Dead Man’s Cell Phone is a tantalizing play: original, unpredictable, poignantly lyrical at times and then suddenly obscene. But I don’t think it ultimately works. The major themes of the play — the ubiquity of cell phones, the attempt to deceive an egocentric dead man’s loved ones into thinking he truly cared for them, and the existence of a black market in human organs — don’t ever really coalesce over the course of two acts, and the love story that’s so important in Act II exists almost independently of everything around it.
Because author Sarah Ruhl is inspired and imaginative, there’s still magic to the comedy — the same magic that I found in her Eurydice at Stageworks recently and in The Clean House at Sarasota’s Banyan Theatre before that. But the unspoken claim of a play like Cell Phone is that it’s going to show us how a few apparently unconnected threads can be wound together to create something strong, strange and beautiful — and that never really happens here. Not even the fine production currently at Jobsite Theater can give these disparate motifs any real unity.
The play starts with a woman named Jean trying to enjoy a visit to a café when the cell phone of a fellow diner starts ringing. Eventually, Jean rises from her table and answers the phone — only to discover that its owner Gordon is dead, and that she’s wandered into the middle of his not-very-pretty story. There she meets
This article appears in Jun 3-9, 2010.