Results tagged “telephone”

Remember phone booths? Not pay phones, but the actual booths you got into in order to access that phone. Well, according to Scouting NY there are only four left in all of Manhattan! Because who needs privacy anymore? Well, maybe Clark Kent. But when movies film here they often have to recreate their phone booth scenes with props. Sigh, just another little thing dropping off the landscape of the city. This site has a great archive of pay phones and booths around the five boroughs, and Forgotten NY takes a nostalgic look back on booths of the past. If you want to see a rare booth in person the remaining ones are at 101st, 100th, 90th and 66th streets.

Ariana Reines's play Telephone begins in darkness, with the faint but mesmerizing sound of static, finally interrupted by the famous words, "Watson, come here, I want you!" Then, out of the void, burst our two stars, Alexander Graham Bell (Gibson Frazier) and Thomas Watson (Matthew Dellapina), their faces frozen in a tableaux of cartoonish terror. In the highly stylized, presentational comic patter that ensues, staged in front of Vaudevillian footlights, it becomes clear their intention is not so much to sell us on their miraculous invention as it is to figure out what the hell just happened. The first transmission of a human voice has left them rather disoriented, you see, as if they've been teleported to another dimension.