Someone give Eric Woolfe protected cultural heritage status. Actor, magician and puppeteer, Woolfe combines a gift for characterization with an improviser’s lightning reflexes. A mere shift in pitch can turn him into another character. And when disaster strikes onstage, he has the wit to make it part of the act.
At the opening night of his latest solo show, The Call Centre of Cthulhu, he had to summon every last one of those talents. Technical gremlins seemed determined to haunt the Red Sandcastle Theatre. Projections glitched, HDMI error messages flashed across the screen, and props tumbled to the floor. All this while Woolfe manoeuvred around a cramped sliver of stage, repeatedly getting tangled in the strings of Melanie McNeill’s makeshift call centre, where metal cans dangling from the ceiling served as bizarre telephones.
The evening’s crowning mishap came barely ten minutes in. Woolfe was adjusting a camera mounted on the office desk at the centre of the set. Throughout the show, it projects close-ups of the customers calling in, all portrayed by puppets Woolfe operates himself. The device is indispensable to the whole enterprise. So when Woolfe repositioned it, and the camera suddenly came off its tripod, landing in his hand, there was good reason to panic.
But for a veteran of more than four decades onstage, these are mere trifles. Woolfe grabbed a container from backstage and set about repairing the contraption, muttering under his breath as he worked. “They don’t have to put up with this crap in Stratford,” he snapped. The audience erupted in thunderous applause.
If only the script were as resourceful as the man performing it.
At 90 minutes without an interval, The Call Centre of Cthulhu stretches a thin premise into an increasingly repetitive parade of old-hat magic tricks, from cups and balls to playing cards. Irving Irving (Woolfe) works at the New Bosford Question Centre, fielding calls from people asking just about anything. He nurses a secret crush on his impossibly long-legged co-worker Moxie while enduring the scrutiny of an overbearing boss. Both puppets have eyes that practically pop out of their sockets, to equally funny and unsettling effect. But the daily grind takes a sinister turn when a caller reports something deeply unnatural.
Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s 1928 cosmic-horror story The Call of Cthulhu, Woolfe’s tale introduces a tentacled monstrosity whose awakening threatens humanity. Irving acquires supernatural powers after discovering a sinister little statuette of Cthulhu inside a locked suitcase. For all that cosmic menace, his new abilities have rather mundane applications: he can shuffle a deck of cards all he likes, but the moment he lays them on the desk, they arrange themselves in perfect numerical order.
Much of the show’s middle stretch finds Irving testing his newfound powers, repeatedly recruiting audience members to help with magic tricks. Woolfe is at his best working a crowd, his irreverent wisecracks making him all the more endearing. Yet as the tricks pile up, the plot recedes. The script struggles to reconcile high-voltage comedy with cosmic dread. Again and again, the action grinds to a halt, an ominous silence settles over the stage, and then — bang! — comes another jump scare. The pattern soon becomes predictable, while even Woolfe’s deft manipulation of multiple puppets risks becoming repetitive without a stronger story to sustain it.
But who cares?
The Call Centre of Cthulhu charms through Woolfe’s offbeat virtuosity and the production’s outlandish visual imagination. Highlighter-bright yellows, pinks and blues splash across the stage, turning the ramshackle office into a fever dream. In the 19th century, stars such as Sarah Bernhardt and Adelaide Ristori could make a script seem almost incidental to their theatrical prowess. Woolfe, in his own gloriously eccentric way, can pull off much the same feat. The scares may be tame, but the man pulling the strings is anything but.
The production runs to November 8 at Toronto’s Red Sandcastle Theatre, 922 Queen Street East. For tickets: https://ticketscene.ca/events/64304/
ELDRITCH THEATRE presents The Call Centre of Cthulhu,
Created and performed by Eric Woolfe, with additional dialogue by HP Lovecraft
Set and costumes: Melanie McNeill
Stage Managed by Sandi Becker
