A Thousand Ways – Part 1: A Phone Call
Written/Directed by 600 Highwaymen
Public Theatre
June 13, 2021
Production website
💉💉 out of 5

Let me begin by saying that this really isn’t theatre in that it lacks one essential ingredient – an audience. This makes Thousand Ways an experience and not technically theatre. But at this point in theatre’s resurgence, I’ll take ANYTHING! The premise is interesting: everything happens with a phone call to a total stranger that remains a stranger throughout. Once your $15 dollar ticket is purchased, you are given a day, a time and a code to dial. When that time comes and you enter the code an pre-recorded electronic voice patches you through to another random person. From there the most mechanical voice asks you to share things with your partner ranging from serious to silly and to do all kinds of imagined fantasies as to what this person must look like and what their habits might be.

NO talk outside of electronic directions is allowed. The experience itself feels like you are poking holes into understanding another person. Without context, however, you are left with a bunch of holes but no thread to complete the picture. It really does replicate the way we meet people, unfortunately, as they share words with us – – often using those words to hide rather than to reveal. And just like that the mechanical voice shuts down the conversation and you are left with a dead phone in your hands. You never get anymore from that person other than the few words they shared. It was most disturbing to get this ever so sketchy view of a person and then KNOW that you will never see or meet this person. It really takes a few minutes for you to recover from this shock. Here is a bit of a YouTube promotion for the play that gives you a taste of the encounter: A Thousand Ways – Part 1: A Phone Call.