Review: TELEPHONE at Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell placed the world's first telephone call to his assistant, Thomas Watson. He might have said "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you," or "Watson, come here, I want you," or "Watson, come here, I need you."

It's a small discrepancy in words with big potential differences in meaning, and it’s the entry point for TELEPHONE, poet Ariana Reines's theatrical triptych inspired by Avital Ronell's 1989 work The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. Directed by Rebecca Lingafelter, this production by Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble (PETE) tackles that slippery uncertainty: how much gets lost, or invented, in transmission.

The action unfolds inside a set that's a piece of art in its own right: Peter Ksander's double-pointed wooden oval reaches nearly to the ceiling, with seating running along both long sides. Still smelling of wood, it doubles as a canvas for spectrogram-like visuals accompanying a soundscape that serves as a precursor to the rest of the piece.

The show opens with Bell (played by the sonorous-voiced Andrew Welsh) and Watson (Jacob Coleman) grappling with what they've just made possible. Staged as Vaudeville, complete with stylized movements, clown makeup, and pratfalls, this section echoes the state fair exhibitions Bell Telephone Company once toured to show off the new invention (a detail worth catching in the dramaturg's notes, courtesy of Chris Gonzalez). Even standing in the same room, Bell and Watson struggle to communicate with one another, which sets up the question the whole evening keeps circling back to: did separating the voice from the person make communication better, or worse?

The middle section is the strangest, and the longest, of the three. It draws on the real case of Babette Straub, known as Miss St., a patient of Carl Jung's who believed she had a telephone inside her. Institutionalized for years, her fragmented, rambling speech was widely dismissed as meaningless, but Jung read it for symbolic content, eventually turning her case into a landmark of early psychoanalysis. Lingafelter has chosen to split Miss St. across three performers: Cristi Miles, Amber Whitehall, and Damaris Webb. They occasionally speak alone, but more often together in a Greek-chorus arrangement that doesn't always stay in sync. As the ravings of a mad person, the text is already chaotic, and the delivery makes the words difficult to understand. Even when I grasped them, I struggled to find meaning. I found my mind drifting to how the actors writhed through Jenny Ampersand's costumes (off-kilter, quilt-like garments) and the shadows they threw against the wall.

The final part brings all five actors together and brings us back to the play's central question with an answer something like "both better and worse." The audience is given headphones (they’re tucked under the seats, so don’t accidentally kick them out of reach like I did, plus it's worth locating the volume dials before the lights go down) and listens in on fragments of phone conversations that are instantly familiar: friends giggling late at night, lovers starting and ending relationships, all kinds of people connecting, reconnecting, failing to connect. We’ve all had these exact conversations. I found it an unexpectedly emotional close to the piece, a reminder that a phone can bridge enormous distances but also hold real intimacy at arm's length, which is sometimes exactly what we want and sometimes what torments us.

This is not an easy night of theatre. It’s more performance art than play, and it won't be for every theatregoer. But for those willing to put in the work, TELEPHONE offers a thoughtful, sometimes moving meditation on what we gain and lose every time we pick up the phone.

TELEPHONE runs through July 11. Details and tickets here.

To post a comment, you must register and login.

Need more Oregon Theatre News in your life?
Sign up for all the news on the Summer season, discounts & more...