Strategies

Some Call It Theatre

What happens when theatre is made into an individualized experience? Is it acting if it's just a conversation? Can you outsource an actor?

by Eliza Bent

The Challenge
To spice up the old and tired audience/performer dynamic.
The Plan
Decrease the size of the audience. Make theatre an exclusive event. Turn the audience into an actor/participator.
What Worked
It's fun, educational, and challenges the preconceived notions of what theatre is.
What Didn't
It doesn't quite feel like theatre. It's probably costly.
What's Next
Visit www.rimini-protokoll.de for upcoming theatre-bending projects.

I thought I was running late. Or perhaps had showed up at the wrong spot. The young woman behind the desk at the Goethe-Institut in Manhattan told me to take off my coat and have a seat. It was bitter cold outside. I waited for my hands to thaw and realized I felt more like I was about to see a doctor than see theatre. The man next to me-the only other person in the room-anxiously flipped through a magazine.

"Eliza? You may go into room one," the woman behind the desk said. She instructed the other audience member to go into room two. Our only instructions were to pick up the phone when it rang.

The performance we were attending, Call Cutta in a Box, stretches the notion of theatre as an elastic art form to its limits. The person on the other end of the ringing phone is at a call center in India. Is she the actor or are you? Is the setting New York City or Calcutta? Who's in charge of the script? What unfolds is essentially a phone chat between two strangers with a few dramatic tricks. But more on that in a moment.

Stefan Kaegi, who co-created the piece with the three-membered collective Rimini Protokoll, tells me later in an e-mail, "We like calling it theatre, because it has roles, rules, script, and it happens live between people." Then again, Call Cutta in a Box can be much more than theatre. "It can also be a game, a flirtation, a serious conversation. Or it can just be a meeting where the two of you never really meet," Kaegi observes.

I entered room one, a large sunlit space with a view of Fifth Avenue and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to find a sleek desk, Ikea couch and coffee table, computer and small wooden platform. I was looking out the window when the phone began to ring. I approached with caution.

"Hello," I said tentatively. A warm voice responded over the crackling line.

"Hello, is this Eliza?"

"Yes, this is Eliza."

"Eliza Bent?"

"Yes, that's me."

"Hello, Eliza! How are you today?"

"I'm fine…how are you?"

"Ooh, I am well. Are you comfortable?"

"Yes."

I began to laugh nervously. Was this really happening? Was this what the performance would be?

What happens when we "privatize" theatre? According to the production's press materials, "Call Cutta in a Box offers every member of the audience an exclusive performance-unique and unrepeatable." It almost sounds like the language of a luxury travel package. And that's part of the appeal: The ephemeral, individual nature of Call Cutta cannot be reproduced.

Susmita Mukherjee, my actor/call agent, led me through more small talk, asking what had I done that day (gone to work), what kind of job I had (you're reading it) and where I grew up (Brookline, Mass.). In turn, she offered details about her own life. Our conversation turned to the weather.

"It's very cold in New York City, isn't it? I don't think I could survive there!" she said through giggles. "How about a cup of tea?" And voilà, the first dramaturgical flourish: An electronic kettle on the coffee table lit up, and within moments I was preparing myself a cup of English breakfast tea.

We moved on to other topics. I learned that Susmita had lived in Texas for a year and is currently unsatisfied with her job as a French teacher at a middle school (she moonlights as an actor/caller at the Descon Limited call center, which is where the call had originated). Rimini Protokoll pays their actor/callers. We talked about reincarnation and shared a secret with one another. It was strange and oddly freeing to be so candid with a stranger.

Kaegi estimates that about 20 percent of what is said during the show is scripted—"I only guess, because we don't listen to the conversations," he says. Besides the tea, other surprises include a desk that rattles, the sudden sound of wind in India, an offer of fennel-infused breath mints and a chance to sing—which I did standing on the wooden platform overlooking Fifth Avenue. But ultimately, Kaegi believes, there is a fair amount of freedom over what is discussed: "We have about a dozen performers in India, and each one gives it a very personal tone."

Does Call Cutta in a Box outsource its actors? Not exactly, considering that the New York audience member becomes just as much an actor as the call-center agent. Kaegi demurs on the topic, admitting that though it is a kind of meta-outsourcing, the project wouldn't happen as it does if it were performed within India or in the reverse (with American call agents and Indian spectators). Says Kaegi, "Rather it is a reaction to the fake game that outsourcing creates when hiding the workers from their customers."

It is that dynamic, in fact, that inspired Call Cutta in a Box. Kaegi and his collaborators were in India researching a different project when they found themselves in a call center—"a room with 120 young Indians shouting in perfect English into telephones and pretending they were British in order to sell mobile phones. ‘What a theatre scene!' we said. Only the audience was completely invisible. So we started thinking: What if we could turn this cultural gap into something more interesting than a post-colonial sell-out of Indian theatre talents?"

Call Cutta in a Box certainly seems to achieve that, but it also raises more questions than it answers (as good theatre does). Is individualized theatre a trend? Is it even educational? "This project doesn't teach," Kaegi asserts. "You might learn something about India, globalization or the person at the other end of the line," he says, but that's not really the point. "We had fun discovering how loose you can leave the rules between audience and performer without becoming random."

At the end of the performance Susmita and I "met" each other on our webcams. As we waved to each other and danced to Indian pop music, it felt like we were old friends—almost. I was distracted by a ticking timer on the screen indicating that time was nearly up. "Eliza, do you have any questions you want to ask me?"

I paused. "How do you say thank you in Bengali?"