Sunday Feature: Nathalie Mathieson on Show and Tell Alexander Bell (SummerWorks)

Communication Takes Centre Stage
Show and Tell Alexander Bell is a lively, somewhat strange version of the story of Bell’s invention of the telephone.
by Nathalie Mathieson

Natalie Mathieson is a core member and co-founder of Ars Mechanica, a Toronto-based theatre company dedicated to exploring history, technology and magic. She is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies and Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She is currently writing her dissertation on Holocaust representation, and has been supported by a Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship. Ms Mathieson has taught at the Department of Drama and Speech Communication at the University of Waterloo, the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, and is a part-time child and youth worker at a shelter for women and children.

On April 20th, 1877, Benjamin Peirce and 15 other people signed a petition addressed to Alexander Graham Bell. They weren’t petitioning against his contested telephone patent, or his controversial beliefs, such as those written in “Memoir upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race.” Only a year after the invention of Bell’s telephone, the Bostonians requested that the inventor publicly demonstrate his fascinating invention in their city. 

In the letter, Peirce and the others—all men—pleaded not to be able to use the telephone themselves. They wished to hear the telephone…and to see it. It is likely that these men understood that time and other practical factors would have prohibited a more participatory interaction with the telephone. It is also likely that they knew that Bell made a habit of personally demonstrating his invention.

Review: (Toronto) Show and Tell Alexander Bell (SummerWorks)

When Bell Plays Broken Telephone
Crossed lines between theatre and performance art
by Gregory Bunker

Like a dream, Show and Tell Alexander Bell (produced by Ars Mechanica) is fantastical, schizophrenic, hard to understand and even harder to recall. Sadly, the premise gets lost and the plot becomes so bewildering that the nightmarish atmosphere towards the end feels appropriate: you know that soon, you’ll wake up and it’ll all be over.