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Death and the Community of Comic Romance: Sarah Ruhl’s Poetics of Transformation in Dead Man’s Cell Phone

Sarah Ruhl is now considered among the most prominent playwrights to have emerged in the United States in the first decade of the twentyfirst century. Leslie Atkins Durham argues that Ruhl ‘dominated the American stage’ in the early twenty-first century despite the pervading unfair conditions faced by contemporary female writers. Indeed, the prolific number of productions and premieres of her work; the honours and awards she has received; and the fact that four of her plays were regularly among the ten most-produced plays by the member theatres of the American Theatre Communications Group (TGC) organisation between 2007 and 2012, support this claim. Given such accomplishments, the key to Ruhl’s success and why her drama is worthy of attention are vital critical questions. Interestingly, two recurring features seem to converge in Ruhl’s most-produced works. Three of her plays – namely, Eurydice (2003), The Clean House (2004), and Dead Man’s Cell Phone (2007) – all share, albeit in different ways, a common concern with death and the aftermath of dying, that is, with mortality. On the other hand, the latter two plays and In the Next Room, Or the Vibrator Play (2009), which is the most-produced, are all comedies. Whether this conflation of theme and genre has been crucial in defining Ruhl’s theatrical poetics is an issue that deserves more critical attention than it has received so far, and one that this article addresses through a critical reading of Dead Man’s Cell Phone, arguably the play 1. Leslie Atkins Durham, Women’s Voices on American Stages in the Early Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 4. Durham’s volume is, after AlShamma’s first monographic study on Ruhl’s oeuvre, a further endeavour to bring the playwright’s work into a more substantial critical sphere and widen what is still a limited body of scholarship on her writing. Its greatest contribution is to address convincingly and challenge the supposed whimsicality of Ruhl’s production, first, by contextualising her work as part of a new generation of US female playwrights, and second, underscoring the social concerns and ethical questions that characterised her (first) decade of success.