Bibliography
62 sources
Here is every academic journal or book I consulted, with a note on what the work argues or describes. The most difficult aspect of studying telephone theater is figuring out what resources are available and which are worth your time. Each resource is marked with its access — whether it is open access, public domain, or available for a fee. When a source is not in English, that is described too.
This field does not yet have a textbook or a core document. One scholar has an ongoing study of it, Lauren R. Beck. There is one edited volume that focuses on literature rather than performance (Telepoetics, 2026), and there are chapters relevant to this topic embedded in books about something else. If you are just starting out, take a look at the resources listed below.
Start here (15)
If I were making a syllabus to give someone the lay of the field, I would start with these. They are sorted by the author's last name, not by their criticality.
| Author | Title | What it does | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beck, Lauren R. 2025 | “The Telelibrary Is Here for You”: A Theater of Service during a Time of Crisis Enveloping Worlds: Toward a Discourse of Immersive Performance, ed. E. B. Hunter and Scott Magelssen · University of Michigan Press · 75-86 | Published scholarly account of the Telelibrary. Documents the system-persona as a refusal-lowering device; supplies the therapy/sex-work comparison; gives durational-performance framing (1,880 calls). | CC BY-NC 4.0 — freely linkable and quotable |
| Beck, Lauren R. 2024 | The Telelibrary Conspiracy: An Autonomous Audience & Their Creation of Remote Community Pandemic Play, ed. Carolyn Ownbey and Catherine Quirk (Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology) · Palgrave Macmillan · 185-196 | The fullest account in print of an audience community forming around a telephone performance. Beck writes as a member of "The Conspiracy," a Discord server built around Trapman-O'Brien's The Telelibrary, and gives a clean mechanical description of a call: consent to recording, three starting credits, nineteen selections priced from half a credit, credits earned by tasks such as describing what is outside your window, roughly fifty minutes, memory carried across calls. The analytic core is Selection 19, priced at 100 credits and therefore unreachable in one call, which drove one user to build the server. Documents user-authored features that became permanent — the Outside Simulator, the Compliment Mailbox. | In copyright |
| Beck, Lauren R. | Ototheatre: Learning to Listen and Perform in Sonically Augmented Environments open access Doctoral dissertation · Northwestern University | Book-length treatment of the form. | Open access |
| Bertho-Lavenir, Catherine 1989 | Innovation technique et societe du spectacle : le theatrophone a l'Exposition de 1889 French Le Mouvement social, no. 149 · Editions de l'Atelier · 59-69 | By a historian of French telecommunications, on the theatrophone at the 1889 Universal Exposition — technical innovation meeting spectacle culture. Complements Curtin, who covers the 1881 demonstration; this covers the service at scale eight years on. Bibliographic record verified; the full text has not been read here. | Paywalled on JSTOR; likely open on Persee after the moving wall |
| Curtin, Adrian 2013 | Recalling the Theater Phone Theatre, Performance and Analogue Technology: Historical Interfaces and Intermedialities, ed. Kara Reilly · Palgrave Macmillan · 214-231 | The deepest historical root in this bibliography, and the chapter both Beck and Motum route through. Curtin's term for the whole family of services is the theater phone, and his argument is that it was not a novelty but a durable mode of theatrical reception lasting some forty years. Two claims matter beyond the history. First, against the standard account that modern theater shifted from aurality to visuality, he holds that the shift "was neither total nor complete." Second, that the medium's deficiencies were productive: stripped of sight, the listener builds a private "mental theater" with a personalized mise en scene, so that "modern theater took places; it did not simply take (a) place." His frame is Sterne on audile technique and Auslander on liveness; he explicitly refuses the origin-story reading, noting it would be naive to suppose the theater phone inaugurated technologised performance. He does not cite Kittler, McLuhan or Connor. The chapter is also a documentary goldmine: prices, subscriber counts, opening hours, microphone placements, and the dates the services died. | In copyright — print ISBN 978-1-349-45742-7, online ISBN 978-1-137-31967-8 |
| Daillere, Julien 2022 | Arborescences et voix de synthese des serveurs vocaux interactifs open access French JIT 2022 — 2emes Journees d'Informatique Theatrale, Lyon, 10-11 October 2022 · Inria Grenoble Rhone-Alpes; ENSATT Lyon; Universite Lyon 2 | The most useful French-language source here, and the one that proves the parallel francophone literature is real rather than assumed. A practice report: locked down in March 2020, Daillere built a working IVR prototype with a firm that makes hospital voice servers, found the interaction too thin, and instead invented the Serveur Vocal Humain — he performs the synthetic voice himself, live, navigating a branching script held as hyperlinks in a word processor. His technical claim inverts the usual one about robots on stage: where a machine's glitch deconstructs the illusion of life, he fakes glitches to construct an illusion of non-life. His own sister navigated the whole tree without realising a human was performing. Names a francophone network otherwise undocumented in English: Home Theater's Serveur Vocal Poetique, the Theater du Rabot, Theater Dechaines, and the "Artistes au telephone" group he founded in March 2020. | CC BY 4.0 — open access |
| Jackson, Sarah 2026 | The Telephone in Pain: Impossible Confessions in Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer Telepoetics · Edinburgh University Press · 257-274 | The scholarly spine for any claim that the telephone has a documented history as an instrument of coercion. Jackson assembles the record — Rejali calling Vietnam "the crucible for modern electrotorture," Donald Duncan's 1967 War Crimes Tribunal testimony naming the "double E-A telephone, just a standard Army field set," Kenneth Barton Osborn's 1971 testimony — and shows the field telephone was preferred because it was portable, government-issued and deniable. She then reads Nguyen's The Sympathizer to argue that a self-connected phone makes the subject both caller and receiver, forcing a confession that is structurally impossible. Names the euphemisms: "The Bell Telephone Hour," "The Tucker Telephone," "la gegene." | In copyright |
| Jackson, Sarah, Philip Leonard, and Annabel Williams, eds. 2026 | Telepoetics: Writing the Phone in Literature, Culture and Theory open access Edinburgh University Press | The edited volume; cite chapters individually. Two things make it unusually useful: it is open access under CC BY-NC-ND, and its Bibliography (pp. 325-51) is a ready-made secondary reading list for anyone entering this field. Worth knowing before you order it: despite the subject, only two of its nineteen chapters concern performance — Riordan on modern drama and Vashisht on Beckett. | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 — open access, freely quotable |
| Laster, Daniele 1983 | Splendeurs et miseres du theatrophone open access French Romantisme 13, no. 41 · Armand Colin / Persee · 74-78 | The most-cited French-language academic article on the theatrophone, and the source the French side of the story routes through — both the English Wikipedia article and the Canadian Center for Architecture cite it. Covers the rise and decline of the service as a commercial enterprise. Open access on Persee. Bibliographic record verified; the full text has not been read here. | Open access on Persee |
| Menke, Richard 2026 | Genres of the Telephone, 1876-1913 Telepoetics · Edinburgh University Press · 41-60 | Dates and sources the founding telephone melodrama. Menke documents Andre de Lorde and Charles Foley's two-act Au Telephone at the Theater du Grand-Guignol, Paris, 1901 — a husband hears his family murdered down the line — and tracks its English staging as Heard at the Telephone at Wyndham's Theater, London, 1902, with Charles Warner. A footnote supplies Margaret Montgomery's stage farce Per Telephone (1893), earlier still, and another points to John Giorno's Dial-A-Poem (1969). Also fixes period vocabulary: the settling of "hello" as the American salutation over Bell's preferred "ahoy." | In copyright |
| Motum, Robert 2024 | Calling from Canada: Exploring the Shift to Telephonic Theater During COVID-19 Pandemic Play: Community in Performance, Gaming, and the Arts, ed. Carolyn Ownbey and Catherine Quirk · Palgrave Macmillan · 107-120 | The anchor scholarly account of the 2020-21 telephone theater wave and the best survey of the Canadian companies. Motum treats four phone plays with participant-observation detail: Outside the March's The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries (Toronto, April 2020 onward — six ten-minute calls over six days, a submitted "telegram" routed to the Misplaced Keepsakes Division, the Striking Coincidences Thinktank or the Paranormal Activity Taskforce; over 1,200 households in 232 cities across 22 countries, participants aged 4 to 99); Convergence Theater's The Corona Variations; Dopolavoro Teatrale's Theater on-Call; and Boca del Lupo's Red Phone. His argument is that site-specific and immersive companies pivoted fastest not because of technology but because they already built each project from the ground up, while larger companies streamed their archives. | In copyright |
| Riordan, Kevin 2026 | Callbacks: Death and the Telephone in Modern Drama Telepoetics · Edinburgh University Press · 61-78 | The only sustained treatment of the telephone as theatrical apparatus in the Telepoetics volume, and the best starting point for approaching phone theater historically. Riordan opens with the device as paid attraction — an 1877 handbill urging "EVERY MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD" to "COME AND SEE THE TELEPHONE" on burlesque and vaudeville circuits — then reads Cocteau's The Human Voice (1930), Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound (1968) and Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone (2008) as a hundred-year arc. The argument is prop studies run against Andrew Sofer's gun: where the gun works on stage time, the telephone dislocates stage space, conjuring places the audience cannot see, and carries an equivalent Chekhovian obligation to go off. | In copyright |
| Ronell, Avital 1989 | The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech University of Nebraska Press · 465 pp. | The founding theoretical text for this cluster, and the one every other theorist here cites. Ronell reads the telephone as a "dual-functioning organ" that destabilises the identity of self and other and operates on "both sides of the life-and-death switchboard," and reads Heidegger's acceptance of the SA official's call at Freiburg as the moment technology invades and constitutes the subject. Her central claim for anyone who rings a stranger's phone as an artistic act: answering is an obligation you cannot decline. "When you hang up, it does not disappear but goes into remission." | In copyright |
| Unsigned London correspondent 1898 | Music, Singing and Dialogues Brought Direct to Your Bedside by Wire open access San Francisco Call, 28 August 1898 · San Francisco Call · 23 | A primary source, and the clearest 1890s account of a paying theatrical audience listening at a distance through a personal earpiece. It documents the London Electrophone in full: 100 dollars a year all in, transmitters placed on the footlights of sixteen named theaters and in the pulpits of sixteen named churches — at Holy Trinity the transmitter was concealed in a box "shaped and decorated to look like a Bible" — rubber ear tubes of the kind used in street nickel-in-the-slot phonographs, and connection made by calling Central exactly as for any other number. The manager reports rising demand for bedside installations over drawing-room ones, and clients asking to be switched between three or four churches during a single service. The subhead frames it as Bellamy's Looking Backward come true. | Public domain |
| Vashisht, Jivitesh 2026 | Samuel Beckett's Intertextual Telephony: Gender on the Line open access Telepoetics: Writing the Phone in Literature, Culture and Theory, ed. Sarah Jackson, Philip Leonard and Annabel Williams · Edinburgh University Press · 181-199 | The best account of Beckett as a telephone dramatist rather than a radio one, and it documents the modernist genealogy of this form's basic grammar: a one-sided call staged for an audience who cannot hear the other party. Vashisht tracks the phone from More Pricks than Kicks (1934) and Murphy (1938) to the teleplay Eh Joe (1965), and roots it in Beckett's attendance at the 1930 Comedie-Francaise premiere of Cocteau's La voix humaine, which he dismissed as "not merely a banality but an unnecessary banality." Eh Joe flips Cocteau's gendered polarity: the male auditor is scrutinised by camera while the woman is exiled off-screen. Includes rehearsal detail — Sian Phillips close-miked with high and low frequencies filtered out for the 1965 BBC broadcast. | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 — open access |
Worth your time (18)
These documents are good for follow-up, and are more specific than broad.
| Author | Title | What it does | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bartley, Sean 2025 | Introduction, Invitation, and Integration in Immersive Performance Enveloping Worlds · University of Michigan Press | Argues that immersion is a staged process beginning before the performance does. The telephone-relevant case is Nocturnal Fandango's 754-200-3058, a durational eleven-day Los Angeles piece conducted entirely through text messages and unscheduled phone calls: a texter fantasises about murdering characters from the company's earlier in-person shows, those characters then phone the participant pleading for help, and the texts deploy personal details harvested from the participant's pre-pandemic visits. Bartley reproduces his own exchanges verbatim. He also notes Street Corner Society's Subway Orpheus, whose onboarding is a phone call the night before giving only a time, a transit stop and a character to find. | CC BY-NC 4.0 |
| Bessa, Virginia de Almeida (interviewer); Mervant-Roux, Marie-Madeleine 2023 | Le theater, lieu ou l'on entend. Entretien avec Marie-Madeleine Mervant-Roux open access French Revista de Historia (Sao Paulo), no. 182 · Universidade de Sao Paulo · a05023 | Mostly not about phone-delivered performance — the theatrophone appears in a single footnote — but it is the doorway into the francophone research infrastructure on theater sound: Mervant-Roux's ANR-funded ECHO project (2014-2018) and the BnF platform Entendre le theater. That is where French scholarship on telephone-relayed performance is cataloged, and it has almost no English-language presence. | Open access |
| Collins, Paul 2008 | Theatrophone: The 19th-Century iPod New Scientist 197, no. 2638 · New Scientist | Traced through Curtin's reference list; not consulted. A short popular account of the theatrophone, and the likeliest quick entry point to the 1881-1900 period for a reader who does not want a book chapter. | In copyright |
| Fauser, Annegret 2005 | Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World's Fair University of Rochester Press · 290, 293 | Cited by Curtin for the sharpest formulation of what telephonic transmission does to a performance: the feedback loop of live performance is "cut irrevocably by the interpolation of the new medium, even though performers perform and listeners listen simultaneously." Telephonic listeners at the 1889 Fair were alienated by being unable to join the applause they could hear. Not consulted directly. | In copyright |
| Hunter, E. B., and Scott Magelssen, eds. 2025 | Introduction: The Ascendance of the Immersive open access Enveloping Worlds: Toward a Discourse of Immersive Performance · University of Michigan Press · 1-22 | Cite for framing and for the terminology argument. The editors set Beck's adoption of Trapman-O'Brien's "user" — for people who dial into the Telelibrary — alongside Rosenthal's "collaborative comrade," Magelssen's "visitors," Kokai and Robson's "guest" and Bartley's "participant." What each field calls the person on the other end turns out to be an argument about what is being done to them. | CC BY-NC 4.0 — open access |
| Lange, Andre 2002 | Le premier medium electrique de diffusion culturelle : le theatrophone de Clement Ader (1881) French Histoire de la television (histv2.free.fr) · self-published | Not academic, and worth having anyway: a substantive, sourced French dossier on Ader's theatrophone with separate pages on Victor Hugo, Proust and "les ecrivains et le theatrophone." Entirely in French, last updated 2002, and more detailed on the literary reception than anything in English. | Freely readable; not peer reviewed |
| Lefevre, Julien 1894 | Le theatrophone (chapter XVIII of L'electricite au theater) open access French L'electricite au theater · A. Grelot, Paris · ch. XVIII | A primary source, not scholarship: a technical account of the theatrophone written while the service was running, inside a book about stage electricity. The contemporaneous French description of how theater was actually piped down a telephone line, and freely readable on Gallica. | Public domain — BnF Gallica |
| Mee, Arthur 1898 | The Pleasure Telephone open access The Strand Magazine, September 1898 · George Newnes · 339-345 | The article that named the thing. Curtin takes his term "pleasure telephone" from here and glosses it as a Victorian smartphone without the wireless. Documented via Curtin's Figure 11.1 caption, which reproduces its illustration of a listener taking opera at home. I have not read it directly; it is public domain and the most worthwhile single item left to find in this bibliography, since it sits beside the San Francisco Call piece of the same year as the British half of a transatlantic pair. | Public domain |
| Milesi, Laurent 1997 | Re: Collecting Calls [review of Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book] Oxford Literary Review, reviews section · Edinburgh University Press · 235-238 | A four-page review, not the book — catalog it as such. It is the fastest reliable orientation to The Telephone Book before quoting Ronell: it lays out her structure, identifies the governing logic as Heideggerian Ent-fernung switching near and distant, and names the pages where her typographic staging occurs. Milesi's one reservation is worth carrying: telephony in Ronell risks becoming an all-pervasive quasi-originary figure. The year is inferred from works it cites; verify against the journal run before citing it. | In copyright |
| Mukherjee, Souvik 2026 | On Answering the Phone in The Stanley Parable: The Telephone-in-the-videogame, Identity and Play open access Telepoetics: Writing the Phone in Literature, Culture and Theory, ed. Sarah Jackson, Philip Leonard and Annabel Williams · Edinburgh University Press · 293-306 | Games criticism rather than performance scholarship, but the decision it isolates — whether to lift the receiver — is the decision every participatory phone work opens with. Mukherjee reads The Stanley Parable, Bury Me My Love and A Normal Lost Phone through Ronell, setting the Phone Room handset as a "Point of Divergence" against Heidegger answering the SA official's call. The consent material is in the third game, which outs a transgender character to her contacts while she is, in the phrase quoted, "unable to consent or comment on your personal invasion." | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 — open access |
| Parker, Priya 2018 | The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters Riverhead Books | Not about theater or telephony, and included deliberately. Parker's subject is the design of gatherings: how they are framed, who is invited, what the invitation does before anyone arrives, and how a gathering ends. For phone work, where there is no room, no threshold and no other audience, her account of the invitation as the first act of the event is the most transferable thing I found outside the performance literature. | In copyright |
| Parsons, Denys 1982 | Cable Radio — Victorian Style New Scientist 23, no. 30 · New Scientist | Traced through Curtin's reference list; not consulted. The earliest secondary account of the Electrophone and theatrophone subscription services located so far, and probably the source later popular pieces draw on. | In copyright |
| Sumner, Tyne Daile 2026 | Looking for a Listener: Twentieth-Century Lyric Telephony Telepoetics · Edinburgh University Press · 221-237 | Supplies the overhearing frame and the legal chronology behind a caller who cannot know who else is on the line. Sumner runs the American lyric alongside wiretap law — Olmstead v. US (1928) ruling that spoken words could not be "seized," Brandeis's dissent, the Communications Act of 1934 — reading Frost, Plath, Field and Ginsberg. The useful move is yoking Mill's "poetry is overheard" to Foucault's confession, where power sits with the listener who judges rather than the subject who speaks, and Karen Ford's point that overhearing begins without the listener's consent. | In copyright |
| Tomkinson, Matthew 2024 | Opera by Telephone in the Pacific Northwest, circa 1895 Theater Research in Canada 45, no. 1 · University of Toronto Press · 116-125 | In English, and listed here because it is on bilingual Erudit and its bibliography is the likeliest single place to find further French-language citations. Extends the theatrophone story to North America and to a region nobody else covers. | On Erudit; access varies |
| Unsigned 1891 | The Theatrophone The Times, 29 May 1891 · The Times · 5 | Documented in Curtin, note 21. Two things make it worth chasing. It argues that telephone listening helped rather than hurt theater attendance, because hearing produced "a desire to see it as well" — the earliest version of an argument still being had. And it records a language-access use: foreigners unfamiliar with French would hear a piece through the theatrophone before going to see it. | In copyright |
| Unsigned 1957 | Theater-Going by Telephone: A Forgotten Amenity of London in the 1920s The Times, 9 May 1957 · The Times · 3 | A subscriber's reminiscence thirty years after the Electrophone closed, and the only listener testimony in Curtin's sources that describes the experience from the inside. It supplies the two sentences a designer would want: that the pleasure was in knowing the performers were unaware of the listener, and that the listener could switch off the dull bits. Documented in Curtin, notes 22 and 24. | In copyright |
| Van Drie, Melissa | Work on the theatrophone and nineteenth-century audile technique French and English see The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Bull and Back, 205-216, for the English chapter · Routledge | A LEAD RATHER THAN A CITATION. Van Drie is the principal current scholar of the theatrophone and publishes in both French and English. Her English chapter is easy to find; her French articles were not isolated in this search and are the most likely next source of substance. Track her before Parsons or Collins. | Varies |
| Williams, Annabel 2026 | 'The board's asunder': Switchboards, Operators and Phoneys in Mid-Century Fiction Telepoetics · Edinburgh University Press · 164-180 | No performance content, but the best short source on the operator's voice and on when a human stopped answering. Williams reads the switchboard operator across mid-century British fiction and supplies dates a period-accurate script needs: the UK's first automatic exchange at Epsom, Surrey, May 1912, then Rochdale 1914 and Kent 1922, with operators still routinely audible into the 1970s because subscriber trunk dialling only began late in the 1950s. Also the gendering: boys were the first operators before being replaced by women thought more "amenable to discipline," and Killen on German telephonists reporting an electric-shock-in-the-ear malady c. 1900-26. | In copyright |
Also consulted (29)
These documents are helpful for understanding specific ideas, artists, and nomenclature relevant to the field.
| Author | Title | What it does | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beck, Lauren R. 2019 | Ototheatre Performance Research 24, no. 4 · Routledge · 80-87 | Coins ototheatre. The same scholar wrote both Telelibrary chapters cited here; hers is the only sustained academic program on this form. | Author's open-access copy |
| Bello, Lauren 2018 | Calls in the Night: Crossed Wires (The NoPro Review) No Proscenium, 6 November 2018 | The earliest substantial review of Candle House phone work. Already calls Neiden a pioneer of a new art form. | In copyright |
| Blast Theory (Adams, Row Farr, Tandavanitj) 2010 | A Machine To See With Sundance / 01SJ Biennial / Banff New Media Institute | Automated phone calls direct the participant through a bank robbery. Premiered San Jose, 16 September 2010. | Company site |
| Burickson, Abraham, with Erica Holeman and Ellen Lupton 2023 | Experience Design: A Participatory Manifesto Yale University Press | My advisor's framework for how to engage with immersive work, and the vocabulary this research is answerable to. I engage its terms directly rather than borrowing them loosely. | In copyright |
| Capildeo, Anthony V. 2026 | 'Rinse and Wring the Ear': Reflections on Being in Long-Distance Conversation Telepoetics · Edinburgh University Press · 30-40 | A practitioner-poet's first-person account of long-distance conversation. Precedent for writing the phone from inside the experience. | In copyright |
| Cardiff, Janet, and George Bures Miller | Artists' site | The Telephone Call (2001), viewed at SFMOMA 27 July 2026. | Artists' site |
| Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn 2003 | An Intimate Distance Riddled with Gaps: The Art of Janet Cardiff Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller (exh. cat., Castello di Rivoli) · P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center · 14-35 | Cardiff invented the surrogate recorded voice out of her own fear of intimacy. Contains the canonical art-historical statement of the agency-surrender problem, and a body of work built on not recognizing evidence of oneself. | In copyright — short quotation only |
| Danna, AJ | Professional site | Atomic Hotline. | Practitioner site |
| Darknell, Thomas / Perspicuum Immersive Productions 2024 | Perfection San Jose, CA | Pre-call application, waiver and information form; the participant defines in writing what the piece may know. Experienced 17 July 2026. | Company site |
| Dias, Marcos Pereira 2012 | A Machine to See With (And Reflect Upon): Interview with Matt Adams and Nick Tandavanitj open access Liminalities 8, no. 1 | Primary interview with the makers. | Open access |
| George, Whitney E. 2026 | Eavesdropping Season 1, July 12 - October 31, 2026 · Self-produced; ThinkOlio Lighthouse and East Village Secret Storefront, Brooklyn and Manhattan | Continuous 24/7 telephone installation. Non-consensual overhearing as explicit subject. Fifteen-day game structure with asymmetrical information between two participants, whose recorded calls become the archive. | Artist's site |
| Goldstein, Douglas 2026 | The Exchange | A one-hour telephonic work made for a single participant. Entry by 2600 Hz tone; the participant ends as operator. | Practitioner site |
| Harris, LaShawn 2016 | Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City's Underground Economy New Black Studies · University of Illinois Press | Labor history of Black women's intimacy and divination work. NOT telephonic — use for the unacknowledged-labor argument, not the phone lineage. | In copyright |
| Kamei, Stepy | Substack | Interactive audio drama; writing on the practice. | Practitioner site |
| Marotta, Allie 2024 | Mixed Media Encounters: Finding the Future of Immersive [Theater] Pandemic Play · Palgrave Macmillan · ~123-136 | CANDLE HOUSE IN SCHOLARSHIP. Analyses Next Time as immersive; cites candlehousecollective.com and the No Proscenium podcast ep. 198 on Moonlight Serenade. | In copyright |
| Milesi, Laurent 2026 | (H)allophonies: Cixous, Derrida and Others on the Line Telepoetics · Edinburgh University Press · 132-144 | Routes to Cixous's 'Writing Blind' — telephony and writing without sight, by a writer who chose the condition. | In copyright |
| Murphy, Katy 2026 | Mutable Signs (telephone performance) and After Mutable Signs (participant program) self-published | PRIMARY. Attended 28 July 2026. Program accumulates attributed participant contributions passed forward to later callers. Cameo's own contribution is in it. | Primary artifact — permission required |
| Murphy, Katy 2026 | Mutable Signs and After Mutable Signs | Attributed, voluntary forward pass. Experienced and retained, 28 July 2026. | Primary artifact |
| Murphy, Katy | Professional site | Mutable Signs; Leo Season. | Practitioner site |
| Nemeth, Alexander 2020 | Developing and Evaluating an Embodied Telepresence System for a Real-World Context open access Northumbria University (doctoral thesis) | HCI-side treatment of telepresence and embodiment. Useful counterweight to the humanities sources. | Open access via Northumbria Research Link |
| Otto, Allen | Professional site | The Archive; Great Gold Bird. | Practitioner site |
| Perfect, Nicky | Professional site | Crisis and hostage negotiation; keynote and training. | Practitioner site |
| Quinn, Will 2026 | How Evan Neiden Turned a Mobile Phone into a Global Stage The Quinntessential Review, 28 May 2026 | Alternate Reality Theater; invitation versus infestation; the safe-but-not-comfortable principle; sixty-five-call participants in Lennox Mutual. | In copyright |
| Reaves, Ezra | Professional site | Co-creator, The Program; Compton's Cafeteria Riot. | Practitioner site |
| Reaves, Ezra, and Amy Langer 2021 | The Program San Francisco Neo-Futurists | Automated phone tree resolving to a live operator. Experienced 15 July 2026, 37 minutes. | Co-creator's site |
| Rimini Protokoll 2008 | Call Cutta in a Box: An Intercontinental Phone Play | Reviewed by Helen Shaw, Time Out New York, January 2009. | Company site |
| Rimini Protokoll (Haug, Kaegi, Wetzel) 2005 | Call Cutta: Mobile Phone Theater | Live one-to-one transcontinental mobile phone theater, thirteen years before Last Candle. | Company site |
| Rogo, D. Scott, and Raymond Bayless 1979 | Phone Calls from the Dead | The paranormal telephone tradition. Pairs with Riordan on death and with the seance thread in the fall project. | In copyright |
| Schöberlein, Stefan 2018 | Call Me Maybe: Telephonic Romances and the Female Voice 1880–1920 American Literary Realism 51, no. 1 · University of Illinois Press · 1-20 | Historicizes voice-as-whole-person 120 years before the field claims it. Documents Voice Culture as a disciplinary regime on the female voice, and the period term "call-girls" for switchboard operators. | In copyright — short quotation only |
Other languages
7 sources here are not in English, and all but one are French. That is not a sampling accident. French is the only language with a real academic tradition on this subject, and it clusters almost entirely on the historical théâtrophone rather than on contemporary practice. A search of DOAJ and Crossref for teatro telefónico, teatro telefonico, teatro por telefone, Telefontheater and Theater am Telefon returned nothing genuine in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese or German. That absence is reported here as a finding, not as a gap I am hiding.
The contemporary francophone practice network — Home Théâtre's Serveur Vocal Poétique, the Théâtre du Rabot, Théâtre Déchainés, and the “Artistes au téléphone” group founded in March 2020 — is documented almost nowhere in English. It would sit in HAL, Cairn and OpenEdition, none of which this search could reach. If you read French, Spanish, German, Portuguese or Japanese and know of work in this area, that is the single most useful thing you could send me.
What is missing
Named rather than quietly omitted. Beck's Northwestern dissertation is read for the argument but contains no criteria table, so it will not settle a coding question. Beyond that: Contemporary Theater Review, Studies in Theater and Performance, IJPADM, and the ICIDS and DiGRA proceedings have not been searched systematically. Neither has the francophone repository literature above.
40 quoted passages are indexed against these sources in the compiler's working files.