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REVIEW
Dialing up a brighter future in ‘Utopian Hotline’
Easing into the reclining seats at the Museum of Science’s Charles Hayden Planetarium for Theater Mitu’s “Utopian Hotline” (now through May 18), feels like a warm hug after a long, hard day. The show — a co-production with the museum and ArtsEmerson — is a lovely theatrical meditation that asks viewers to imagine a brighter future as they listen to an audio montage of other people’s desires for the world through large, black headsets offered at the door.
Visuals of outer space, a kaleidoscopic of roving cast members and spinning records are projected on the dome-shaped ceiling. The audience listens to people talk about a healthier environment, a technologically automated society that makes space for kindness and for heaven to come down on earth. The cast members (who have all mastered the soothing radio voices for the show), dressed in gray work jumpsuits with headphones, sing and operate the ancient tech of old: a silver Walkman and beige push button phones to the tempo of the music.
The idea for the important and much needed show stems from the Apollo Voyager I and II sending the golden records—with sounds and data from earth—into space. That way, if other beings should be out there, they could have some understanding of what our world looks and sounds like.
This year, the Museum of Science is embarking on a year-long exploration of what it means to be human. Part of being human, as "Utopian Hotline" shares, is love and loss, the creation of music and poetry, the importance of memory and the constant grappling with loneliness. And that loneliness and uncertainty at the height of the pandemic ushered this story into existence. During post-show remarks, Rubén Polendo, founder of Theater Mitu, recalled that during the pandemic, he and his other artist friends were concerned about hope. While theaters were shuttered and the future was uncertain, Denis Butkus, one of the artists at Theater Mitu, “had this really lovely, pure instinct,” he said, “to put up these posters everywhere that just said, call this number and tell us how you imagine a more perfect future. It didn't say art. It didn't say theater.”
They didn’t expect anyone to call. But hundreds of people called the hotline and told stories, sang, put their kids on the phone, prayed and left their ideas for the future. All the messages helped the artists realize that there’s a lot of hope left in the world. And they wanted to share that hope through this work, that so delicately and kindly traverses through time and space.
During the performance, one of the cast members in the center of the planetarium asked us all to imagine the future. I immediately envisioned my mother’s face in a field surrounded by sunlight, thinking of the day I’ll see her again. I envisioned accomplishing a lot, the cultivation of community, and a peaceful world with safe food and drinking water for everyone. The next directive was to envision what the person next to us might want. The prompt sheds light on our interconnectedness, even when we feel alone.
These kinds of endeavors with existential roots or aspirations can sometimes veer off so sharply that they leave you untethered. But this production, with its soft touch feels balanced and much needed right now as headlines shout of our differences and legislation threatens to further separate us in countless ways.
But, when things seem untenable, I will think about what Polendo said: “There’s a lot of hope, and not only a vision of the future, but many visions of the future, and that it's actually quite a really beautiful, Democratic idea.”
Perhaps the point of asking us to consider what the person next to us in the planetarium might want is to help us remember that we are each other.
And that the future can be as bright or as dark as we imagine.
The Museum of Science, ArtsEmerson and Theater Mitu’s production of “Utopian Hotline” runs through May 18 at the Museum of Science’s Charles Hayden Planetarium. To leave your message for a brighter future, call 646-694-8050.
