Theatre Journal

How do you imagine a more perfect future?

The recorded phone message asks you to speak your answer to this question after the tone. On the other end of the phone is an implicit guarantee: someone is listening. In their first piece since the start of the pandemic, the Brooklyn-based company Theater Mitu listened and engaged with those collected manifestos of an imagined future. The group used these answers left on their hotline’s voicemail as well as messages from astronauts, astronomers, and middle-school students as wide-ranging source material for their production Utopian Hotline. The process of making this production produced not only the live event and the public hotline, but also an installation, a virtual archive, an album, and a vinyl record. Theater Mitu is asking not only what theatre looks like in our entangled “now” of media connections, overlaps, and documentation, but they are asking how to continue thinking about theatre after the event ends.

Walking into the space, I was instructed to take my shoes off and find a seat on a sprawling pink carpet that framed the performance area and encompassed where the audience sat. The small audience of twelve filed in, found their seats around a set of long white tables that featured sound devices both contemporary and vintage: record players, tape recorders, rotary phones, and reel-to-reel players, alongside a variety of stage microphones and wired headphones. Above the tables were large projection [End Page 372] screens that did double work as a ceiling that made the space feel smaller, closer. When I sat on the ground, I was instructed to put on large black headphones through which the entire soundscape of the piece was experienced. The headphones allowed me an intimate experience with the piece as each voice was channeled directly from microphone to my ear, foregoing even the short trip against the black walls, as if I were able to get closer to the performers through our technological connection. As one performer explained, “I’d like to speak to you directly.” There was no attempt to hide the machinery; the black cables screamed across the pink ground under the tables to each of the spots to which we were guided. At first, I felt isolated in this high-tech bubble of curated sound and felt limited in a seemingly open space by the cable tying me to others. But as the show began, we were asked to look around at our fellow audience members with the same reflection of the pink carpet hitting our faces. After a brief introduction to the rules of the space (no shoes, how to put the headphones on), we were asked to imagine each other’s lives, realities, and futures by “sift[ing] through the contents of your mind—specifically, your dreams” in a ritualistic opening monologue from one of the performers. My isolation faded away as I considered others in my own dream of the future. Soon I found myself bound not only to the performers but to my fellow audience members by the big black cables. It was a mediated closeness in the age of pandemics, but a time that more than any other attempts at closeness in the past two years asked me to look into the future by first looking into the eyes of strangers. I started to look beyond the masks and COVID protocols that we were abiding by and instead see “directly” by listening-with. In the words of one of our performer-guides, I felt the cables had become “a tether to their humanity.”

Utopian Hotline integrated the recorded messages of the...