This real-life video game literally takes you through Los Angeles

“Great Gold Bird,” a theater production playing at several Los Angeles locations, begins at my house. It begins as a mystery, presenting itself as a missing persons story. But it’s also a headache.

Henry, we are told, has disappeared. Only he didn’t suddenly disappear. I am now an active investigator, as the protagonist intentionally left a trail of clues behind.

“Great Gold Bird” can be heavy, tugging at our hearts even as it becomes more mystical — its themes ricocheting between heartbreak, science fiction and spiritualism. Twice it brought me to tears, its storyline being both deeply personal and universal to anyone who has survived a significant loss. And yet, it has an underlying narrative motivation, a desire to discover its secrets that transcends any feeling of sadness.

Because “Great Gold Bird” is a play, but not in the traditional sense of the term. Think of it more like an actual video game, one that uses light puzzles to advance the story and create a sense of exploration. A “wandering game”, as its designer calls it.

“Great Gold Bird” takes place across three locations, including the audience members’ starting location. The next destination is revealed through the narrative: an address unlocked after browsing a website dedicated to a lost love, or a card discovered in a locked chest after discovering its combination. This sense of play is essential, allowing “Great Gold Bird” to delve deeply into the realities of life with prolonged grief — its delusions, its isolating nature and its fantastical hopes — without feeling overbearing. By transforming the audience into participants, we ourselves are motivated by the desire to reach a healing conclusion.

It begins with an online shrine, a fictional website that Henry’s character (Josh Meyer) created to preserve the memories of his late wife, Jen (Kristin Degroot). From there we are led to what we are told is Henry’s campervan, an incredibly comfortable abode filled with miniaturized amenities and hidden nooks. We are on the loose, looking for clues that will lead us to Henry’s messages. The first is clearly visible, but soon we are scouring every inch of the vehicle looking for secret hiding places.

Inside an RV, the participants search for clues that could lead them to Henry’s messages.

(Twin Alchemy Collective)

The camper is parked in a secure parking lot in Arlington Heights. Since the precise address is revealed as the story progresses (none of the puzzles are particularly difficult, but there is a system of clues in the story, if necessary) I chose to preserve some of the secrets of “Great Gold Bird,” but please be aware that this is a timed experience on weekend evenings and there will be a host to greet you at the first location. The finale is more of a self-guided walk through nature, as the piece will take us to a designated area around Griffith Park where various props have been staged.

“Great Gold Bird” immediately had its hooks with me, its writing echoing phrases I myself said when I was in the throes of grief. We meet Henry, who is struggling, even panicking, as he realizes that memories centered on his past relationship are fading. “The possibility that I might lose my wife a second time – not just our future but also the slow erosion of our past – terrified me,” Henry wrote in a letter to his niece, who launched him on a writing exercise to create a site dedicated to their time together.

I found this immediately relatableand not just because I spent many months on a similar project dedicated to a past relationship. But it focuses on one particularly sneaky way in which grief can pierce the hooks within us. Grief can become a danger when we begin to find the past more comforting than reality, which is not difficult to do when dealing with the loss of a loved one. I, too, was terrified of forgetting any memory of a past relationship, so I spent nearly two years documenting every moment I remembered in the guise of a fairy tale . But to do this is to transform grief into our personality, and that is precisely what Henry does in “Great Gold Bird.”

“Great Gold Bird,” recommended for an intimate audience of one or two people, is priced at a flat rate of $120 per show. It’s also a production that becomes more surreal as it unfolds, although I felt its handling of grief was particularly grounded. It makes sense, like Katie Green’s project Twin Alchemy Collectivewas born from both personal reflection and professional research.

The camper van is full of hidden corners that allow participants to piece together the story.

(Todd Martens/Los Angeles Times)

Green, in her day job, is a practicing mental health therapist. “I’m really interested, even more so once I started becoming a therapist, in this intersection between immersive art and how that can be a vehicle for hopefully transformative, confronting experiences. very real and personal things, like your relationship with grief or death,” Green says.

Once “Great Gold Bird” sets its heartbreaking premise, it begins to take a spiraling turn, tackling metaphysical topics that cause us to question our own reality. Henry discovers experimental meditation techniques, and for a while, “Great Gold Bird” makes us wonder if Henry is delusional or if he has actually found a way to communicate with his lost love. Daydreaming, after all, is powerful, and as “Great Gold Bird” gets stranger and stranger – we’re soon scouring the trailer for hidden rooms, searching for VHS tapes and trying to decipher clues. maps of Los Angeles – “Great Gold Bird” becomes a tale of magical realism.

In this sense, “Great Gold Bird” will recall another long-running immersive show in Los Angeles, the “Nest” created by the scout expedition which is currently featured in Hatch Escapes. Both Scout and Hatch were instrumental in bringing “Great Gold Bird” to Los Angeles, as Green is based in Austin, Texas, where she has been directing various incarnations of “Great Gold Bird” for about a decade.

Like “The Nest,” “Great Gold Bird,” scheduled for release through December, was influenced by exploratory video games such as “Gone Home,” in which players search through personal items to uncover the story of two siblings and the history of the Bay Area. alternate reality game (ARG) “The Jejune Institute”, which was captured in a Documentary 2012. Green, 35, says she even spent about five years trying to turn “Great Gold Bird” into a video game.

“My two biggest inspirations for the first version of this game in 2013 were playing “Gone Home” and the “The Jejune Institute”, “I’m watching this documentary, hearing about it second hand, and wondering what it would be like to create a live environmental storytelling experience that would also extend beyond a single space and be a little smoother with space and time,” Green said. “It’s like an ARG, but on rails.”

Green initially wanted “Great Gold Bird” to visit a third location in Los Angeles, but the realities of traffic and travel time confined it to two spaces outside our homes. The project does not need to be completed on the same day. Indeed, noticing that it would take me an hour to get from Arlington Heights to the Los Feliz area on a Friday evening, I chose to finish “Great Gold Bird” the day after it began. This worked for me, because “Great Gold Bird” is designed for contemplation, and I wanted to have time to process its grief management.

Although “Great Gold Bird” centers around the death of a loved one, Green says it was largely inspired by the breakdown of romantic relationships. “I make art to try to understand things I don’t yet fully understand, and the heartbreak I’ve felt following major breakups is the best approximation of that,” Green says. “I did this for other people to process their own relationship with grief, whether it’s the death of a person, the death of a relationship, or the death of a part of your identity.”

Ultimately, that’s why “Great Gold Bird” resonates. We, as spectators turned actors, are searching for a lost soul – a soul itself that must rediscover who it is.