When I was in university I got a job at a theatre box office selling tickets and managing subscriptions mostly over the phone. In many ways it was a great job—there were very funny co-workers I became close friends with, flexible hours, an environment free of danger or injury, access to plays, frequent orders from Pizza Hut, and a mission (delivering art) I believed in. The main downside was that I was occasionally yelled at on the phone.
Most people who attend theatre are older, educated, and affluent—in other words, they lead comfortable lives. Almost all of them are lovely and/or decent people, and I do not remember any of the conversations I had with the good ones. What I do remember, vividly, are the hysterically aggrieved patrons who would either call in already furious or immediately work themselves up into a lather the second they heard the word no. People would lose their damn minds because they were going to miss a show and we didn’t issue refunds, or because they wanted to exchange tickets from one fiscal year to another and we didn’t do that, or because they didn’t like that we had cast a black actor playing the relative of a white actor, or because there was a snowstorm and they might be killed if they tried to drive into the city and how dare we not reschedule the performance to another date. Some people would ask if you were stupid, or threaten to get you fired, or say they would sue you and the theatre. Some people would yell for a bit, calm down, and apologize. Others would yell for one or two hours straight, while you sat there wondering how they were able to find the energy over some Christmas Carol tickets. These outbursts would erupt from the otherwise placid, congenial atmosphere and end up the only memorable thing that happened.
The first time someone yelled at me it was an incredibly upsetting and stressful experience. The more it happened, though, and the more out-of-proportion the rage was to the situation at hand, the more I started to find it funny.
One of my co-workers was a young actor named Qasim Khan. Qasim was both very funny and very good at talking to people on the phone—he had a voice that radiated sweetness and gentle professionalism. He sounded like he was your friend, and genuinely wanted to help. He left the job when he was accepted into a prestigious training program offered by the very theatre we worked at, launching his career as an actor. Many years later I was developing a musical I had co-written in Charlottetown, PEI. Qasim was there performing in Anne of Green Gables: The Musical and Alice Through The Looking Glass. We cast him as Ivan, the young romantic lead, in a small test reading of our show. He absolutely crushed it, and I added his name to the list I keep in my head of people I want to work with.
Some years later an idea bubbled up from my subconscious: Valerie, an older, somewhat conservative white woman living in Etobicoke, calls her phone provider to complain about extra data charges on her bill. She’s not being entirely reasonable. Something else is going on—her family is in the midst of a crisis. Something is wrong with her son. They’re estranged and he’s in some kind of trouble. Akbar, the representative she talks with, is someone more or less like Qasim—a gay, brown-skinned artist from a Muslim family, raised in the suburbs but now living in downtown Toronto, paying his bills by working a part-time job he is almost accidentally good at. Akbar prides himself on his ability to make people happy, and he tries to help Valerie by getting to the root of what is really upsetting her. He begins gently probing into her life, and Valerie begins sharing. And then Akbar begins opening up to her in return. What began in rancour becomes something intimate and meaningful. Akbar becomes a kind of surrogate son to Valerie, changing both their lives in ways that I will not spoil here.
I called up Qasim and asked if he’d be interested in collaborating, both as an actor and as a source of research. He agreed, and we had a good long conversation about our experiences answering phones and his life more generally. He was very generous opening up and allowing me to pillage his experiences for artistic inspiration. I felt I ought to pillage some of my own life experiences as well—I thought about things I had witnessed or felt growing up in the suburbs. I began writing, and pretty quickly the scripts for FEEDBACK came into the world.
I’ve never been able to get into radio plays. But I love being told a story, so I conceived of a series that was like a really high-production-value audiobook or investigative podcast. Narration and conversation are woven together with music and some gentle sound design. Because the story is told almost entirely over phone calls it’s well-suited to an audio medium—you don’t feel like you’re missing anything just by listening. It’s a story it would be impossible to tell on television and less fun to read in a book.
I asked Jill Harper, a director I really like, if she would be interested in collaborating, and we went looking for—and found—the money to make it with her theatre company Cue6. We filled out the rest of the cast. We spent a handful of days recording everything and several months editing it all together. I have listened to these episodes many, many times, and there are moments where the performances still make me laugh out loud. Credit here goes to our cast, which features some genuine titans of Canada’s acting industry and as well as some very gifted comedians and voice artists.
The full title is “FEEDBACK: a comedy of impeccable customer service.” There’s a trailer available now wherever you listen to your podcasts. The whole series will drop on November 7th but you can follow/subscribe to the show right now so that the episodes are automatically added upon release. If you find yourself enjoying it, I encourage you to leave a review in whatever app you use, and to tell your friends—we do not have the marketing budget of the CBC and need all the word-of-mouth we can get.
Here are some links to Apple Podcasts and Spotify, but it’s also available on Google Podcasts and pretty much every other podcast player out there. Thank you for listening!