Lifestyle
L.A.'s most intimate theater experience? You're the only guest at this thrilling show
Last summer I had a chance to strike a deal with the devil.
I sat, contemplating my choice — what I could live without to acquire the one thing I most desired. This was no arbitrary crossroads. Over the past 40 or so minutes I had confessed long-held goals and romantic yearnings while revealing details of my most intimate relationships. They were now being weighed against me. All, I was told, could be mine, minus what I would sacrifice. The contract would be binding, necessitating a drop of blood.
I was left alone, a tiny lancet sitting before me. The barely audible cackle of candle kept me company in a stark warehouse room, a setting that felt illicit while the small flame’s fragility reminded me that I needed to make a decision.
I was here because I had booked a session with Yannick Trapman-O’Brien’s “Undersigned,” a show he bills as a “psychological thriller for one.” Each production is personal, and highly individualized to its participant — plot points detailed here may not unveil for every guest. Know, however, there is no talk of dooming oneself to a fantastical afterlife. “Undersigned” is grounded in our reality, a conversation we have over our wants and needs, and, at least for me, what aspects of my personality or social circle I would forgo to achieve them. Love and various relationships were on the table as I fiddled with the lancet and considered puncturing my finger.
This was not a decision I would make lightly. Trapman-O’Brien’s performance, after all, had created an atmosphere of damning seriousness. And I hadn’t even seen him.
For most of the show I was blindfolded as he sat across from me, and he had left the space while I raced through my life and the future I was starting to imagine for myself. It’s rare to partake in “Undersigned” — after bringing it to L.A. last August, when I experienced it, Philadelphia-based Trapman-O’Brien is back with a smattering of dates this month. Limited tickets, at the time of writing, remain.
Despite being comfortable with vulnerability and having a tendency at times to overshare, I went in to “Undersigned” with trepidation. No topic, unless specifically requested, is off limits. Our relationship to money, sex, religion, love, power and more are all fair game, and the subjects are discussed in a setting that nods to the occult. Yet “Undersigned” ultimately became something akin to a therapy session, as I was prompted to analyze my strengths and weaknesses in matters of romance and faith.
Trapman-O’Brien, 32, has a unique ability to improvise, to quickly twist my words and use them against me. There were no cards or magic tricks here. “Undersigned” is purely a meeting of the minds, and those who treat it seriously will find it most revealing.
My session was a tug-of-war between empathetic and selfish tendencies; I wanted no deal, I said, unless all those potentially affected were happy, but such a request necessitated taking a figurative scalpel to other areas of contentment. Thus it became a work of self-examination. If rewriting history and one’s life were possible, how much could I accept while still looking at myself in the mirror?
Only everything started to become twisted. I had gone in expecting to share some of my professional and romantic dreams. As the show progressed, however, a fear that I would never achieve them set in.
“There is an enormous act of care in providing people a place where they can be confronted by themselves,” Trapman-O’Brien says. “For all that the themes and origins of this story are rooted in traditions and in things that are bad and sinister, I actually find it to be an incredibly affirming piece to do. I am gobsmacked by people’s generosity, and courage to stare down a scary thing. I’ve had people say something and then immediately say, ‘Oh, I don’t like that that’s true.’”
Trapman-O’Brien is careful with his words. A promise of “Undersigned” is that what is spoken of during the performance will never again be discussed. He will reveal, only broadly, the topics that have been broached. A veteran of the East Coast participatory theater scene, Trapman-O’Brien’s prior show, “The Telelibrary,” was born out of the COVID-19 pandemic, a whimsical yet open-hearted telephone-based performance in which vocal prompts led us either to literary reflections or to recollections left behind by other callers.
“Undersigned” started in 2019 as a commission for a patron’s Halloween party. Trapman-O’Brien balked, not wanting to create a horror-themed show, but then became intrigued by exploring the concept of making a deal with the devil. “Undersigned” only works because the choices don’t feel like an arbitrary thought experiment; that is, it’s not a game of accepting, say, untold billions by giving up a pet or a limb. Throughout, the blindfolded conversation with Trapman-O’Brien dials in on our emotional wants and needs, and then needles away at them in search of their root.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien has performed “Undersigned” about 300 times, each time asking guests to potentially offer up a personal and emotional sacrifice. The abstracted bargains of past guests are on display for participants.
(Todd Martens / Los Angeles Times)
The goal? To emotionally disarm guests by creating, in Trapman-O’Brien’s words, a “nonjudgmental space.”
“One of the problems is the second you open up the idea of a deal with the devil, people expect that they’re going to get screwed,” Trapman-O’Brien says. “I find people negotiate against themselves. One of the most impactful things of the piece is talking to people about why they keep accepting less than they want. Like, ‘I don’t need my dream job. I just need a good job.’ But I told you that you could have anything you want. Have your dream.”
The vulnerability inherent in the show extends to its payment structure. An “Undersigned” performance asks for a “down payment” of $100, with slightly cheaper options for students and creative professionals. At the end of the show, guests are presented with a notebook to write something personal to leave behind for others to read, and an envelope containing 30% of their initial investment in cash — a recognition, reads “Undersigned’s” fine print, of “the gamble” guests are taking with such an openly revealing, potentially unnerving show.
“I think the best way to ask for something is to invite,” Trapman-O’Brien says. “And the best way to invite people into vulnerability is with vulnerability of your own. We’ve talked about how heavy the show is. And I believe a big part of what makes people willing to share is that I try to find as many places as possible to stick my neck out. “
Trapman-O’Brien says he regularly hears from those who participate, sometimes months later, with updates on their agreement. For me, I sat in the warehouse’s lobby — the show is run out of Hatch Escapes in Arlington Heights — for a good 45 to 50 minutes, contemplating how easily I was willing to offer up professional ambitions and personal connections for something I believed would make me happy.
“There’s a non-zero number of participants,” Trapman-O’Brien says, “who will reach out and say, ‘I know I’m not supposed to discuss it, but it did happen.’ Well, those rules are about your safety and mine, so I can say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ But that to me is what it means to do a piece in which you say things that you need. Some of them might surprise you.”
Arguably, the biggest revelation for me with “Undersigned” is how true it all felt. About six months after I partook in the production, there are moments I’ll catch myself thinking about the show and the choice I was presented with. Should that future I imagined for myself ever become a reality, a not insignificant part of me will wonder what other forces were at play.
For when I departed “Undersigned,” I also left a part of me behind: a drop of blood, and a signed deal with the devil.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
-
New Hampshire1 minute agoMore businesses would be exempt from a key state tax under a proposal heading to Ayotte’s desk
-
New Jersey8 minutes agoNew details on plane collision on New Jersey Turnpike
-
New Mexico11 minutes agoNew Mexico sues Kalshi over allegedly allowing unlawful sports betting
-
North Carolina16 minutes agoMom driving 111 mph crashes car with 3 kids inside, 2 killed, one in critically injured, NCSHP says
-
North Dakota23 minutes agoArmstrong applauds federal funding for upgrading coal infrastructure, including Antelope Valley Station
-
Ohio26 minutes agoOhio freezes new behavioral health provider applications amid fraud concerns
-
Oklahoma31 minutes agoOklahoma House Democratic leader reflects on final session, calls for focus on cost of living
-
Oregon38 minutes agoOregon resumes SNAP renewal interviews as advocates warn more could lose benefits
