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The pandemic shut down theaters across the country a year ago — but that hasn't meant a complete end to live theatrical creativity. 

This week the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis begins a run of a show without sets, lighting or even actors. 

 Each show involves just two audience members and a phone. 

The show's full name is  "A Thousand Ways (Part One): A Phone Call." It offers something that's been missing from many people's pandemic lives — encounters with strangers. 

Michael Silverstone — one half of the theater group 600 Highwaymen — says an audience member buys a ticket for a performance at a specific time, and is given a phone number.

"Another audience member gets that same phone number," said Silverstone. "You both call in. You are immediately met by a recorded voice." 

"This is a way to see one another," the voice says. "Words are all we have." 

"She is a robot," Silverstone said. "This voice guides the entire experience. She asks questions."  

"Have you ever scaled a fence? Have you ever been to Spain? Have you held a gun?" the robot asks.

Some questions are directed to one audience member, some to the other. Some to both. 

"She gives you things to do, things to experience, things to say," said Silverstone.

"What are you looking at? What can you see from where you are?" the robot asks.

This show requires a participant's full engagement. But Silverstone's partner Abbie Browde bristles at the term "audience participation."

"Audience participation tends to involve some kind of humiliation, it tends to make you the butt of a joke. It tends to involve some kind of rules that you are not privy to, and I think this is not that," she said.

It's an experience designed to be comfortable. It's just three voices talking, and one of them is a robot. Browde says talking through the phone, without a visual connection, allows a kind of magic.

"Having our eyes be sort of on a separate plane from our ears felt really transporting and that there was a kind of conjuring you could do of the other person on the line, because you weren't seeing them with your eyes, because you were sort of seeing them almost in your mind." she said. 

The show continues for up to an hour. You never learn the other person's name, but Silverstone says audience members form an image of their fellow participant.    

"So you feel this, hopefully, a profound and unexpected sense of closeness," he said. "And then it's gone. And then you are immediately brought back to the reality of being alone. Of knowing that you will never talk to this person again."  

A reviewer with the London Observer who attended an early version of "A Thousand Ways" described feeling bereaved when the other person left his life.

Walker Art Center senior curator of performing arts Philip Bither says he was skeptical when he heard about the emotional impact of the show — and while he didn't feel like someone had died, he did feel he'd experienced something profound. He's glad that Silverstone and Browde offer a Zoom gathering for all participants after the run of the show  

"To hear other people’s experiences of the relationship built over an hour was really moving," he said.

Because there are only two audience members at a time, runs of "A Thousand Ways (Part One)" usually sell out. It runs at the Walker from Tuesday through March 14. 

The Walker is also offering "A Thousand Ways (Part Two): An Encounter" for two weeks starting April 20. That's for two audience members who meet across a table, separated by a glass panel. Their discussion is moderated by prompts on index cards.

Browde and Silverstone say you don’t have to do Part One to do Part Two. 

Despite its name, Part Two actually came first. 600 Highwaymen developed it before the pandemic as a way to get people who had never met to talk and form, if not a relationship, at least a common understanding of an experience. At the time it was meant to get people out of their own bubbles.    

And there's a part three in development as well. At some point, when it's safe, 600 Highwaymen would like to assemble everyone who can come in person for a larger experience. Maybe even unmasked. Bither says the Walker is interested on hosting, but it's going to be a delicate timing balance.

"Both when people are still celebrating the coming out, but also not too late that it's sort of like, 'Well, what’s the big deal? It's over now, and I barely remember it!'" he said. 

Which may be the reality of many profound relationships that burned hot, but only for an hour.

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Euan Kerr

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The Walker Art Center is presenting “A Thousand Ways,” which provides an experience many people have missed during the pandemic: a meaningful encounter with a stranger. 

600 Highwaymen create theater with two audience members and a phone

A photo illustration of hands that appear translucent.

Image courtesy of Walker Art Center

A printout for a theatrical production on a peach background.

600 Highwaymen create theater with two audience members and a phone

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