Review: (Montreal) Phone Whore

Into the Electronic Brothel...
...eyes wide open...
by Gaëtan L. Charlebois

The way I have covered the Montreal Fringe is to split the venues up among reviewers; each has to cover everything, for good or ill, at their venue. So I did not get to see one of the hot tickets of last year's edition, Cameryn Moore's solo Slut (r)Evolution. Nor have I seen Phone Whore (which toured - and will be touring - the North American Fringe circuit). When I mentioned into Twitter that PW was coming here this week, the Twittersphere ignited and I was told (nay: ordered) to see it.

...there was also a haunting darkness that leaves one, at an hour's end, profoundly troubled. 

Tonight the piece began its brief run at Mainline and I am glad. Last week I wrote about how theatre has the power to change one's mood and Moore and her director Elizabeth Dupré definitely dragged me out of this filthy winter. The place they dragged me in to, however, was not always a pleasant one. Yes, there was humour - but there was also a haunting darkness that leaves one, at an hour's end, profoundly troubled. This is adult theatre in every sense of the word and it is utterly refreshing to see it after the near-theatre, half-theatre and kiddy theatre to which one is often subjected.

Then she gets a call and the complicity evaporates.

Moore herself, you see, is a phone sex operator and the play is about her job. But Moore is, most of all, a highly-skilled actor (here and in phone job). She juggles the performer/spectator dynamic constantly. One minute we are accomplice - she speaks directly to us (and with tonight's minuscule audience it was possible for her to actually make eye-contact with each one in the house). In these moments of complicity she tells us about the work, about what it pays, about how the business of it works. Then she gets a call and the complicity evaporates.

The spectators becomes voyeurs, even intruders. Moore closes slightly away from us; she doesn't wink at us during the torrid call, we are not there. Often we laugh (easily, uncomfortably, horrified and delighted), sometimes there is dead silence especially near the end of the work when the calls take on a different colour and descend into profoundly shadowed corridors of the human experience. You are challenged, even tested; but it is a cathartic moment when all of your values are thrown into sharp focus and how you deal with the entire play becomes a case of how you parse it in your own head. Are these callers of hers sad, pathetic, dangerous or simply allowing themselves to go down paths so overgrown and moonless we simply don't want to follow (even as the soi-disant Phone Whore holds her clients' hands for the journey).

Finally Phone Whore is the kind of wondrous theatre work which forces you to face not just your own limits, but also what the limits are for text, performance and - let me say it - theatre itself.

Go.

Phone Whore is at Mainline to January 29