I paid $250 to be kidnapped in LA — why it was worth every penny

Last week, I paid $250 online. In return, I was kidnapped.

I received a time slot, coordinates to a vacant dispensary in North Hollywood, and an invitation to “hunt aliens.” 

A week later, exactly at my allotted time, I knocked on the door. A man answered, hissing at me to not look anyone in the eyes. He smelled terrible. 

Inside the dispensary, after the man taped my wrists and hands together, I pieced together what exactly was happening to me, and I decided to make a run for it. As I scrambled to my feet, the man began screaming at me. 

A different, shirtless man tackled me to the ground, while a woman in a nurse’s outfit shoved fruit gel/pop rocks concoction into my mouth to render me “optimal for alien reproduction.”

Thirty minutes later, I was back home and working on a piece of writing I hadn’t touched in years. 

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This is the untapped power of LA’s culture of immersive theater. It’s the cure to the city’s collective creative burnout.

Los Angeles is full of experiences and events to chose from. You can play pickleball, take an improv class, go on a bar crawl, or stare at a wall and do nothing at all.

Me? I’ve spent hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours on immersive theater events in one of the best cities for immersive theater. 

Like many Angelenos, creativity and invention are parts of my livelihood. 

I’ve gleefully let my imagination, my inner child, my sense of unencumbered play — whatever you call it — be monetized, co-opted by a succession of underpaying but fun creative day jobs. 

But after the pandemic, I noticed that myself and many of my fellow creatives felt uninspired. Listless, disconnected, bland. 

Maybe it was social media, maybe it was the glut of information we were constantly trying to consume. Maybe it was how we’ve isolated ourselves in the separate spaces within our city, or the long commute in our cars. 

Whatever happened to us, it felt hard to escape; re-engaging in creativity as I once knew it seemed nearly impossible.  

But this was Los Angeles, I thought — the greatest city in the world! A creative metropolis designed and perpetuated by a handful of insane businessmen, citrus farmers and cult leaders using a completely nonsensical freeway system. 

Surely, it had an interesting answer to our collective creative malaise. 

And, it did. 

I began noticing events around town … group activities and ticketed happenings known as “immersive theatre.” 

Now, immersive theatre is a misleading term.

It sounds serious and intense and a little bit boring (and yes, it can be those things) but it also doesn’t have to be. Immersive theater, I’ve learned, is just an obnoxious name for a type of performance that involves agency. 

When you’re doing it, you can be passive; sit back, and experience what’s going on around you … or make choices, dictated by the experience itself.

Most experiences involve at least one live actor, a time limit and narrative component — a beginning, a middle and an end. The themes immersive theater tackles — like most pieces of art — are enduring (love, death, sex, and yes, even aliens).

The most famous example of immersive theater is probably Sleep No More out of New York — a now retired, dance-heavy interpretation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Many of LA’s immersive theater events take cues from Sleep No More, but push the experience even further: making it more intimate, more strange, even a bit dangerous. 

Making your own choices within the immersive theatre event, you can make it completely your own. Every choice you make produces a different outcome, that can slightly affect your experience or completely alter it, depending on the experience itself. 

And for me, it changed everything. 

Los Angeles has so many facets to explore, but this one is a perfect cross-section of what LA does best: narrative entertainment, drama and abject weirdness. It’s been there, but I had been to closed off to fully exploring it. 

I began attending immersive theatre events regularly, noticing myself becoming more engaged in my own work, and more open to creative thinking. Even driving home from an immersive theater event, I observed my mind is working in a different way than usual: more playful, more excited, more attuned. 

I also reconnected with past projects, and started new ones. I had more energy to do this, along with a surprising renewed interest. 

I’ll stand by the idea that immersive theater brought me my own, personal creative renaissance. I have done hundreds at this point, and have spared no expense. 

Some might say — after all the money and time spent— that I’ve taken it too far.

But I think that’s impossible. And I believe that for other creative Angelenos, it could be thing that propels them to new creative heights, changes their way of thinking, or at the very least, gives them an hour of unique, refreshing, alien-flavored weirdness.

Rebecca Leib is a writer, producer and podcaster based in Los Angeles.