What A Phonecall With A Stranger Teaches You About Human Crisis

What if you end up picking up a call from a stranger with no idea where the conversation will lead you? Some of you may argue that all of us are inadvertently strangers at the end of the day? Fair enough. But how much time can we take out from our everyday lives to sit down and discuss things that truly matter with another human being? Chances are that none of us have any time for that at all.

Now imagine a telephone line that connects you to a complete stranger, you know nothing about where they come from or who they are for that matter and neither do they. But for the next 30 minutes or more, you can discuss everything that plagues human existence.

Seems unreal at a level, doesn’t it? But Kaivalya Plays’s Lifeline 99 99, an interactive play that explores the absurdity of the human crisis, directed by Akshay Raheja and Gaurav Singh warns you about the greed and loneliness that consume our lives, through a one on one storytelling experience conducted entirely through your phone.

The play combines the use of IVRS technology with live storytelling over the phone. After registering, the audience calls the Lifeline 99 99. This connects them to an IVR machine that enquires about their preference for an experience. Based on their responses, a few minutes later, someone or something calls back, but who calls back?

And this is where the fun begins.

Maybe a conflicted sex chat operator or a dead human being or a piece of art – personified. What is known about the Lifeline 99 99 is that it is loaded with fundamental philosophical questions of our absurd times.

Akshay Raheja says, “It was a conscious decision to restrict this interactive play to a one on one performance, which retains the life of a theatrical experience over a digital medium.” Gaurav Singh adds, “Talking to a stranger over the phone isn’t what’s unique, but what’s at stake is the difference. Every episode asks the audience member to change something in each narrative.”

While the stories you hear in these episodes are fictional, they seek to bring out the absurdities of the lives we are living. “Potentially, theatre exists in every live human interaction”, says Akshay, and adds “It is the role of an audience in a breathing performance, how their understanding, trust and expectation changes the performance and the actors in real-time”. Gaurav believes that the interactive nature of the performance is what sets it apart, adding, “While all of us may encounter the same emotion (e.g. grief), we all process it differently. It is exciting for us to see how every audience member will leave with a slightly different experience in each show.”

As someone who had the chance of experiencing the improv, I entered the conversation unaware of how it would progress. To be quite honest, I did not expect it to move me or to even leave me introspecting as they had promised. But the conversation ends on such a tragic note, that you are almost forced to answer some difficult questions for yourself. In my case, the person on the other side of the line was a telecommunication company owner, he kept insisting how it was his last call. In the first half of the conversation he rambled about his company and I felt feelings of irritability that we often face when confronted with such calls. As the call progressed, his story unfolded in front of me, quite aware that I was in the realms of fiction, I felt my apathy disturbing. But it is the ending of the call that moves you, the uncomfortable realisation that if perhaps someone’s last call was to us, would we be exhibiting such apathy whether intentional or unintentional. It is this thought that stayed with me long after the improv had ended and is a thought that has been subconsciously playing in my mind since. During the conversation, we did tread into unchartered waters of humanity and how the world plays out, how governments fail us, how society does but how there are still rare moments of humanity that give us hope.

Perhaps the intent of Lifeline 99 is precisely this, to remind us what it means to be human and what it means to offer our humanity.

Post the improv, we got in a conversation with the co-directors of the play to understand their ideology behind the improv and how they view theatre and improv play out in a post-COVID world.

Why did you decide to call this performance Lifeline 99 99?

Gaurav Singh: The idea for this performance was born out of Akshay and my fascination with the good old days of the telephone, wherein voice calling preceded text messages and video calls. Today, we only have transactional, service calls on the phone – food delivery, life insurance, customer care etc. There is something fascinating about hearing the voice of a stranger, trying to connect with you over something utterly mundane like a parcel delivery, and we wanted to explore how that conversation could be theatrical. That’s where the ‘Lifeline’ comes from, an absurd telephone line where humans connect with each other over something crucial to their lives. The ‘99 99’ comes from the social, cultural and economic significance of the number in our lives – from the psychological trick of having prices end in 99 instead of whole numbers to the 99% loading on our computer screens – there is something, one thing, missing from all of our lives at the moment. It can be a person, a desire, a success, a relationship or anything else that we perceive will complete us.

Q. What was the inspiration behind this interactive play?

Akshay Raheja: Theatre is an experience of a story through bodies in the same time and space. We wanted to understand how we could preserve theatrical life in spite of not being in the same space as the audience. For us, the inspiration was to understand ‘what is alive in theatre’. We started with the assumption that theatre exists in every live human interaction. This is how we came up with the idea of a one on one interactive narrative. By placing the audience at the core of this experience, we offered them multiple narrative choices that interrogate their beliefs and ideas based on their decisions in conversation around these peculiar scenarios.

How do you place this show within the larger context of COVID-19?

Akshay Raheja: This play was not created as a response (of the art form) to the pandemic, however, the consequences of the pandemic definitely inspired the content of the play. It made us rethink about human connections in live conversations as against telephonic ones. When we set out to create this telephone line, we wanted to preserve the life of human interaction by restricting it to a one on one audio performance, as theatrical as it could be. Therefore, we think it will be relevant even when performance venues open up.

Gaurav Singh: What we’re doing in Lifeline 99 99 makes use of a ‘distanced’ composition style – one where audiences, performers and spaces will continue to be separated but can be brought together by reclaiming this distance of time and space. With this show, we can continue reaching out to audiences who may be isolating at home or even wanting access to a more visceral performance experience that places them at the centre of it. I believe theatre pieces like this will continue to inform, challenge and investigate the relationship between the audience and the performance, leading to more innovative forms and narratives in the theatre.

What is the scope of such kind of a show once theatres fully reopen? How do you see this moving ahead?

Akshay Raheja: This play was not created as a response (of the art form) to the pandemic, however, the consequences of the pandemic definitely inspired the content of the play. It made us rethink about human connections in live conversations as against telephonic ones. When we set out to create this telephone line, we wanted to preserve the life of human interaction by restricting it to a one on one audio performance, as theatrical as it could be. Therefore, we think it will be relevant even when performance venues open up.

Gaurav Singh: What we’re doing in Lifeline 99 99 makes use of a ‘distanced’ composition style – one where audiences, performers and spaces will continue to be separated but can be brought together by reclaiming this distance of time and space. With this show, we can continue reaching out to audiences who may be isolating at home or even wanting access to a more visceral performance experience that places them at the centre of it.

What would you consider a major takeaway for the audience?


Akshay Raheja: Theatre intends to bring the audience and performer(s) together. One of the most crucial aspects of this is the choice an audience has to observe silence collectively in order to aid the performance in a real-life space. Over the digital medium, this spectatorship is challenged due to our habits of latent media consumption for entertainment. Through Lifeline 99 99, we attempt to curate diverse experiences for an audience member, one that they participate in creating. From the beginning of the experience, they choose one of the five narratives that are all meant to provoke thought and ask questions. The one-on-one nature takes the experience of immersive performance a step further. The collective takeaway for the audience has been the excitement of having equal control on how the story moves forward whilst individual takeaways vary widely from being introspective to deeply reflective, as every single call is unique to the conversation they have with the performer.

How do you view improv in a post-Covid world?


Gaurav Singh: The global improvisational theatre community were amongst the first to respond to arts venue shutting down with online shows, workshops and jams as early as March 2020. What’s been exhilarating is just how much improv has grown in India (and the world) in the last one year. At Kaivalya Plays we’ve been hosting a weekly improv jam that’s been running for 46 weeks straight and has seen participation from over 1000+ participants across 12 different countries. As we start easing lockdown restrictions, I believe improvisation (and by extension, improv shows) will lead the way in creating a hybrid, distanced form of entertainment that still engages the audience deeply whilst being able to readily adapt to the changing guidelines and circumstances of live performance. Whilst audiences will continue to isolate at home, they will look for fun, engaging ways to curb the lockdown blues. They can now tune in to the best improv shows from around the world and, at the click of a button, join the action themselves.