Dead Man's Cell Phone

"We are in a perpetual state of mourning." This line is uttered in one of the play's monologues, commenting on the tendency of people today to wear black for all occasions. Of all quotations, this is the one that stood out the most to me. There is a truth to it that is apparent nowhere more than in a play that explores our increasingly complex relationship with life and death.

Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone opened the Persephone Deep End series for this year, continuing the tradition of dark, edgy, and slightly experimental theatre. We open with a dead man slumped over in a café, with his cell phone ringing. Kristina Hughes plays Jean, the well-meaning woman who happens upon this scene and, seeing a problem, resolves it the best way she can: by answering the phone. In this small act, she becomes inextricably bound with the dead man, Gordon, becoming his executor of sorts, taking responsibility not only for spreading news of his death through the Cloud but also for the emotions of those close to him. In trying to comfort Gordon's loved ones (so to speak) Jean ends up constructing a convoluted web of lies, fabricating her own relationship with this man whom she really knows nothing about. The dead man's cell phone becomes a crutch for her, an addiction, although she cannot say exactly why.

For the entire duration of the play, I had one lingering question in my mind: Why am I the only one laughing? Indeed, I still can't say for certain, but I will say that I should not have been. Jeffrey Pufahl's direction played up the darkly comic aspects of the script brilliantly, and was assisted in no small part by Kristina Hughes' sense of timing. There is a harsh juxtaposition between the darkness of the subject matter and the hilarity of some of the interactions, but that in turn just makes it funnier. One particular scene where Jean tries to comfort Gordon's family by presenting them with "gifts" that Gordon left them was one of the funniest things I've seen in the theatre in recent memory; the incredibility of Jean's story is made more absurd by how readily accepted it is by everyone else (I was also sitting right in front of Jeffrey Pufahl during preview, so I can only assume that he appreciated my hearty reaction).

Dead Man's Cell Phone is a triumph of modernist storytelling. Instead of trying to probe the human mind in spite of growing technology, it pulls the veil off how our lives (and deaths) are shaped by those devices with which we surround ourselves. Although Gordon expires before the play opens, his cell phone carries on; and because of that lifeline, he continues to live and grow in the hands of Jean, becoming a better person than he ever was before. Through Jean's growing obsession with the cell phone, the play becomes a story about how we strive to connect with people through technology, but those connections are never completely honest. But then the play starts to go somewhere different, and shortly after coming back from intermission I got a creeping sensation that we were headed toward and unsatisfying conclusion. We were. The play spins off into corporate intrigue, then metaphysical moralising. By the time we reach the end, it feels we've come a long way from the theme with which we started. The actors carry through very well, but the script loses direction.

The strength of the play falls on Kristina Hughes as the uptight businesswoman who is drawn into a strange new world. Her well-meaning innocence helps supply a lot of the comedy in the play. Leon Willey plays Gordon, as a limp corpse in the first scene, then later soliloquising in the play's more abstract segments. There is a profound juxtaposition between the two: Gordon the suave, manipulative sociopath, and Jean the awkward but kind-hearted good samaritan. Their differences create a delightful amount of friction when Jean realises just who she's allowed herself to connect to. Willey also plays Gordon's brother Dwight, timid and nerdy; his scenes with Jean supply the plays soft, romanticute moments. Then Natalie Feheregyhazi does a turn as both Gordon's widow Hermia, sullen and repressed, and his waifish French lover. She displays a gift for both dry humour and over-the-top characterisation. The real scene-stealer is Sharon Bakker as Gordon's emotionally fragile mother, who utters the fateful line that I mention at the top of this review. She grabs the attention of the audience with her high, wavering voice, then clamps onto it with her lugubrious speeches, providing the play's deepest emotional resonances.

The sad fact is that the substance of the play felt like two scripts stapled together, but it still succeeds on many levels by the strength of the cast and its biting humour. And even though I don't like how she ended things, I do give Sarah Ruhl credit for jumping into the deep end (see what I did there?) to probe the complex and sometimes damaging relationships with those miniature lives we call cell phones.