Race
Dead Man’s Cell Phone
By Sarah Ruhl
Directed by David M. Jenkins
Extended! Jun. 3 – 27, 2010
Thu. – Sat. 8pm, Sun. 4pm
Tickets: $24.50
Shimberg Playhouse, Straz Center for the Performing Arts
Winner!
- Creative Loafing Best of the Bay – Most Consistently Surprising Actress – Meg Heimstead
- Creative Loafing Best of the Bay – Best Actor, Reader's Poll Runner-Up – Steve Garland
- Creative Loafing Best of the Bay – Best Actress, Reader's Poll Runner-Up – Summer Bohnenkamp-Jenkins, Meg Heimstead
Making sense of mortality in the digital age
"… beguiling new comedy … Ms. Ruhl’s work blends the mundane and the metaphysical, the blunt and the obscure, the patently bizarre and the bizarrely moving." – New York Times
An incessantly ringing cell phone in a quiet café. A stranger at the next table who has had enough. A dead man with a lot of loose ends. So begins Dead Man's Cell Phone, a wildly imaginative new comedy by playwright Sarah Ruhl, recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant and Pulitzer Prize finalist for her play The Clean House.
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"Ruhl's zany probe of the razor-thin line between life and death delivers a fresh and humorous look at the times we live in." – Variety
Dead Man's Cell Phone is an odyssey of a woman forced to confront her own assumptions about morality, redemption and the need to connect in a technologically obsessed world.
Jean (Meg Heimstead, who stunned Bay area audiences last year in Rabbit Hole) is sleepwalking through her life until she answers a dead man’s (Steve Garland, 2007 Best of the Bay – Best Actor) cell phone.
It turns out to be a wake-up call that sends her to an uncomfortable encounter with the dead man's mother (Elizabeth Fendrick, making her Jobsite debut), a date with his brother (Michael C. McGreevy, most recently seen as Sgt. Match in What the Butler Saw), a drinking binge with his wife (Katrina Stevenson, 2004 Best of the Bay – Best Actress), and a mysterious rendezvous with a strange woman (Summer Bohnenkamp-Jenkins, who just completed Jobsite's run of boom! as the pink-coiffed museum docent), not to mention trips to the afterlife and the black market.
In this quirky modern adventure, Jean reconnects to her own spirit and learns that life is for the living.
About the Artists
Dead Man's Cell Phone is directed by Jobsite Producing Artistic Director David M. Jenkins (two-time Best of the Bay – Best Artistic Direction), who also designs the sound. Jobsite's designer in residence, Brian Smallheer, provides the set, lights and video projections.
Sarah Ruhl's plays have been produced at theaters around the country, including Lincoln Center Theater, the Goodman Theatre, Arena Stage, South Coast Repertory, Yale Repertory Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre among others, and internationally. She is the recipient of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (for The Clean House, 2004), the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award, and the Whiting Writers' Award. The Clean House was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005. She is a member of 13P and New Dramatists.
See more about the cast & crew.
And Baby Makes Seven | Night of the Living Dead | What the Butler Saw
boom! | Dead Man's Cell Phone | Dog Sees God
