Answering the Phone: A Farce

When Mrs. Courtney and her daughter Eleanora leave home, they leave strict instructions for their new maid, Nora Flanagan: answer the telephone while they're away. There's just one problem. Nora has never seen a telephone in her life. What follows is a delightful cascade of confusion as she fumbles through calls from the local butcher, an impatient aunt, and worst of all, Miss Courtney's eager suitor Reginald who simply cannot get a straight answer about when his beloved will return. Nora, determined not to reveal her ignorance, invents increasingly absurd explanations for why the household cannot come to the phone. Written as a two-scene one-act farce, this early 20th-century comedy mines endless humor from the gap between what Nora thinks the telephone is and what it actually does, while quietly skewering the pretensions of the professional class through a domestic servant trying desperately to preserve her dignity. It's slight, it's silly, and it moves with the rapidfire momentum of the best farces.