Ariana Reines's play Telephonebegins in darkness, with the faint but mesmerizing sound of static, finally interrupted by the famous words, "Watson, come here, I want you!" Then, out of the void, burst our two stars, Alexander Graham Bell (Gibson Frazier) and Thomas Watson (Matthew Dellapina), their faces frozen in a tableaux of cartoonish terror. In the highly stylized, presentational comic patter that ensues, staged in front of Vaudevillian footlights, it becomes clear their intention is not so much to sell us on their miraculous invention as it is to figure out what the hell just happened. The first transmission of a human voice has left them rather disoriented, you see, as if they've been teleported to another dimension.
Considering how the telephone has so thoroughly permeated modern life, Bell and Watson's sense of shock, as depicted here, seems wholly justified. The ubiquitous device has become something everyone takes for granted, but Reines's play looks at it with fresh eyes. Comprised of three distinct parts, the first scene between Bell and Watson, played with perfect pitch by Frazier and Dellapina, is the most accessible, but far from straightforward. The dialogue is disjointed and absurd, as if the invention had hit them with the force of a sheet of high-power acid. "I wonder," intones Watson, "whether machines ever feel lonely for the people they were designed to assist?" Bell declares, "Once, a voice spoke to Moses through a burning bush!" To which Watson adds, "And now any home or office can have a burning bush of its own!" But does it come with a 10 megapixel camera?
Pavel Antonov
The second part of Telephone consists of a logorrheic monologue by a woman who identifies herself as Babette; the character is modeled after an early-twentieth century schizophrenic seamstress who was treated by Carl Jung. Her hysterical, rambling speech, performed with great ferocity by Birgit Huppuch, is at turns incantatory and impenetrable, and perhaps a bit too long. But it succeeds as a bold, poetic study of one poor soul's struggle to communicate, and provides a striking counterpoint to Telephone's third part, which features engrossing snippets of contemporary miscommunication, staged in perfect twilight by the full three-person ensemble, who shift through the space like liminal, babbling ghosts.
Taken as a whole, the production, by the intellectually rigorous Foundry Theater, is a complex, challenging exploration of technology's power, enriched by an enthralling, ambient sound design by Matt Hubbs and Sunder Ganglani. While restoring a sense of mystery to what's become a commonplace object, Telephone also illustrates how confused, banal and incomplete our struggle to be understood has always been. The last exchange we hear in the half-darkness occurs between two loved ones who have found each other again—sort of. A woman can hear her man's voice through the phone, but when she asks him where he is, he just repeats, "I'm here," which is both true and false.
