Explore the Art of Memory in ‘The Nest’ (The NoPro Review)
Scout Expedition Co. brings back their escape room-meets-serial podcasts experience to stunning results
When you move people through space, while telling them a story, it feels like they’ve been on a journey.
These are the thoughts, somewhat paraphrased, of Ted Schilowitz, Futurist, in the foreword to Storytelling in Virtual Reality by John Bucher, in 2016.
He was referring primarily to themed entertainment and dark rides like The Haunted Mansion at the time, but the concept is relevant to any creator working in immersive media, be it theatre or virtual reality or escape rooms. Somehow, moving through physical space while hearing a good story feels like an emotional experience. Like you’ve been somewhere and back.
And not one year after these words were written, in 2017, Scout Expedition Co. (founded by veteran themed entertainment designers Jeff Leinenveber and Jarrett Lantz), burst onto the LA scene with their interactive experience The Nest, drawing inspiration from the worlds of podcasts, video games, and immersive theatre. After a few months of sold-out shows, the indie immersive production, set in a spare shed in Jeff’s backyard, would close, but not before earning critical acclaim and solidifying the company as a force to be reckoned with. Now, after a successful crowdfunding campaign this past spring, The Nest is back in 2019: rewritten and expanded in a permanent space.
In The Nest (2019), participants find themselves the winner of an auction for a storage unit once owned by the mysterious Josephine “Josie” Carroll, who has passed away without any next of kin; the fictional auction company, run by a friendly “Mel Baker,” is unable to offer information about her life, so players find themselves without much to go on as they arrive at the undisclosed location. The majority of the experience in The Nest is spent piecing together the milestones of Josie’s life as participants navigate through the dark but surprisingly expansive storage unit. The walls are lined with boxes that seem like they could topple over at any moment at first glance, but don’t; participants wander makeshift-seeming hallways and cramped chambers armed only with a flickering flashlight and a portable tape deck.
That’s right: a portable cassette player. Josie was a journalist and a woman obsessed with documentation through film photography and the constant creation of audio recordings. So: through the detritus of decades which have accumulated inside the storage unit, scattered among the shoe boxes and old issues of National Geographic and plastic canisters of film, participants of The Nest can find Josie’s old cassette tapes. These tapes contain diary entries that she made, starting at the young age of 12 and continuing throughout the course of her life. Sometimes, we hear only her voice on the recordings; other times, she’s captured the voices of her father or a good friend or her husband Tom in conversation. It’s a snapshot in time of Josie’s life. And The Nest, which runs for only one or two people at a time, offers up the story of her life through these old tapes as participants solve lightweight puzzles and complete tasks in the space, slowly revealing more and more hidden sectors of the strange storage unit until it starts to take on a surreal, dream-like quality as various “doors” open. But to say more would be to rob potential attendees of the joy of discovery. And fear not, if you don’t consider yourself a great “puzzler” or solver of mysteries, because “Mel” of “Mel B’s Auction House” is on the line to help (via an ancient-looking rotary phone), just in case you need it.
From the pre-show opening of The Nest, as we walk into the back of an old freight elevator in a non-descript looking building near Mid-City, it’s clear to me that every single possible detail has been thoughtfully constructed in service of the overall story. Not one iota of effort has gone to waste in this production. In fact, the show is located two floors above a real life storage company, whose banker boxes reading “Beverly Hills Storage” flash by as the elevator car shudders to life and lifts up you up. Once there, a host of doors to other units wait quietly down the foggy hall, teeming with the remnants of other lives. (I am briefly reminded of the concept of sonder: the realization that “each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”)
But me: I’ve got the keys for unit #515 and who knows what lies in wait there?
Each item in Josie’s dimly lit unit feels like it did in fact belong to another person, that it probably meant something to someone, somewhere, at some other point in time. I can pick up a suit jacket or a worn out stuffed animal or an old water canteen, examine it closely, and feel its textures under my fingertips. There’s something viscerally satisfying here as well, akin to a well-designed escape room. There’s a momentous click as I find the right key and place it in the right lock at the right moment. I hold my breath as I make my way into a new part of the space, only to emerge somewhere otherworldly and unexpected. Each reveal not only makes sense within the context of the story, but also in the context of the environment and the objects contained there. The cassette tapes add another layer to the richness, as marital discord might soundtrack the fumbling around a stubborn combination lock or a sweet, naive conversation between young Josie and her friend might be juxtaposed with the act of rifling through camping gear from the 1970's.
The physical “places” participants end up exploring in The Nest feel like the real-like equivalent of a “memory palace”: all of the nooks and crannies of a video game similar to Gone Home or What Remains of Edith Finch, but brought to life with tender care and an awe-inspiring attention to detail. Everything in The Nest comes together just so, like the pieces of an intricate jigsaw puzzle: from the objects and textures on the walls and floors of the space to the moody soundtrack to the fittingly eerie lighting, which changes in response to various points in the story. And I would remiss in not mentioning the superb voice acting on the tapes: Josie is voiced by the talented Mackenzie Firgens, while The Speakeasy Society’s Matthew Bamberg-Johnson plays her husband Tom.
As each new cassette is discovered, I find myself cradling the tape player like a baby, slowly walking forward to the unknown, straining my eyes to look around me. My husband holds the flashlight in the crook of his neck, as he attempts to open a cabinet using its tiny beam of light, his body shrouded in the darkness. As chapters of Josie’s life reveal themselves to us, the transitions and traversal from room to room, from scene to scene, feel practically flawless, the momentum of the story pushing us ever forward, even as I realize: I don’t want the tapes to finish playing. Because it means Josie will be gone.
The Nest is a powerful masterclass in storytelling through environment and objects. The experience sits in the Venn diagram of immersive theatre and escape rooms, and yet, is its own thing, forged in the crucible of narratively-driven video games and serialized podcasts and the vision of two very talented storytellers. The sense of wonder I felt as the experience progressed brought to mind the feeling of make-believe: the kind of make-believe that I associate most strongly with childhood daydreams. The Nest makes adventure seem not only possible but probable, hiding just beyond the next closed door. The discovery of what happened to Josie captivates from start to finish, even as it hints at some tough existential questions:
What is the metric of a life well-lived?
What is the trajectory of a relationship?
And what do we leave behind after we’re gone?
There are no easy answers.
By the end of The Nest, we the participants, have moved through space and time with Josie; that is to say: we have gone on a journey with her. So while Josephine Carroll may have left all of her earthly possessions behind when she moved on to her next voyage, for every person passing through storage unit #515 courtesy of Mel B’s Auction House, I have to believe that a piece of Josie stays with them.
I know this much is true for me.
The Nest is sold out through December 20, 2019. Our fingers are crossed for an extension.
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