The Program
The Program
The Program was the first full-length play produced by the San Francisco Neo-Futurists. Co-created with Ezra Reaves in early 2021, The Program was a one-on-one immersive play experienced entirely over the phone. Audience members call in to an automated line and are led down a telephonic wormhole into an absurd version of a corporate phone tree. Rather than just acting as a gimmick, Ezra and I were interested in playing with themes of intimacy and alienation (which felt especially heightened by COVID-19), and found that the phone was the perfect medium to move audiences into this emotional space.
How we made it
The Program was created using Twilio, a cloud communications software usually used by corporations for managing phone trees and automated text lines. We taught ourselves basic programming in order to create an audio experience that was both interactive and different for every audience member.
We’re eternally thankful for the help from Tilde Ann Thurium (developer at Twilio) and Ziz Simoens (game designer) for their guidance and support in navigating Twilio.
Audience & Press reviews
“Imagine if a phone tree kept you digging deeper and deeper and you never reached that live operator who was currently helping someone else; also imagine if, say, the interactive voice agent controlling said phone tree was a bit lonely, or jealous, or perhaps even… possessive. I’d say more about The Program but that it would rob potential listeners of the joy of discovering its surreal and twisted telephonic world on their own.”
- Kathryn Yu, review of The Program for No Proscenium
“One of the most clever, entertaining, thought provoking, highly relevant and technically sophisticated virtual audio performances I have ever experienced. A five star event! The sold-out 2021 run ended far too soon. I'll be first in line should The Program return for encore transmissions.”
-Ed Decker, Artistic Director of the New Conservatory Theater Center
“The Program has familiar ingredients of several kinds of things the [San Francisco Neo-Futurists] have always been good at on stage: quiet intimate audience-interaction mood pieces, eerie taped monologues and audio mashups, comedy based on intolerable repetition. But the combination of those was still surprising to me, because this format has such an unfamiliar emotional effect, and it's so sly about creating a story inside the story; they clearly put a lot of thought into how this works, and it works. When you find yourself talking to a person for real, it's like coming out of a dark cave maze on a beautiful day and being handed a ceremonial robe and a cup of hot chocolate. I liked this a lot.”
-E.B., audience member
“The kind of connection-making, heart-growing theater the world needs.”
-Jessie, audience member
“Fantastic. Both heartfelt and unsettling.”
-Mike, audience member
“By far the most unexpected 45 minutes of the last year.”
-E.E., audience member
“It was fast-paced, funny, and unpredictable in the best possible way. The sound design, writing, and performances were top-notch.”
-Luke, audience member
“It was an emotional mixture of the very unemotional phone answering system, sprinkled with emotional questions and wonderings of the objectives (hidden and plain) of the program itself. Like life coming forth from insert matter, deep feelings came forth from prerecorded audio trees (and beautiful sound engineering/mixing/effects).”
-Maic, audience member
