Calling from Canada: Exploring the Shift to Telephonic Theatre During COVID-19

At the beginning of the pandemic, when artists and audiences could no longer gather, the first Canadian theatre companies to pivot their programming and launch live theatrical works were those with long histories of challenging what theatre is, where theatre can happen, and how theatre meets its audience. While many artists and companies turned to archival footage from previous productions, online play readings, or other recorded content, companies with backgrounds in site-specific or immersive theatre seemed to transition to the new “normal” quickly and with observable success. By April 2020, Outside the March (OTM), a Toronto-based company known for staging work in places including a kindergarten classroom, video store, and funeral home, launched The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries—a week-long interactive telephone play. The piece has become a successful cultural export during a time when traditional theatre touring is impossible. Alongside OTM, Convergence Theatre also performed for an international audience with their phone-based Corona Variations. Dopolavoro Teatrale (DLT), another Toronto company self-described as “site and audience specific,” launched Theatre on-Call, and Vancouver’s Boca del Lupo toured yet another phone-based experience, Red Phone. During a time when theatre and society moved into the virtual world, these companies gravitated away from screen-based digital content toward an older, analogue form—the telephone. Together, these “phone plays” represent some of the earliest live Canadian theatrical experiences of the pandemic, and invite reflection on how notions of theatrical space, liveness, and intimacy shifted during COVID-19. Approaching this work in conversation with scholars of site-specific, digital, and disability performance, this chapter suggests that the practicalities of telephonic form offer opportunities for new accessibilities of theatre now and in the future.