Telephone Plays and Interactive Performances
In The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries performed by the Bramble Theatre, participants would receive a phone call and be asked to report a “mundane” crime that had occurred to them. They would then receive several more phone calls throughout the day from a cast of characters trying to solve their mystery. The performance wasn’t focused on the pandemic, but attempted to distract the audience from the horrors of the pandemic, and give them the opportunity to interact with another human being. In the article “There’s No Place Like Home (Theater); Critic’s Notebook,” the author, Alexis Soloski discusses her experiences with interactive/immersive theater, including The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries. Soloski discusses how the immersive theater “asked about [her] world, listened and then let [her] slip free of it.” In an interview with Mitchell Cushman the co-creator of The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries, Cushman tells Soloski that the goal of Mundane Mysteries was “to be a project that leads with optimism” in a world that is already “very dark and disturbing.”
Another interactive performance created during the pandemic is Disclaimer, by Tara Ahmadinejad. Disclaimer is an interactive performance given over Zoom that invites audience members to participate in a murder mystery. It doesn’t focus centrally on the pandemic, and seeks primarily to distract audiences from their day-to-day lives during the pandemic.
Unlike stand-up and sketch comedy, the majority of telephone plays and interactive performances focused on transporting their audiences into a different reality. These performances were designed to provide relief from the trauma of the pandemic, not to use dark humor to cope with it.