Review: DEAD MAN'S CELL PHONE Examines Relationships, Real and Imagined

Dead Man's Cell Phone, produced by the SBCC Theatre Group and directed by Katie Laris, typifies playwright Sarah Ruhl's keen sense of metaphysical surrealism. A play about unanticipated connections and relationships, Dead Man's Cell Phone is a humorous, touching story of something like love in a universe that ebbs and flows on the shore of familiar reality.

Dead Man's Cell Phone focuses on the various (and sometimes deceptive) natures of human association. There's a thematic emphasis on the idea of "real" versus "the imagined"; the most obvious example of which is the invented relationship between Jean (Jenna Scanlon), a woman at a café, and Gordon (Brian Harwell), a man who dies at the table next to her. Jean doesn't know Gordon, but she absconds with his incessantly ringing cell phone. The relationship begins: Jean begins to answer calls religiously, and handles Gordon's business as best she can, despite her utter lack of knowledge about his life. Dead Man's Cell Phone has an interesting manner of presenting our cultural dependence on technology in the addictive way Jean appropriates aspects of Gordon's lifestyle via his phone.

The play is entertaining, and presents challenging questions about character motivation. Why does Jean insert herself so forcefully into an imagined position of intimacy in Gordon's (now defunct) life? Is this an ordinary woman compelled by loneliness or boredom to take a step into the proverbial woods and assume a more noteworthy life by (literally) answering the call of the unknown? Is this act, and the subsequent commitment to her new persona of "Gordon's acquaintance," a symptom of psychosis? Or is she simply a woman who, after one rash decision contrary to her seemingly timid nature, finds herself in over her head? The play presents a hodgepodge of strange (and sometimes unexplainable) inspirations, which creates opportunity for unpredictable and exhilarating storytelling.

Knowing Ruhl's tendency toward quirkiness, I've been looking forward to this show--and I found SBCC's production to be successful. The performances were strong, and the set (designed by the very talented Francois-Pierre Couture), which consisted of swaths of cloth hanging from the ceiling to delineate the playing spaces, exuded an ethereal energy that suited the tone of the play in its mounting eccentricity. Brian Harwell, as Gordon, the dead man who gets to explain himself from beyond the grave, has a noteworthy monologue about his former life. Gordon's impression of the world is scathing and smug, a candid depiction of a hardened man with flexible morality. Shannon Saleh, as Gordon's widow, Hermia, portrayed the complicated experience of a lengthy marriage with a capable balance of humor and surprising melancholy. While Jean captures the intensity of early romance by way of her various infatuations (Gordon; Gordon's brother, Dwight (Justin Stark); and Gordon's mysterious and exciting lifestyle), Saleh embodies the emotional realism of a relationship post-honeymoon: the slow-building resentments; the desire for autonomy; and the recognition of personal sacrifice; all of which simply can't trump the need for the comfort and familiarity of partnership. While the story of Jean partially absorbing Gordon's identity through his cell phone is interesting both psychologically and narratively, the underlying depiction of the capricious nature of love and romance gives the play emotional depth.

There was much that I enjoyed about Dead Man's Cell Phone, but I was nonplussed by the substantial tone shift near the play's conclusion, when Ruhl's otherwise enjoyable style of unexpected storytelling veered dangerously into the morass of sudden absurdity. Jean abruptly goes from meek spinster fumbling with unfamiliar dishonesty to Kung Fu-fighting femme fatale in South Africa at odds with Gordon's smoldering-hot secret agent mistress (Leona Paraminski). This precipitous alteration in motivation and execution was jarring, and it distracted from the more substantial aspects of the play. However, while Dead Man's Cell Phone is a story of finding purpose and of learning to love in unfamiliar ways, it's also a conversation about time--about the now and the after and whether (and when) those two planes of existence coincide. Time is twisted, and existence is questionable; especially after Jean is rendered ambiguously inert by the Russian mistress. That indistinctness sends the final, climactic moments of the show spiraling into opacity, leaving the audience with a mixed message about the play's interpretation of existence.

Dead Man's Cell Phone is an enjoyable, if not strange, foray into the philosophy of life, death, and human relationships--real, unreal, and those perceived via our ever-present mechanical accouterments. It's an intelligent play that exists in a twilight zone between life and Ruhl's version of whatever other realities there are beyond the one we recognize. Dead Man's Cell Phone is humorous and mysterious, and tells a story at the triangulated point between here, there, and technology.

SBCC Theatre Group presents:

Dead Man's Cell Phone
by Sarah Ruhl
directed by Katie Laris

April 17th-May 2nd
@SBCC

theatergroupsbcc.com

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