Despite Bizarre Plot, Cell Phone Rings True

Striving to show some shred of our shared humanity, Sarah Ruhl successfully distills and dramatizes the feelings of emptiness and disconnect in her new play, Dead Man’s Cell Phone. Ruhl’s characters are quirky and at times absurd. The world of Dead Man’s Cell Phone may at first seem surreal, but the characters deal with very real issues. They struggle to come to terms with mortality, each other, and the many levels of communication technology offers. In doing so, they begin to make sense of the universal void.

Gordon is dead, but his cell phone rings on with bizarre vigor. Throughout the play, sound cues, like the vibrating buzz of a cell phone, the thunder of trains, and the throb and whir of copy machines, articulate dramatic moments. The play opens on a quiet café, and before any character speaks a line, the incessant ring of a cell phone pierces the initial silence. At first reluctant to get involved or even acknowledge its presence, Jean, played by the excellent Mary-Louise Parker, suddenly, almost impetuously, answers the phone, and immediately she is implicated.

Set against G.W. Mercier’s simple backdrop, Jean stares from the phone in her hand to the dead man before her. Here director Anne Bogart, of Columbia’s graduate directing program, capitalizes on the simplicity of Ruhl’s script and constructs a moment of sincere dramatic realization. “How did you die so quietly?” Jean says, hugging him. Her deadpan inflection lends this line a spark of humor, but its simplicity is powerful. The audience laughs at Jean’s confusion and candid communion with Gordon, but the embrace conveys a painful poignancy. From here, the play carries on with full force. It does not take too long before Jean is enmeshed in mending the fragile relationships and unseemly affairs the dead man left behind.

Mrs. Gottlieb, Gordon’s matronly mom, played by Kathleen Chalfant, accosts Jean just minutes after they’ve met, asking, “Are you religious?” Jean answers, “A little.” At first this seems like a toss-away line, but “a little” reveals the character’s terrifying uncertainty of faith and a desperate desire to believe in something. This is a theme that weaves itself throughout the play and allows the production to transcend the confines of the typical tragic comedy. Ruhl spells out the ambiguity of death and the vulnerability and helplessness of those left behind. Her characters struggle to come to terms with faith and end up finding it in unexpected places.

As Jean becomes more intimate with Gordon’s family, the act of remembering and holding onto memories becomes a source of faith and reverence. Gordon’s befuddled yet adorable brother Dwight (David Aaron Baker) befriends Jean and immediately they form a perfect pair, equally old-fashioned in their politeness and proclivities. Despite their evidently repressed emotions, Ruhl skillfully weaves romance into their relationship. Jean and Dwight share a quasi-sexual passion for engraved paper. This fetish stems from their mutual desire to remember everything. Dwight woos Jean with a simple statement,“Remembering requires paper”—a traditional notion that is fading in an increasingly technological world of e-mails and text messaging.

The second act begins with a monologue by Gordon in which he details his distinctly irreverent life. Nonetheless, Ruhl builds his story carefully, and by the monologue’s end, the audience is invested in him wholeheartedly. Gordon concludes on a note of emptiness—a statement of a loveless life: “At that last moment, I had no one to call.”

Gordon’s sentiment is the crux of what Ruhl is getting at in this latest theatrical offering. The title alone, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, seems to beg the question: do cell phones really connect us, or do they only widen the distance between us? It is indisputable that we are constantly connected. But by living in a haze of hindsight, regrets, and missed moments, as Ruhl’s central characters do, the production leaves us wondering if we have said what really matters.