I entered into the wrong room at the ornate Goethe Institut across from the Metropolitan Museum on 5^th Avenue. I waited for the phone call that was apparently originating from a call center from India — a reversal of the dynamic in which one’s call to a U.S.-based corporation is rerouted to a cubicle located in India or elsewhere.

Perhaps it was deliberate on my part as I am more than reluctant to go to theatre pieces that rely on audience participation. I find them contrived, a kind of theatrical mad-libs: the audience is only there to fill in the blank, providing the performance with a verb, a noun, an adverb but never really guiding or transforming the narrative. I am fine with the fourth wall, and I like my experimentation on stage, not in blurring the distinction between performer and ticket-buyer.

But I’m a media studies person and a friend recommended the piece, regrettably entitled “Call Cutta in a Box.” The “intercontinental phone play” is devised by the German troupe Rimini Protocoll in collaboration with the Callcenter Descon Center Limited in Kolkata, India and coproduced in New York by the Under the Radar Festival and the Public Theatre. When I was redirected to the “right” room (not filled with beautiful winter light alas but just as spacious and probably even more ornate with its marble fireplaces and tall mirrors), I tried to keep an open mind when the cell phone chirped and a man with an Indian accent introduced himself to me, saying my name. At first I did find it a bit silly. He alerted me to the boiling tea pot in front of me inviting me to a cup of tea. He asked me what kind of animal I’ll like to be in my next lifetime. Whatever. Then he asked me to close my eyes and listen to him sing a song from a Bollywood film, inquiring if any images came to mind (truth be told I never closed my eyes) and I thought of errands I needed to do later in the day.  He guessed my age, asked if I was happy in my life, if I was married or single (a heterosexist assumption for a New York audience). He had trouble hearing me (and I was close to saying “can you hear me now?” a few times). He was following a strict script indeed—neither improvising nor allowing chance to enter into the interaction as he asked me to move about the room to examine certain objects that were meant to give a sense of his experience in Kolkata, 8000 miles away. I thought he was a kindly fellow doing a series of tasks requested of him by a German theatre company that had international funding, and though he was involved in an art milieu he was still part of an outsourcing operation. After all, why not hire an underemployed New York actor to pretend that s/he was 8000 miles away in a call center while s/he was actually working from a studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen?

My call center friend asked me if I felt like an actor. I told him no, I felt like a media critic. He seemed to assume that I knew nothing of his world and was surprised when I identified the Hindu god Kali in an image (very important to call center workers in Calcutta I learned) as well as Ganesh (very important to my new “friend”). The piece became more dynamic when he asked me to sit behind the simple Ikea desk near a fireplace. He said he was drawing me and asked that I draw him. When I logged on to the computer in front of me he took me on a tour of his city. I received a few faxes from him, one of a photograph that showed him at home but it was a long shot and I couldn’t see his face. When he instructed me to remove a plant from the desk, a webcam was revealed. He took me on a tour of his office. Unlike the Beaux-Arts splendor of my temporary environment, his was a desolate space crowded with cubicles and a din of workers on the phone audible in the computer’s speakers. I began to sense what it is like in his workplace and it contrasted greatly with the quietude and spaciousness of my temporary office at the German cultural institution. Seeing his image allowed the interaction to have more spontaneity to it—the script’s hold on him seem to lessen and we began to have more of a conversation. This is ironic because I use sound and words to establish relationships as much as I use gazes. Yet actually seeing his situation—and that of his coworkers—reminding me that he was working in a factory whereas I had spent $15 to have a long distance phone call in a well-kept mansion on 5^th Avenue.

He told me there were six golden rules in talking with a customer at a call center. I wanted to know them all but he said he could tell me only one, so I asked for number four. Rule number four is: Never use the word “sorry.” I understood immediately—the worker can never admit to the caller that a mistake has been made for the corporation can never accept blame. We showed each other our drawings—mine was more accurate than his even though his was technically much better (perhaps it was a standardized one he used for white men). We actually looked like each other—similar noses as well as hair and hairlines. We both wore glasses. I told him that my ears didn’t stand out as much as his—his were like an elephant’s I jokingly told him, thinking of Ganesh. Looking again at my drawing, I realized I had drawn myself not him, which may have been the point of the exercise. He remarked that as much as we were looking at each other via the webcams and computer monitors, we were also looking at a mirror. A bit heavy-handed perhaps, but I couldn’t deny the truth in his comment—I wonder now if that is part of his script. I guess the point is that by exploring difference, one finds resemblances and correspondences as well as projections onto the cultural other. Or that call center workers are performers that must be adept in managing callers and travel great distances telephonically as they are supposed to know about American or British culture and never expect the caller to know anything about India.

He alerted me that time was running out on our interaction and that he was going to have to go. He seemed sad at this—as if he was only following orders. I realized I liked the fellow, even if I remained suspicious of the theatre company he freelanced for—I imagined that they probably congratulated themselves on creating a performance that focused on the cell phone, using faxes, computers, and cameras as props in their “intervention” into the dynamics of global capitalism. Whatever.

He guessed wrongly that I was a freelancer. There was something endearing in how wrong he was about my age, my profession, my sexuality, the way I looked—or perhaps this was part of his recommended dialogue, to allow the person the illusion that they are elusive or mysterious. He hung up as I was in mid-sentence and I left the ornate room with its inexpensive Ikea office furniture. The woman downstairs who wasn’t clear in her directions asked how the piece was. I told her: “Well, the guy was sweet.” She looked a bit disappointed when I added: “but it was a bit silly.” But truth be told, it wasn’t only silly, I realized that those who toil in call centers work very hard for their money, even when they are part of “an intercontinental phone play.”

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