

A “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” can be irksome



In playwright Sarah Ruhl’s latest work, Jean (Emily Grogan) does just that after Gordan Gottlieb’s (Mike Dooly) nagging phone finally gets to her. “Hello,” she answers. “No, he isn’t – can I take a message?” She not only takes messages but proceeds to meet with Gordan’s former mistress, mother, widow and brother. We don’t really know why Jean makes it her duty to answer Gordon’s phone and give callers a little bit of peace about his death, even if it’s all a lie. Crazy? Lonely? A knee-jerk reaction that it was the right thing to do? Perhaps all three. Whatever the reason, the task of finishing Gordan’s unfinished business sends Jean and the audience down a wacky rabbit hole involving his eccentric family and shady dealings.

Jean manages to get invited to dinner with Gordan’s mother, Mrs. Gottlieb (Julie Jamieson), his widow, Hermia (Peggy Gannon), and socially awkward brother Dwight (Tim Gouran) in a gauche but funny scene. The actors deftly handle Ruhl’s idiosyncratic script, (including Dooly as Gordan who opens the second act with a lengthy, cryptic monologue from the afterlife) but at times I was left wondering where this was all going.

The forest through the trees in this offbeat, dark comedy however is that the more connected we all are, the less present we really seem to be. Jean, having never owned a cell phone herself because she wanted to disappear, is compelled to answer when it rings during the eulogy at Gordan’s funeral, later in the throes of passion with his younger brother and in a scene where his widow has called drunk from a bar and tries to get the phone back from her. Why does she still have it again? “Gordan wanted me to have it,” according to Jean.

A sometimes lumbering and non-nonsensical story for an increasingly familiar message, at least Dead Man’s plot is more creative than the title. Dead Man’s Cell Phone runs through Oct. 3 at ArtsWest.

Photo credit: Matt Durham. Emily Grogan as Jean and Mike Dooly as Gordon.

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Maia Jannele

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