Catharsis meets comedy: ‘Customers From Hell’ show will premiere at the Shea Theater on Sunday, June 15

Most people who have worked retail and food service jobs have dealt with customers who were rude, annoying, or just plain strange. A new comedy TV series written and filmed in the Pioneer Valley wants to answer the question: what if those customers were actually from Hell?

The first episode of “Customers From Hell” will premiere at the Shea Theater in Turners Falls on Sunday, June 15, from 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m, followed by a Q&A with director Alexis Hott, producer Liz Walber, and co-writer Nico Gomez-Horton. (Masks are required at the event and will be provided.)

The premise of the show is that a cafe called Tilly’s is endlessly beset by absurd customers – all of whom are based on real-life stories – who emerge into the cafe through a fiery portal and seem hell-bent on making things difficult for the staff, especially Charlie, a brand-new employee. Ironically, the show is brightly lit and very colorful – but that was the point, Hott said, to up the sense of absurdity.

There’s the man who looks like Benjamin Franklin who insists on paying in quarters and pennies. There’s the woman who sings a jingle (numerous times) to get staff members to memorize her discount code. There’s the cowboy with red eyebrows. There’s the overly grateful gym-goer who shows up visibly sweaty with a towel around their neck. There’s the customer dressed as Slash who says nothing and just stares at Charlie. There’s the customer who calls the cafe from the bathroom to say they’ve just clogged the toilet. There’s the well-dressed man who calls Charlie “disgusting” while not mentioning the spider hanging from their chin. There’s the mustachioed man who pretends to speak only Italian – but actually just speaks gibberish – as his embarrassed daughter urges him to speak English.

Hott said the point of the show is not just to entertain, but to provide an outlet for customer service workers.

“The word ‘catharsis’ really does feel central to it, because if you’ve worked in customer service, you know that customers aren’t the reason that those jobs are hard – it’s wages, it’s bosses, it’s capitalism. It’s not customers, but having an outlet for those experiences is important,” Hott said.

“We kept going back to the idea of, well, we want the person who this happened to to see us reenacting it and laugh out loud and for it to be meaningful for them in a way other than just, ‘Oh, customers are goofy’ or ‘Oh, Boomers are goofy,’” Walber said.

The creation process for the show began about a decade ago when Hott and a now-former housemate were both working in cafes. After work, the two would play a game where they’d reenact strange experiences with customers.

“We were joking, ‘It feels like these people actually just came out of a flaming portal to be here. Where did they come from?’” Hott said.

Walber and Hott, both Smith College alums who work in public television, later reconnected after college, and Hott mentioned the idea, suggesting it could become a show. Walber agreed.

They started to work on it in earnest after receiving a grant from the Montague Cultural Council. Hott reached out to friends (and friends of friends) to collect customer service stories that were “just absurd, like, you laugh at them and you kind of can’t believe it was real.” Gomez-Horton helped them format the stories into a complete script.

“The show itself is fun,” Hott said, “but I think for me, what has always felt the most meaningful about it is the process.”

The team put out a casting call last summer, with the requirement that all actors must have worked in customer service before. (The cast and crew are all queer, they said, and many of them are disabled.) The team filmed at Athol Orange Community Television, where Walber works as the program coordinator, on a hand-constructed, hand-painted cardboard set.

“Some of the people who were acting were reenacting their own stories. Some weren’t. … And everyone who shared a story was given the option of reenacting as the customer that they experienced. Not everyone wanted to do that for a lot of reasons, but it was really fun and it was really special,” Hott said.

There isn’t a set timeline yet for when the next episode will air, but it will be funded by a grant from Northampton Open Media. After the premiere, the episode will stream on Montague Community Television and on Athol Orange Community Television, and it’s already available online. Still, completing the first episode of “Customers From Hell” inspired the team to keep creating.

“We have so many ideas for other projects and other things that we want to make possible through community television,” Hott said. “[The show] felt like an opening. This idea was just a first thing. It was really exciting to see what we could do.”

“I’m so thrilled we got from point A to point B with this,” Walber said. “There wasn’t really a moment where it felt like we wouldn’t, but there’s something really magic about public television. We really just said we were going to do it, and with $500. Here we are.”

Tickets are $5 to $25, sliding scale, via showclix.com/event/customers-from-hell or at the door. The cast of “Customers From Hell” includes Eli Berger (Charlie), Vaughn Marger (Max), Ivanna Sofia (Sheila), Margarey Gyorgy (Angry Benjamin Franklin), Libby Crowe (Jingle Lady), Asa Rowan (Horror Cowboy), June Kramer (Slash), Caro Vera (Thank You Sir), Ruth Elan (Fake Italian), Tay Porco (Daughter), Ace Chandler (Dr. Suit), and Razz Cucho-Nguyen (Walk-out Customer).

To keep up with further “Customers From Hell” episodes, follow @customersfromhell.tv on Instagram. If you have a memorable customer story to share, email [email protected].

Carolyn Brown can be reached at [email protected].