Hello. Thank you for calling the Utopian Hotline. We are collecting anonymous responses to help us build a better tomorrow. At the tone, please leave a message answering the question: How do you imagine a more perfect future?
The journey of Utopian Hotline began with a simple prompt, spread via flyers posted across several major U.S. cities: Call in and share, anonymously, your imaginings for a utopian future.
There was no show art, no logo, no explanation. But as messages poured in, the team at experimental troupe Theater Mitu were listening. Drawing upon hundreds of voicemails, the Obie-winning company then devised a communal investigation into our vast cosmos, the possibility of a better world, and perhaps the biggest question of all: Are we alone in the universe?
First staged at Mitu’s tiny Brooklyn space in fall 2021, Utopian Hotline has now journeyed to an unlikely staging in the Charles Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Science, Boston. The first theatrical piece featuring live performers to play this 209-seat planetarium, this unique multidisciplinary event, co-presented by the Museum of Science and ArtsEmerson, runs through May 18.
“Planetariums invite us to sit in community and take in the grandness of this vast unknown,” said Rubén Polendo, founding artistic director of Theater Mitu and Utopian Hotline‘s director. “To place humanity’s hope up there, and have us sit together taking that in—it felt like an incredible opportunity.”
By “up there,” Polendo of course refers to the planetarium’s 57-foot dome, onto which images of our universe can be projected, typically for educational pieces led by museum staff (though the museum’s varied programming also includes Taylor Swift and Beyoncé sensory concerts). Utopian Hotline uses the dome for a range of imagery, from dreamily abstract projections to live video feeds of the performers to stunning imagery from space.
While unlike anything the Museum of Science has hosted before, the new show proved a natural fit with their programming. Indeed, Mitu had drawn inspiration for the show from the “Golden Record,” two time capsules of life and culture on Earth included aboard the Voyager probes in 1977.
“It is using the planetarium as this incredible medium and immersive space, telling a story very much in the spirit of astronomy and community,” said Dani LeBlanc, the museum’s director of immersive theatres and programs. “It felt so right, coming together to send one message out into space that brings together all of the things we are as humanity.”
Under the dome, four performers maneuver around a circular white table wrapped around the ZEISS Star Projector at the planetarium’s center. On the table sit a range of outmoded messaging technology: push-button telephones, tape decks, reel-to-reel players. In a carefully choreographed dance, the performers move from one gadget to the next, toggling recordings on and off.
Dressed in jumpsuits, the four also act as spiritual guides through the communal journey of the piece, trading off melancholic original songs and reflective monologues that draw on expert testimony. The performer’s voices are piped into viewers’ ears directly through headphones provided to audience members as they enter the space. (The songs have been released on Vinyl and can be heard on Spotify, while all the voicemails are archived online in the form of an interactive semi-video game.)
The result is a gentle, almost dreamlike meditation on unanswerable questions. The vast indeterminacy of the topic is offset by the profoundly human, often deeply silly content of the voicemails themselves.
Perhaps it could be a future of empathy and actual social awareness.
Plenty of Gorgonzola cheese tastings for all.
We need an intra-borough Brooklyn train.
A more perfect future is constantly in flux. Change is God. But, ya know. Not in that way.
Meeting weekly on Zoom amid the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Mitu team were heartened by the hopeful spirit of the messages pouring in.
“We discovered so many rich and complicated visions of the future,” Polendo recalled. “We saw them not as competitive, but rather as visions that could tapestry together.”
“There is no singular answer to the questions we’re exploring,” added Monica Sanborn, a company member since 2020 and a performer in Utopian Hotline. “What feels exciting is taking all of these different perspectives and views, and sharing space and time to think about them together.”
The company next interviewed several physicists and astronauts, aided by the SETI Institute in connecting to experts. They also partnered with Brooklyn Independent Middle School, where they were able to consult an equally essential set of experts on the future: children. To their surprise, the team found that seasoned experts and savvy kids gave very similar answers.
“We had scientists talking about how time is a flat circle, there is no division between past, present, and future,” said Polendo. “Then you speak to a kid who goes: ‘The problem is, the future is now. The future is every moment. And until we realize that, nothing’s gonna change.’”
Everyone was eager, in other words, to deconstruct the idea of a “better future” as much as to answer the question straightforwardly. Following their lead, Utopian Hotline interrogates its own prompt, at one point questioning whether humans even exist in a shared present or future at all.
“If you look at me, do you see me now?” asks Kayla Asbell, another performer for the Boston run, gazing out into the audience. (The ensemble is rounded out by Denis Butkus and Michael Littig.) “Not really, because light takes time to come from me to you. So you see me as I was a few nanoseconds ago.”
Utopian Hotline was first staged at Mitu580 in Gowanus, the company’s permanent home since 2018. A multi-use venue built for interdisciplinary experimentation, Mitu580 has also hosted the livestream of Pulitzer finalist Circle Jerk and, more recently, the madcap celebration of mall culture 1-800-3592-113592, from the new ensemble CHILD.
Mitu recently resigned their lease on the space through 2034. Their latest world premiere at Mitu580 was (Holy) Blood, a gruesome meditation on madness and murder in which they reconstructed Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1989 film Santa Sangre with a live soundscape and torrents of fake blood. Other recent Mitu productions include remnant, an audio-based rumination on war, and Victor L. Cazares’s time-bending American (Tele)Visions, co-presented with New York Theatre Workshop in 2022.
For Utopian Hotline‘s 2021 premiere, played for 30 audience members a night due to capacity restrictions as theatregoing slowly returned, Mitu580 was decked out in luscious pink carpeting. The pink carpet has since become essential to the show’s identity: It was retained for subsequent tour stops in El Paso, Texas, Mesa, Arizona, and Manama, Bahrain, and now for the Boston run.
This time around, throwing down carpet was the least of the practical challenges Mitu faced. Bridging the differing technical systems of Utopian Hotline and the planetarium took multiple on-site workshops. Projecting live video feeds onto the dome took the most troubleshooting. The show must also be able to load in and out quickly between matinee and evening performances, as the planetarium has other programming throughout the day.
Thanks to the planatarium’s concentric seating layout, none of the piece’s intimacy is lost in this unusual new space.
“Everyone is facing the middle, so it is a very ‘around the campfire’ feel that lends itself to storytelling,” said LeBlanc.
Thought the quarantine-inspired moment of debate and reflection around a better future that inspired Utopian Hotline feels like it has faded in the intervening years, in Sanborn’s view that only makes the show more essential today.
“Is it possible to bring more curiosity into our collective conversations, in the midst of all of our differences?” said Sanborn. “Curiosity about each other, about the world, and about our future on our planet?”
In bringing 200 people together in a communal space of inquiry, Polendo hopes the show itself achieves that goal—and, by its own existence, offers some answer to the most existential question of all.
“That question of ‘are we alone’ is no longer an intimidating one, but actually a strengthening one, because the form of the show itself offers confirmation that we are not,” said Polendo. “If nothing else, you are not alone in asking these questions.”
Joey Sims (he/him) has written for The Brooklyn Rail, Vulture, Into, Queerty, TheaterMania, New York Theatre Guide, and TDF Stages. Joey is an alumnus of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Critics Institute and runs a theatre Substack called Transitions.
