A number of people, hearing the title Dead Man’s Cell Phone, have said to me, “I want to see that play!” From the title alone, they sense a story, a playful suggestion of “what if?” And they’re right—that image, a “dead man’s cell phone,” starts a story. By now, cell phones are ubiquitous in our lives. They are the appendage through which we negotiate our world. In our cell phone is the list of our contacts that circle of family and friends who constitute our world. Depending upon the sophistication of the device, it also contains our calendar, our photographs, our e-mail. Each of our cell phones tells the story of our life—it is the alternate “me,” the repository of personal and professional contacts and commitments, and the device that connects us to those people and places. To lose one’s cell phone is to become untethered, to lose the thread of one’s connection in the web of one’s life. The title, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, suggests, then, the afterlife of a “me.” In the image, there is a dead man and a cell phone. An organic body and a device. But tuned to the terminology, one hears a reversal: the man (that organic body) is dead, the phone (that device) is a “cell” (the fundamental unit of organic life). And guess what? The woman who picks up the dead man’s cell phone is named Jean. Homonym to “gene,” that fundamental unit of organic life. Already, in the opening gesture of the play—Jean answering a dead man’s cell phone—a web of linguistic associations are in play. In play in the play. Sarah Ruhl’s writing invites this playful interrogation of language. She’s a very canny writer a poet of the stage, enchanted with the subterranean life of our words and ways. Sarah makes visible—and sets into play—the mysterious web of association and myth that underlies the quotidian coinages of language. In those words and practices rubbed dull by daily use, she drills down to another layer of meaning where the imagination lives. And plays. What if? What if a woman, sitting in a cafe, irked by the incessant ringing of a cell phone that goes unanswered by the stranger sitting next to her, answers that phone? What if she discovers that man is dead? What if she decides to enter his life through the portal of his cell phone? There it is, his cell phone, now more alive than he—the connection to his family and friends, the central link in his professional life. And there she is—ready to pick up the phone, ready to maintain the connective web of the dead man’s life. Why? Why is Jean so ready to abandon her own life and enter the life of the dead man, Gordon? (“Gordon” near relative to “Gordian,” that knot that represents the problem insoluble in its own terms and solved only by a cutting through.) So, Jean is handed a life that is a Gordian knot and it is hers to cut through. Why does Jean feel, in the ringing phone, an invitation? What makes her susceptible to the possibility of entering another life? As she reveals to Gordon’s family, she works in the office of the Holocaust Museum about which she says, “It is a sad job. But it’s good—you know—to remember.” So Jean is a woman whose life is conducted in a hall of memory she is a caretaker of the artifacts of dead lives. Gordon’s cell phone is an artifact of his life and through it, Jean enters its living web. It is as if she has finally found, in the cell phone, the artifact that permits her to enter not just a memory, but a present—a circle of survivors. And there in that living circle is Gordon’s brother, Dwight: the dead man’s double, alive. She meets Gordon’s mother, Mrs. Gottlieb (“our name means God loving in German”); his wife Hermia (evocation of Hermia in Shakespeare’s topsyturvylove story, Midsummer Night’s Dream); and “the Other Woman,” a professional and personal colleague of Gordon. And in a flight of the fantastic, Jean visits Gordon in his very particular heaven. It would be unfair to reveal the outcomes of Jean’s encounters with each of these characters, but I encourage you (the playwright encourages you) to attend to the particulars of their names and their professions. Be playful with the play—listen to its language, turn its language over to discover the depth that lies underneath its well-worn surface. Sarah creates a beautiful inscription of this language-action in the play when Jean invents a parting gift from Gordon to his wife, Hermia. Jean, attempting to retrieve some happiness for Hermia in Gordon’s death, hands Hermia a salt shaker, saying, “This salt is for you, Hermia. Because he said you were the salt of the earth.” There it is, in the most quotidian, non-descript item at hand, a “parting gift” that signals the essential. All at Jean’s invention. She retrieves, from the table’s detritus, a symbol, a numinosity. This is the joy of Dead Man’s Cell Phone: the conversion of the well-worn, the over-looked, the dull object into meaning. One can suggest that the central conversion is Jean’s: a mousy woman (the Other Woman commands Jean to apply lipstick with verve, to walk into a room, confident of her presence) enters her life with a new animation. She chooses to leave the museum of her world and enter a living circle. Jean (ah, “gene”) comes alive. Which returns us to the play’s title: Dead Man’s Cell Phone. In it is contained the linguistic paradox (the dead man/the cell phone) that animates the language of the play. And what is language but the repository, the museum, of our history? It is the residue of lives already lived that we make ever new. A “cell phone?” Who knew? Who knew that a “cell” would take on a new life for those of us in this 21st century? The promise of Sarah’s play is that everything we thought we knew, everything we thought was dead, can be uncovered, can be re-discovered, and brought to life again.
News & Articles
Letter from the Artistic Director on Dead Man's Cell Phone
by Martha Lavey
A number of people, hearing the title Dead Man’s Cell Phone, have said to me, “I want to see that play!” From the title alone, they sense a story, a playful suggestion of “what if?” And they’re right—that image, a “dead man’s cell phone,” starts a story. By now, cell phones are ubiquitous in our lives. They are the appendage through which we negotiate our world. In our cell phone is the list of our contacts that circle of family and friends who constitute our world. Depending upon the sophistication of the device, it also contains our calendar, our photographs, our e-mail. Each of our cell phones tells the story of our life—it is the alternate “me,” the repository of personal and professional contacts and commitments, and the device that connects us to those people and places. To lose one’s cell phone is to become untethered, to lose the thread of one’s connection in the web of one’s life. The title, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, suggests, then, the afterlife of a “me.” In the image, there is a dead man and a cell phone. An organic body and a device. But tuned to the terminology, one hears a reversal: the man (that organic body) is dead, the phone (that device) is a “cell” (the fundamental unit of organic life). And guess what? The woman who picks up the dead man’s cell phone is named Jean. Homonym to “gene,” that fundamental unit of organic life. Already, in the opening gesture of the play—Jean answering a dead man’s cell phone—a web of linguistic associations are in play. In play in the play. Sarah Ruhl’s writing invites this playful interrogation of language. She’s a very canny writer a poet of the stage, enchanted with the subterranean life of our words and ways. Sarah makes visible—and sets into play—the mysterious web of association and myth that underlies the quotidian coinages of language. In those words and practices rubbed dull by daily use, she drills down to another layer of meaning where the imagination lives. And plays. What if? What if a woman, sitting in a cafe, irked by the incessant ringing of a cell phone that goes unanswered by the stranger sitting next to her, answers that phone? What if she discovers that man is dead? What if she decides to enter his life through the portal of his cell phone? There it is, his cell phone, now more alive than he—the connection to his family and friends, the central link in his professional life. And there she is—ready to pick up the phone, ready to maintain the connective web of the dead man’s life. Why? Why is Jean so ready to abandon her own life and enter the life of the dead man, Gordon? (“Gordon” near relative to “Gordian,” that knot that represents the problem insoluble in its own terms and solved only by a cutting through.) So, Jean is handed a life that is a Gordian knot and it is hers to cut through. Why does Jean feel, in the ringing phone, an invitation? What makes her susceptible to the possibility of entering another life? As she reveals to Gordon’s family, she works in the office of the Holocaust Museum about which she says, “It is a sad job. But it’s good—you know—to remember.” So Jean is a woman whose life is conducted in a hall of memory she is a caretaker of the artifacts of dead lives. Gordon’s cell phone is an artifact of his life and through it, Jean enters its living web. It is as if she has finally found, in the cell phone, the artifact that permits her to enter not just a memory, but a present—a circle of survivors. And there in that living circle is Gordon’s brother, Dwight: the dead man’s double, alive. She meets Gordon’s mother, Mrs. Gottlieb (“our name means God loving in German”); his wife Hermia (evocation of Hermia in Shakespeare’s topsyturvylove story, Midsummer Night’s Dream); and “the Other Woman,” a professional and personal colleague of Gordon. And in a flight of the fantastic, Jean visits Gordon in his very particular heaven. It would be unfair to reveal the outcomes of Jean’s encounters with each of these characters, but I encourage you (the playwright encourages you) to attend to the particulars of their names and their professions. Be playful with the play—listen to its language, turn its language over to discover the depth that lies underneath its well-worn surface. Sarah creates a beautiful inscription of this language-action in the play when Jean invents a parting gift from Gordon to his wife, Hermia. Jean, attempting to retrieve some happiness for Hermia in Gordon’s death, hands Hermia a salt shaker, saying, “This salt is for you, Hermia. Because he said you were the salt of the earth.” There it is, in the most quotidian, non-descript item at hand, a “parting gift” that signals the essential. All at Jean’s invention. She retrieves, from the table’s detritus, a symbol, a numinosity. This is the joy of Dead Man’s Cell Phone: the conversion of the well-worn, the over-looked, the dull object into meaning. One can suggest that the central conversion is Jean’s: a mousy woman (the Other Woman commands Jean to apply lipstick with verve, to walk into a room, confident of her presence) enters her life with a new animation. She chooses to leave the museum of her world and enter a living circle. Jean (ah, “gene”) comes alive. Which returns us to the play’s title: Dead Man’s Cell Phone. In it is contained the linguistic paradox (the dead man/the cell phone) that animates the language of the play. And what is language but the repository, the museum, of our history? It is the residue of lives already lived that we make ever new. A “cell phone?” Who knew? Who knew that a “cell” would take on a new life for those of us in this 21st century? The promise of Sarah’s play is that everything we thought we knew, everything we thought was dead, can be uncovered, can be re-discovered, and brought to life again.