Synopsis from Samuel French: “An incessantly ringing cell phone in a quiet cafe. A stranger at the next table who has had enough. And a dead man–with a lot of loose ends. So begins Dead Man’s Cell Phone, a wildly imaginative new comedy by MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sarah Ruhl. A work about how we memorialize the dead–and how that remembering changes us–it is the odyssey of a woman forced to confront her own assumptions about morality, redemption, and the need to connect in a technologically obsessed world.” And from Charles Isherwood with the NY Times: “As Dead Man’s Cell Phone takes surprising twists and leaps, the lament for the supposed coziness of pre-digital culture takes on layers of nuance and contradiction. Characters in Ruhl’s play negotiate the no man’s land between the every-day and the mystical, talking like goofs one minute and philosophers the next. And her characters’ quirkiness is in keeping, too, with the play’s doleful central theme, that each human being is a book full of surprises even to intimates, and that one is destined to be left unfinished.”
