitated young man who resembled Ryan Gosling (Rett Keeter) shined an LED flashlight directly into my eyes, a gesture that would become familiar over the next hour.

“Do you know the safe word?” he demanded.

I did. He instructed me to shout, “I want to find aliens!”

I complied.

Louder.

“I WANT TO FIND ALIENS!”

Louder.

“I WANT TO FIND ALIENS!!!”

At some point, he noticed something else.

“Do you laugh when you’re nervous?”

Apparently I had been laughing quite a bit. The answer was yes. I was nervous. But laughter was also a way of maintaining some distance from what was happening, remaining the amused observer rather than the person to whom this was actually happening. He seemed determined to take that away from me.

And that’s about as much as I’m going to tell you about what happens next.

Part of the pleasure of The Pineapple is not knowing what is waiting on the other side of a door, down a darkened passageway or sometimes inches from your face. Over the course of a remarkably packed 60 minutes, I crawled, squeezed and stumbled through a succession of spaces and encounters that could be funny, frightening, ridiculous and unexpectedly intimate.

At various points I thought of Bugonia, Barbarian and the kitchen sequence in The Backrooms. But those comparisons only get you so far. Unlike a movie, The Pineapple doesn’t let you sit safely outside the frame: You are the thing being acted upon.

The privilege doesn’t come cheap: Tickets run about $250. But there appears to be a hungry audience for this kind of hyper-experiential entertainment. The initial run of roughly 80 performances sold out almost instantly.

Some explanation of the people responsible for all this is probably in order.

Candle House Collective was founded in 2018 by Evan Neiden, who began experimenting with a peculiar form of immersive theater that didn’t necessarily require a theater at all.

Its early productions infiltrated participants’ lives through phone calls, texts and emails. The idea was to collapse the distance between fiction and reality until, ideally, you stopped behaving like an audience member and simply reacted.

That approach produced Claws, a one-person telephone thriller in which a frightened stranger calls asking for help with something lurking in his closet; and Lennox Mutual, an ongoing interactive epic disguised as a customer-service line for a mysterious “life en-surance” company. Candle House calls what it does “alternate reality theatre.”

The conceit sounds gimmicky until you encounter what its performers can do with it. Writing about Claws and Lennox Mutual in The New Yorker, a critic described one of these encounters becoming “suddenly, uncannily real.”

That’s the trick, and the performers in The Pineapple, conceived, designed, and directed by Neiden, are remarkably good at it. The difference is that this time Candle House has gotten out of your phone and into the room with you.

There is nowhere for an actor to hide when his audience consists of a single stranger standing inches away. The talented performers — besides the intense Keeter, the cast includes Ian Michaels, Cece Kelly and Neiden himself — commit so completely to the reality of The Pineapple that, despite knowing perfectly well I’d bought a ticket to a theatrical experience in North Hollywood, there were moments when that knowledge became surprisingly difficult to access.

They are also performing a second, largely invisible task: reading you. How frightened are you? How game are you? How far can this particular person be pushed?

My nervous laughter wasn’t in a script. It was something the first actor noticed, understood and used. Over the course of the hour, the power relationships keep shifting. The participant who arrives determined to observe eventually discovers that observation isn’t really an option.

The Pineapple does push, although not always in the ways you expect. At one point, a performer asked whether I had ever forgiven someone. Who? What had they done? Why had I forgiven them?

By then, The Pineapple had trained me to answer questions rather than stand outside them analyzing why they were being asked. So I told him, not entirely sure why I was relaying such sensitive information. I revealed something deeply personal to a stranger inside this absurd fictional world, and then the show moved on.

Except it hadn’t.

Much later, what I’d told him came back to me, incorporated into the performance in a way I won’t reveal. It fucked with my head a little. It was also weirdly touching.

The waiver I’d signed beforehand warned of physical contact, but that phrase doesn’t quite prepare you for what follows. I was touched, caressed, held and, at one point, kissed on the mouth.

I found myself wondering whether I was experiencing those encounters differently than another audience member might. Would the audience member’s sexuality affect the experience, turning it from something exhilarating into something threatening? At what point does the identity of the person being touched become part of the work?

Then another question occurred to me: What about the person doing the touching?

For all the apparent power the performers exercise over you, this is also their job. They are being asked to enter unusually intimate physical situations with a succession of strangers.

After the performance, I asked Neiden about the actors’ side of this peculiar bargain. Audience members are given a safeword, which stops the action. But Neiden told me the performers have exactly the same right. They can say it, too.

(No one on either side of the equation has used it in L.A., while an earlier incarnation of The Pineapple in New Jersey resulted in a lone participant ending the experience.)

That detail changed the way I thought about the preceding hour. The Pineapple is built around the sensation that control has been taken away from you. In reality, the whole elaborate illusion depends upon everyone in the room retaining the power to stop it.

Which may be why the experience can go as far as it does. There is humiliation here, claustrophobia, physical vulnerability and an intimacy that occasionally brushes against the erotic. But there is also absurdity and a surprising amount of humor. The production keeps scrambling the emotional signals. Something threatening becomes funny, someone powerful becomes vulnerable, a ridiculous situation begins to feel alarmingly real.

An hour after I’d knocked on the wrong door, I stumbled back onto the street, disoriented, a lei around my neck and wondering what the hell I had just experienced.

A man was standing beside a parked Tesla. He looked at me and gave a slight, knowing smirk. For a moment, I wondered if he was part of The Pineapple, too. By then, I wasn’t entirely sure where the show ended.

“Are you next?” I asked.

He was.

“How was it?” he asked.

I looked at him. My first instinct was to assess who he was, what he might make of everything I’d just experienced. I couldn’t really tell.

“I loved it,” I said, entirely unsure he’d feel the same way.