“Great Gold Bird,” a theatrical production unfolding across multiple sites in Los Angeles, begins inside my home. It starts with a mystery, introducing itself as a missing persons story. Yet it’s also a puzzle.
Henry, we’re told, has disappeared. Only he didn’t just suddenly vanish. I’m now an active investigator, as the protagonist has intentionally left behind a trail of clues.
“Great Gold Bird” can be heavy, tugging at our hearts even as it becomes more mystical — its themes ricocheting among grief, science fiction and spiritualism. Twice it brought me to tears, its script feeling at once deeply personal yet universal for anyone who has survived a significant loss. And yet it possesses an underlying narrative drive, a pull to discover its secrets that transcends any sense of sadness.
The tale is one of magical realism centered around grief, namely the quest to reconnect with a lost loved one. Pictured in the frame is the character of Jen, portrayed by Kristin Degroot.
(Todd Martens / Los Angeles Times)
For “Great Gold Bird” is a play, but not in the traditional sense. Think of it more as a real-life video game, one that uses light puzzles to push the story forward to create a sense of exploration. A “wanderplay,” as its designer calls it.
“Great Gold Bird” is set across three locations, including audience members’ starting place of residence. Where to go next is revealed via the narrative — an address unlocked after perusing a website dedicated to a lost love, or a map uncovered in a locked chest after we discover its combination. This sense of play is key, allowing “Great Gold Bird” to delve heavily into the realities of living with prolonged grief — its delusions, its isolating nature and its fantastical hopes — without feeling overbearing. By turning the audience into participants we ourselves become driven by a desire to reach a healing conclusion.
It starts with an online shrine, a fictional web site the character of Henry (Josh Meyer) has 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 camper, a fantastically cozy abode filled with miniaturize installations and hidden nooks. We’re set loose, looking for clues that will lead us to messages from Henry. The first one is clearly visible, but soon we’re canvassing every inch of the vehicle hunting for secret hideaways.
Inside a camper, participants look for clues that might lead them to messages from Henry.
(Twin Alchemy Collective)
The motor home is parked in a secure lot in Arlington Heights. Since the precise address is revealed by advancing through the narrative — none of the puzzles are particularly challenging, but there is an in-story hint system, if needed — I’m choosing to preserve some of “Great Gold Bird’s” secrets, but know that it’s 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 play will take us to a designated area around Griffith Park where various props have been staged.
“Great Gold Bird” instantly had its hooks in me, its writing echoing phrases I have said myself when in the throes of grief. We meet Henry, who isstruggling, panicking even, as he is realizing the memories centered around his past relationship are fading. “The possibility that I could lose my wife a second time — not just our future but also the slow erosion of our past — terrified me,” Henry writes in a letter to his niece, which set him off on a writing exercise to create a website dedicated to their time together.
I found this immediately relatable, and not solely because I have spent many months on a similar project dedicated to a past relationship. But it zeroes in on a particularly devious way in which grief can pierce its hooks in us. Grief can become a danger when we start to find the past more comforting than reality, which isn’t hard to do when dealing with the loss of someone close to us. I, too, felt terrified at forgetting any memory of a past relationship, so I spent nearly two years documenting every moment I could remember in the guise of a fairy tale. But to do this is to turn grief into our personality, and that’s precisely what Henry does in “Great Gold Bird.”
“Great Gold Bird,” recommended for an intimate audience of one or two people, is flat-priced at $120 per show. It’s also a production that becomes more surreal as it unwinds, though I felt its handling of grief was particularly grounded. That makes sense, as the project, from Katie Green’s Twin Alchemy Collective, is born of both personal reflection and professional research.
The camper is filled with hidden nooks that enable participants to piece together the narrative.
(Todd Martens / Los Angeles Times)
Green, in her day job, is a practicing mental health therapist. “I am really interested, more so once I started becoming a therapist, in this intersection between immersive art and how that can be a vehicle for hopefully transformative experiences and confronting very real and personal things, like your relationship with grief or death,” Green says.
Once “Great Gold Bird” sets up its heartbreak premise, it starts to spiral out, touching on metaphysical topics that have us questioning our own reality. Henry discovers experimental meditation techniques, and for a time, “Great Gold Bird” has us pondering whether Henry is delusional, or if he has indeed found a way to communicate with his lost love. Daydreaming, after all, is powerful, and as “Great Gold Bird” gets weirder — we’re soon canvassing the trailer looking for hidden rooms, hunting for VHS tapes and trying to decipher 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 Los Angeles show, the Scout Expedition-created “The Nest,” which is currently staged out of Hatch Escapes. Both Scout and Hatch helped in bringing “Great Gold Bird” to Los Angeles, as Green is based in Austin, Texas, where she has been running various incarnations of “Great Gold Bird” for about a decade.
Like “The Nest,” “Great Gold Bird,” slated to run through December, was influenced by exploratory video games such as “Gone Home,” in which players scour over personal items to discover the story of two siblings, and the Bay Area’s alternate reality game (ARG) “The Jejune Institute,” which was captured in a 2012 documentary. 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 back in 2013 was playing ‘Gone Home’ and the ‘The Jejune Institute,’ watching that documentary and hearing about that second hand and wondering what it would be like to create a live action environmental storytelling experience that also moved beyond one space and was a little more fluid with space and time,” Green says. “It’s like an ARG, but on rails.”
Green initially wanted “Great Gold Bird” to visit a third Los Angeles location, but the realities of traffic and travel time kept it confined to two spaces outside of our homes. The project need not be completed in the same day. Indeed, noticing it would take me an hour to get from Arlington Heights to the Los Feliz area on a Friday evening, I opted to finish “Great Gold Bird” the day after I began it. That worked for me, as “Great Gold Bird” is built for contemplation, and I wanted time to process its handling of grief.
Though “Great Gold Bird” is centered on the death of a loved one, Green says it was inspired largely by the severing of romantic relationships. “I make art to try to understand things that I don’t yet understand fully, and the grief that I felt from significant breakups is my closest approximation of that,” Green says. “I made this for other people to process their own relationship with grief, whether that was the death of a person, the death of a relationship or the death of some part of your identity.”
Ultimately, that’s why “Great Gold Bird” resonates. We, as audience members-turned-actors, are on the hunt for a lost soul — a soul himself who has to rediscover who he is.