Multiple Identities at Hale Center Theater

This blog post has been re-purposed from a “Listen User Profile” of actual Listen customers detailing their experience with Listen Solutions.

The Hale Center Theater just outside of Salt Lake City had been filling its seats each night with the uproarious British farce, “One For the Pot.”

In this fast-moving tale of mistaken identity, one actor plays young Hickory Wood and his three identical quadruplets, each of whom is unaware of any others’ existence, but all of whom want to claim the inheritance of a rich business associate of their late father.

The delightful deceits of “Pot” require the actor who plays the young would-be heir and his siblings to make 50 entrances, speaking in four accents and portraying four different personas.

All went hilariously well at the Hale Center Theater until the main actor injured himself during one of the performances. The understudy, who had not had the chance to run through the whole show or even all of the scenes, was suddenly called into action.

“We felt this actor would end up playing the show with a script in hand so that we would be able to keep him straight,” said Michael Fox, the assistant box office manager at Hale Center. “We didn’t want to do it that way, of course.”

Fox said that’s when they remembered the Listen Technologies Corp. (Listen^Æ) system for assistive listening that Hale Center uses to help patrons who are hard-of-hearing. The system transmitter plugs into the amplification system, with the sound wirelessly sent over FM radio waves to each patron wearing a discreet Listen battery-powered receiver and headset. They hear the sound clearly and without interference.

“We dreamed of a system that would allow our understudy to wear a listening device into which we could feed him his lines,” Fox said. “It would be akin to what a television news anchor wears on TV.” Fox called Listen, an international company that is headquartered near the Hale Center Theater in Sandy, Utah and a wireless audio system was delivered that afternoon.

Backstage that evening, the director was able to speak quietly into the Listen microphone, sending the signal to the actor wearing a tiny earpiece and wireless, concealable battery pack and receiver.

So while the four identical quadruplets and other parties to their folly became more confused as the play progressed, the actor himself was able to remain clear-headed and on cue, knowing his lines and proper identity were just a whisper away.