Dial T for Theatre
With stages shuttered, some companies are using phones to tell stories.
Toronto’s immersive theatre companies have prided themselves on pushing live performance into new and uncharted territory. In the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, that includes a more conventional method of communication: the phone call.
Outside the March, the awardwinning immersive company that brought us Annie Baker’s movie theatre-set “The Flick” and escape room-theatre hybrid “The Tape Escape,” has announced a new production series that will take place entirely over the phone, titled “The Ministry for Mundane Mysteries.”
And Outside the March isn’t alone. Convergence Theatrewill produce a two-part series, “The COVID Confessions” and “The Corona Variations,” in which phone submissions about reallife coronavirus impacts will be used as inspiration for five-minute phone-call plays.
And Toronto immersive company DopoLavoro Teatrale, or DLT, has a particularly apt phone-based initiative called “Decameron Today,” inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s “The Decameron” novellas about 10 young Italians fleeing the bubonic plague.
“It does feel like we’re all on the precipice of burning out on screen time. The phone feels different, a little bit nostalgic and a little bit more personalized,” says Outside the March artistic director Mitchell Cushman.
Like other artists who have had their livelihoods interrupted by social distancing in efforts to flatten the coronaviru s curve, Cushman had two contracts cancelled. Outside the March artistic council members Sebastien Heins and Katherine Cullen have also felt the sting of closures.
The “Ministry” series was first conceived of as an alternative revenue source for out-of-work artists. It costs $35 for a program of six daily phone calls from Outside the March artists (tickets can be bought for someone else or as a pay-it-forward option for a financially challenged participant) and $25 for those out of work. One hundred per cent of the proceeds will go to artists who are in financially precarious situations due to COVID-19.
“We’re well-suited to try to offer something in this moment because we don’t have 500 people on payroll that we have to worry about and we weren’t in the midst of a large-scale production,” Cushman says.
“We’ve already developed a practice of immersive theatre that is trying to eliminate many preconceptions of what a theatre experience is.
“Now we have to eliminate the idea of physical presence which, you know, wasn’t on my mind before, but it sure is now.”
Besides Heins and Cullen, “Ministry” performers will include Amy Keating and Colin Doyle. Designers Nick Blais and Anahit a Dehbonehi e, writer Rosamund Small, composer Britta Johnson, and directors Cushman and Griffin McInnes are also attached to the project. But more team members could be added depending on demand.
The first week will feature 50 spots for ticket buyers. Outside the March aims to employ as many artists and reach as many audience members as possible. The content of the phone calls will depend on the individual participant and the mystery the Ministry has to solve: a lost item, a missed connection, a paranormal experience or an impossible coincidence. The stories are meant to be shaped by the individual audience member, whether they’re being consumed as a family activity, a mental escape from workingat-home stress or outreach to someone in self-isolation.
“These distances might be a really great learning experience for us as a company on how to make our theatre more accessible, even when we’re all allowed to be together again,” says Cullen. “We can take these lessons and apply them to the future.”
For Convergence Theatre, run by Aaron Willis and Julie Tepperman, the confessions recorded on the theatre’s “hotline” for “The COVID Confessions” will be used to commission “The Corona Variations,” a cycle of six five-minute phone calls by various artists in various genres that will be performed nightly for only 10 households a night.
DLT, meanwhile, will provide different short phone performances over 10 days, including a retelling of several of the “Decameron” stories, an ode to joy amid self-isolation, a selection of Samuel Beckett readings, and Italian actor Anna Amadori reflecting on the future of Italy, community and performance.
“Decameron Today” is part of DLT’s phone-based “Theatre On Call,” which also includes an audio-only adaptation of its production “The Invisible City” and a bedtime story series for young audiences (but anyone in need of a calming bedtime story can purchase one).
“We’ve always been obsessed with talking to audiences,” says DLT artistic director Daniele Bartolini. The company specializes in site-specific performances for one audience member at a time. “Now this is our medium in which we can connect with them. It’s the idea of the voice, right? We want to have our voices connected; we want to create space for connection.”
The word “connection” is paramount for all three companies; indeed for artists in general as they turn to streaming and other online platforms to reach audiences.
“At the core of ‘The Ministry’ is a conversation between two people,” says Heins of Outside the March. “It’s a whole fictional world built around your very mundane issue and someone on the other end really listening to you.
“We’re all doing our best to go underground and be as invisible as possible while the health-care workers and the government workers do their job, but that continuous feeling of invisibility needs to be combated. And something like this just brings people’s sense of identity back into frame.”
Outside the March Theatre Company’s “The Ministry for Mundane Mysteries” begins performances Monday. See mundanemysteries.com for tickets. To participate in the Convergence Theatre’s “COVID Confessions,” call 416-997-7886 from 10 a.m. Saturday to 10 p.m. Sunday, or email converge@convergencetheatre.com. “The Corona Variations” will be performed April 14 to 19. See ConvergenceTheatre.com for information. Got to DLTExperience.com to book a pay-what-you-can on-call performance from DopoLavoro Teatrale.