New theater production places tensions of modern life in center of stage
By Elliot Boswell
Any play with a title like "Dead Man's Cell Phone," makes a telling admission before the curtain is even raised: The man is already dead, the plot will take a backseat, prepare for some deconstruction.
So it goes with Sarah Ruhl's play, which first debuted off-Broadway in 2008, and opens tonight on The Bluff in the Mehling Hall Studio Space under the direction of senior Lily Raabe. "Dead Man's Cell Phone" is a quasi-absurdist rumination on technology, connection and the self in the 21st century, with a moderate balance of the mundane and the metaphysical, and a surprisingly nostalgic bent to it.
"Dead Man's Cell Phone" begins with a moment of supreme irritation, both for the audience and for the main character, Jean: A man next to her in a café refuses to answer his phone, and it rings and rings and rings ... and rings.
Jean, portrayed with gusto and manic eyebrows by senior Becky Downs, gets fed up, walks over to the man, and finds simultaneously that she loves him and that he is dead.
As a memento, she takes his phone, and duly armed, begins to weave her way into the fabric of his former life (the man's name is Gordon, played by senior Patrick Rexroat). She discovers there a delusional mother (freshman Jessica Hillenbrand), a sinister mistress (freshman Hillary Joseph) and an embittered widow (sophomore Eleanor Johnson) - among others - all of whom, in their own ways, reveal yet another scrap of Gordon's career and character.
As the title suggests, "Dead Man's Cell Phone" has at its center the relationship between life (or death) and technology; indeed, technology swarms the play like a cloud of gnats. "I call him every day ... It's habit," says Gordon's mother haughtily, but Ruhl's stance is ambivalent, refusing to outright condemn our pervasive cell phone use, (though she does emerge as a bit of a closeted Luddite).
Rather, Ruhl is more concerned with the transplanting of the self that occurs when our public and private spheres merge, when a kiss is interrupted by a ringtone, for example.
UP's production of her play makes concrete the times when we forget the difference between electronic and face-to-face conversation: As Gordon's brother Dwight (junior Charles Lattin) stands behind Jean to braid her hair, the audience can see each of their individual facial expressions while they themselves cannot.
It's a moment reminiscent of the easy lack of attention we pay to one another while we're on the phone, of the negligence that seems an inherent part of communication in a digital age.
Yet Ruhl is suspicious of a knee-jerk reaction to the less humanizing elements of technology, for after all, a yearning for the "simple life" of yesteryear is, and probably always will be, an inadequate response. The tension plays out into her characters' dialogue: The widow, Hermia, can lament that "Nothing is really silent anymore," while The Other Woman (Joseph) spits "I hate sentiment."
Director Raabe lets none of this go down easy, staging individual scenes that bump up against each other, jarring the audience into self-examination rather than the leisurely, sequential viewing many of us expect from theater.
Occasionally the script gets a little heavy-handed, like when Gordon's mother says, "There are only one or two sacred places left in the word today. Where there is no ringing. The theater, the church, and the toilet." Right, Mrs. Ruhl: For better or for worse, we've already been well school in irony.
However, "Dead Man's Cell Phone" is not without its distinct pleasures. Ruhl has a gift for nuance and non sequitur, and the script holds more than a few downright hilarious moments. The lighting often takes on a dappled palomino tone, which, albeit sometimes hard to see, renders scene-by-scene juxtapositions all the visually starker.
And each performance from the minimal six-member cast is well suited to the general emotional timbre of the show: A little hysterical, a little overblown, yet never quite veering off into the outright absurd.
"I've never really understood truth for its own sake," says Gordon, in his soliloquy from beyond the grave. Most everyone today knows what he means, at least to some extent, but somehow we all find a reason to roll out of bed in the mornings.
If we take Ruhl's word for it - that we're nothing more than receptacles waiting to be filled with meaning - then her next cue follows effortlessly: Maybe meaning is only to be found in other people. "Dead Man's Cell Phone" makes 21st century disconnect terribly vivid and the importance of our relationships terribly relevant.
