“It helps me to remember the difference between thought and action,” says Cameryn Moore in her one-act play, Phone Whore. “Somebody may be thinking something that I personally find appalling — is actually illegal — but if they don’t act on those thoughts, then that’s good enough for me.”
Moore, a playwright, performer and phone sex operator gave an unflinching and uncensored performance of her show for Sex Week audience members Thursday night in the McCormick Tribune Center Forum. The slice-of-life comedy/drama confronted taboo, fantasy and deviant desires that pervade the world of phone sex and society today.
The play took the format of shadowing Moore’s (Larissa to callers) life as phone sex operator for one evening. The reflective monologue on her job and the men she talks to was interspersed with calls. Moore’s one-sided, scripted calls were based on callers she gets in real life.
“I chose them for inclusion because they are fairly common archetypes that I am working with,” Moore said. Fantasies portrayed and discussed in the show included homosexual and interracial sex, a “gang bang,” incest and pedophilia.
With such sensitive material portrayed in the play, the Sex Week committee considered asking Moore to rewrite her show and present a censored version for Northwestern. They decided not to censor it “because it makes us a little uncomfortable sometimes because that’s the point,” said Sexual Health and Assault Peer Education (SHAPE) publicity chair Amanda Mather. “These things make people uncomfortable so we need to contextualize things and we need to figure them out and think about them and talk about them and that’s what’s really important about her show.”
Sex Week committee director Nicole Collins had introduced the show with a warning to the audience that the show contained sexually explicit material and that audience members should feel free to step out of the auditorium should they feel too uncomfortable. A counselor from the Women’s Center was also in attendance should their counseling be necessary.
Several people did excuse themselves from the show during the last call in which Moore tells an imagined story of incest to a client.
“Yeah, it puts people off,” Communication junior Mather said. “Frankly, it puts me off. It makes me very uncomfortable, and I don’t consider myself uncomfortable with much.” Mather said she was glad that people stepped out when they needed to and that they at least came and gave the show a try.
A one-hour play is not nearly enough time to examine and dissect all the sexual taboos in the world, but the goal of Phone Whore is to provide a new perspective on them, not instigate sexual world peace. The play succeeds in that goal by leading us just beyond the boundary of comfort and encouraging us to take the discussion from there.