“She’s going to become her own vocabulary word,” Paula Vogel has said, describing former student Sarah Ruhl’s unique voice. “There’s not anyone else like her. There are no models to refer to. Ten years from now, we’ll say, ‘It’s rather Sarah Ruhl’.” Indeed, others are reconizing Ruhl’s distinctive talent; in the past few years, she has received a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, a Pulitzer Prize nomination, and productions in theaters across America. Ruhl’s plays display boundless imagination and striking theatricality; her extraordinary landscapes meld familiar experience with the possibility of fantastic occurrences. Ruhl’s spare yet evocative stage directions—her play The Clean House is set in “a metaphysicial Connecticut”—are a gift to her artistic collaborators, providing them with a clear framework that allows ample room for creative exploration. Two months before first rehearsal, we talked to director Jessica Thebus, actress Polly Noonan and the Dead Man’s Cell Phone design team about Ruhl’s distinctive theatricality and creating the unique world of this play. JESSICA THEBUS Director: One of the things I love about Sarah’s voice is that she has a sense of the mythic. Eurydice , one of her well-known early plays, builds on a Greek myth and Dead Man’s Cell Phone is like a fairy tale. Her plays are very theatrical, and I would say not unlike Greek theater. There are many differences of course, but they share a mythic landscape that contains very human problems. In Dead Man’s Cell Phone, you get a magical place, an unusual place, a place where you visit the underworld or miraculous things can happen, and yet the problems and issues the characters are dealing with are extremely familiar and sometimes mundane. This combination of the mundane and the magical is fertile theatrically, and it makes Sarah a playwright who is uniquely well suited to the theater. She’s not writing movies that can also be performed live, she’s writing plays that can only be done on the stage, because it is a place of procession and passion and mythic possibility. I think that often reflects what it is to be alive inside your own head. When you look at yourself and the world from inside your mind—your dreams and your fantasies and your jealousies—it all has a magical, epic dimension. It’s why it’s funny to think of the distinction between “naturalistic” versus “non-naturalistic” theater, because naturalistic theater is about how you see the world, but I think this more magical theater expresses what it’s like to be the world. POLLY NOONAN Actress/Jean: Sarah is such a visual playwright; her plays are full of absurd and wonderful images. In Melancholy Play, one character becomes so depressed that she actually turns into an almond. And then the other characters have to play a scene with her. It’s totally ludicrous but quite wonderful; to watch two actors talk to an almond. And yet, if you’ve ever dealt with someone who is deeply depressed, there are moments when people do seem to enter an almond state. Where you can’t quite reach them. It’s a very funny way of pointing out something that is quite heartbreaking, which is that sometimes we can’t reach each other. SCOTT BRADLEY Scenic Design: For me, Dead Man’s Cell Phone was almost entirely inspired by a small note that Sarah puts in a parenthesis after Jean speaks: “An Edward Hopper painting, for five seconds.” Hopper is one of my absolute favorite artists, because of his use of light on architecture and the way he encapsulates the feeling of loneliness in otherwise spacious rooms. So one of my first stabs at the design was recreating one of his paintings: a woman in a café window, alone and staring out. It was so much the opening scene of this play that I almost literally made the painting three dimensional. We refined it from that to something even more simple, while retaining the feeling of a Hopper painting. We created an elongated space with a very long horizontal window that opens up onto sheer blackness, a void beyond. The window becomes a metaphor for death, but also a frame for the visions we see in the play, such as the cell phone ballet. We never leave that room. All of the play’s episodic descriptions—it goes to the airport, and to the stationery store, to someone’s home—happen in a room that’s quite spare. It celebrates Sarah’s way of transforming a space’s emotional metaphor from a comfortable café to the underworld. Her very first description of the setting is some chairs and tables, that’s it. Rather than decorate the stage with more stuff, we’re trying to use just those simple elements, and to use them in different ways than you might imagine, along with specific props to tell us where we are. It becomes a challenge to make the most of our choices, and to be as creative as possible. I think the set is going to be quite familiar yet expansive in its possibilities of unexpected change. LINDA ROETHKE Costume Design: We started the design process last fall over a cup of coffee in a wonderful old café in Andersonville, appropriate when you think about it as the play is placed in one. Jessica had recommended reading Mark Strand’s Hopper , and so we were thinking about Edward Hopper’s paintings, which is timely, because the Art Institute opened an exhibition of his work in February. There’s such stillness and a sense of waiting in Hopper’s paintings; he captures the seemingly mundane moments in life when extraordinary things can and do happen. We talked about the paintings in relationship to this play about a woman in her middle years waiting for something to happen to her in life. Scott’s design for the set is a deconstruction of a Hopper painting, and it uses the colors that he loved so much in his interiors. The clothing palette is similar, though heightened somewhat in intensity and texture. I believe Sarah sees color when considering some of her extraordinary characters. I very much appreciate that aesthetic as a designer. One of the challenges that Jessica and I have been in conversation about is the delicate balance that needs to be struck between theatrical realism (drama occurring in realistic setting) and magic realism (magical elements appearing in a realistic setting). The characters have very real motivations and objectives, yet some of them contribute to the magical moments of the play in a visual way through their clothing. Striking that balance in such characters as Mrs. Gottlieb and The Other Woman is the artistic challenge of designing the costumes for this play. Mrs. Gottlieb, a character in her 70s, has a little Miss Haversham (of Great Expectations), “the house smells of dry cracked curtains,” and a drop of Cruella De Ville, “she wears furs indoors.” Yet her grief is very palpable, a mother suffering after the death of a favorite child. JIM INGALLS Lighting Design: We’re responding to the loneliness and the isolation of Hopper’s work. The set isn’t heavy on detail. It’s heavy on plane and diagonal, but there’s not a lot of molding and extra stuff, it’s all “Hopper-spare.” I’m hoping that I’ll be able to tone the set in a way that enhances that. Basically, we’re trying to find a balance between the café and the café modulated. We’re never going to really lose the café, it’ll be that space with changes in temperature, in volume and in angle. ANDRE PLUESS Sound Design and Composition: Right now, I’m thinking about unity and cohesion. Dead Man’s Cell Phone works as a sustained trance or dream, from the moment the audience enters the world until the end. What we’ve all been working on is how to frame the entire experience in a way that makes the magical moments feel cohesive with the more naturalistic scenes, so we don’t feel like we’re in a play and then, all of a sudden, a dance piece. Right now, Jessica and I are in the process of trying to find an instrumental vocabulary for the show. But more importantly, we’re trying to explore the gray area where literal music—meaning melody, and harmony, and chord and rhythm—meets sound design. For example, we’ve been discussing heavily the cell phone ballet in the show. Is it simply a collage of treated, mediated sound, perhaps with elements of voice interspersed with fragments of melody, or is it something that is specifically metered musically, that has a clearer tempo and structure? Or is it somewhere in between? What’s the most effective way to evoke the feelings in the sequence? Is it by being more angular in our approach to “music,” or is it by creating the most lyrical music I can possibly write?
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Finding the World of Dead Man's Cell Phone
by Joy Meads
“She’s going to become her own vocabulary word,” Paula Vogel has said, describing former student Sarah Ruhl’s unique voice. “There’s not anyone else like her. There are no models to refer to. Ten years from now, we’ll say, ‘It’s rather Sarah Ruhl’.” Indeed, others are reconizing Ruhl’s distinctive talent; in the past few years, she has received a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, a Pulitzer Prize nomination, and productions in theaters across America. Ruhl’s plays display boundless imagination and striking theatricality; her extraordinary landscapes meld familiar experience with the possibility of fantastic occurrences. Ruhl’s spare yet evocative stage directions—her play The Clean House is set in “a metaphysicial Connecticut”—are a gift to her artistic collaborators, providing them with a clear framework that allows ample room for creative exploration. Two months before first rehearsal, we talked to director Jessica Thebus, actress Polly Noonan and the Dead Man’s Cell Phone design team about Ruhl’s distinctive theatricality and creating the unique world of this play. JESSICA THEBUS Director: One of the things I love about Sarah’s voice is that she has a sense of the mythic. Eurydice , one of her well-known early plays, builds on a Greek myth and Dead Man’s Cell Phone is like a fairy tale. Her plays are very theatrical, and I would say not unlike Greek theater. There are many differences of course, but they share a mythic landscape that contains very human problems. In Dead Man’s Cell Phone, you get a magical place, an unusual place, a place where you visit the underworld or miraculous things can happen, and yet the problems and issues the characters are dealing with are extremely familiar and sometimes mundane. This combination of the mundane and the magical is fertile theatrically, and it makes Sarah a playwright who is uniquely well suited to the theater. She’s not writing movies that can also be performed live, she’s writing plays that can only be done on the stage, because it is a place of procession and passion and mythic possibility. I think that often reflects what it is to be alive inside your own head. When you look at yourself and the world from inside your mind—your dreams and your fantasies and your jealousies—it all has a magical, epic dimension. It’s why it’s funny to think of the distinction between “naturalistic” versus “non-naturalistic” theater, because naturalistic theater is about how you see the world, but I think this more magical theater expresses what it’s like to be the world. POLLY NOONAN Actress/Jean: Sarah is such a visual playwright; her plays are full of absurd and wonderful images. In Melancholy Play, one character becomes so depressed that she actually turns into an almond. And then the other characters have to play a scene with her. It’s totally ludicrous but quite wonderful; to watch two actors talk to an almond. And yet, if you’ve ever dealt with someone who is deeply depressed, there are moments when people do seem to enter an almond state. Where you can’t quite reach them. It’s a very funny way of pointing out something that is quite heartbreaking, which is that sometimes we can’t reach each other. SCOTT BRADLEY Scenic Design: For me, Dead Man’s Cell Phone was almost entirely inspired by a small note that Sarah puts in a parenthesis after Jean speaks: “An Edward Hopper painting, for five seconds.” Hopper is one of my absolute favorite artists, because of his use of light on architecture and the way he encapsulates the feeling of loneliness in otherwise spacious rooms. So one of my first stabs at the design was recreating one of his paintings: a woman in a café window, alone and staring out. It was so much the opening scene of this play that I almost literally made the painting three dimensional. We refined it from that to something even more simple, while retaining the feeling of a Hopper painting. We created an elongated space with a very long horizontal window that opens up onto sheer blackness, a void beyond. The window becomes a metaphor for death, but also a frame for the visions we see in the play, such as the cell phone ballet. We never leave that room. All of the play’s episodic descriptions—it goes to the airport, and to the stationery store, to someone’s home—happen in a room that’s quite spare. It celebrates Sarah’s way of transforming a space’s emotional metaphor from a comfortable café to the underworld. Her very first description of the setting is some chairs and tables, that’s it. Rather than decorate the stage with more stuff, we’re trying to use just those simple elements, and to use them in different ways than you might imagine, along with specific props to tell us where we are. It becomes a challenge to make the most of our choices, and to be as creative as possible. I think the set is going to be quite familiar yet expansive in its possibilities of unexpected change. LINDA ROETHKE Costume Design: We started the design process last fall over a cup of coffee in a wonderful old café in Andersonville, appropriate when you think about it as the play is placed in one. Jessica had recommended reading Mark Strand’s Hopper , and so we were thinking about Edward Hopper’s paintings, which is timely, because the Art Institute opened an exhibition of his work in February. There’s such stillness and a sense of waiting in Hopper’s paintings; he captures the seemingly mundane moments in life when extraordinary things can and do happen. We talked about the paintings in relationship to this play about a woman in her middle years waiting for something to happen to her in life. Scott’s design for the set is a deconstruction of a Hopper painting, and it uses the colors that he loved so much in his interiors. The clothing palette is similar, though heightened somewhat in intensity and texture. I believe Sarah sees color when considering some of her extraordinary characters. I very much appreciate that aesthetic as a designer. One of the challenges that Jessica and I have been in conversation about is the delicate balance that needs to be struck between theatrical realism (drama occurring in realistic setting) and magic realism (magical elements appearing in a realistic setting). The characters have very real motivations and objectives, yet some of them contribute to the magical moments of the play in a visual way through their clothing. Striking that balance in such characters as Mrs. Gottlieb and The Other Woman is the artistic challenge of designing the costumes for this play. Mrs. Gottlieb, a character in her 70s, has a little Miss Haversham (of Great Expectations), “the house smells of dry cracked curtains,” and a drop of Cruella De Ville, “she wears furs indoors.” Yet her grief is very palpable, a mother suffering after the death of a favorite child. JIM INGALLS Lighting Design: We’re responding to the loneliness and the isolation of Hopper’s work. The set isn’t heavy on detail. It’s heavy on plane and diagonal, but there’s not a lot of molding and extra stuff, it’s all “Hopper-spare.” I’m hoping that I’ll be able to tone the set in a way that enhances that. Basically, we’re trying to find a balance between the café and the café modulated. We’re never going to really lose the café, it’ll be that space with changes in temperature, in volume and in angle. ANDRE PLUESS Sound Design and Composition: Right now, I’m thinking about unity and cohesion. Dead Man’s Cell Phone works as a sustained trance or dream, from the moment the audience enters the world until the end. What we’ve all been working on is how to frame the entire experience in a way that makes the magical moments feel cohesive with the more naturalistic scenes, so we don’t feel like we’re in a play and then, all of a sudden, a dance piece. Right now, Jessica and I are in the process of trying to find an instrumental vocabulary for the show. But more importantly, we’re trying to explore the gray area where literal music—meaning melody, and harmony, and chord and rhythm—meets sound design. For example, we’ve been discussing heavily the cell phone ballet in the show. Is it simply a collage of treated, mediated sound, perhaps with elements of voice interspersed with fragments of melody, or is it something that is specifically metered musically, that has a clearer tempo and structure? Or is it somewhere in between? What’s the most effective way to evoke the feelings in the sequence? Is it by being more angular in our approach to “music,” or is it by creating the most lyrical music I can possibly write?