PARTY LINE
Let’s Make a Theatre Company
March 8-15, pay-what-you-can
Tickets must be purchased by March 7
www.posttheatrical.org
With venues shuttered since last March, theater companies have come up with different, creative — and, in some cases, old-fashioned — ways of presenting works. On Site Opera’s To My Distant Love, Woolly Mammoth’s Human Resources, and 600 Highwaymen’s A Thousand Ways (Part One): A Phone Call took place over the telephone, while Ars Nova’s P.S. consists of a year of letters between two childhood friends, arriving every few weeks in the mail.
Purchase professor Scott Adkins and his Let’s Make a Theatre Company, formed last April during the pandemic, use both methods of delivery for Party Line, running March 8-15 and part of Post Theatrical, a festival of durational works from Pittsburgh’s RealTime Interventions that unfold through letters. In the 1930s and 1940s, communities used party lines, local telephone circuits in which users could hear other people’s conversations, resulting in the spread of gossip and other information (and misinfornmation). In Party Line, audience members receive a prerecorded phone call, via a robo-call platform, every night for eight days at 8:00, lasting between two and ten minutes each as an audio narrative evolves. In addition, they receive a self-addressed stamped envelope to correspond with any character of their choosing — who will write back. Of course, with the postal system experiencing historic delays, there’s no guarantee how long this part of the work will take, and it’s ironic given how many Americans have spent much of the crisis either sanitizing the mail or putting it aside for a while before opening it.
Adkins (Lakeview Terrace, TupuTupuTupu) wrote and directed the play, which features Ellen Walz, Chris Padro, Shavell Fernandez, Peter Moriarty, Sara Meade, Trevor Vaughan, Izzy Hamboussi, and Leah Bickley, with sound design and engineering by Gavin Price. Pay-what-you-can tickets must be purchased by March 7. Other Post Theatrical shows include the Wallpaper Company’s All Light on Earth Comes from Somewhere Else, New Georges’ Dream/Home, and Melisa Tien’s The Community Forest.