Dead Man's Cell Phone

The most charismatic performance in Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone comes from a corpse. This is not an insult, however, since this cadaver is more talkative than most. It is his phone, which still buzzes with life long after he has expired, that propels the plot of this darkly absurd family drama.

The shy but impulsive Jean (played by Alyssa Hagerbrant with great naturalistic comedy), moments after discovering the deceased Gordon (a wonderfully snarky Ashish Ramachandran) next to her in a cafe, answers the phone on his behalf and begins to pick up the trail of dysfunction left in his wake. Using the phone in a quixotic attempt to give Gordon's death some meaning, Jean stumbles from one lie to another, becoming embroiled with Gordon's eccentric family, his mistress, and his increasingly ominous business associates.

The play is an odd stylistic mixture—gallows humour, awkward romance, social commentary and a very American magical realism—but thanks to a script that is a masterpiece of brevity, no single element outstays its welcome. Though unbidden monologues on death, communications technology and human relationships weigh down the plot's flow, the tragicomedy of errors that leads to much of the sparkling character interaction more than makes up for it.

Unfortunately, the play loses focus near the end in its scramble to tie up every dangling plot thread, where preserving some of the metaphysical mystery might have been preferable. But that flaw only highlights how sad, funny and involving the preceding meditation has been.