“Dead Man’s Cell Phone” Rings off the Hook

By Roland Finger
Staff Writer

Director Brad Delzer wakes us up with a Dead Man’s Cell Phone plan. Sarah Ruhl wrote this play with dark comic intent, and the Theatre B production revels in screwed-up characters dealing with peculiar circumstances.

Jean finishes her bowl of lobster bisque in a nondescript café and grows irritated by an apparently sleeping man’s cell phone that keeps ringing. Taking matters into her own hands, she realizes the man, Gordon, played by the best corpse actor in the business, Matt Berdahl, is dead, but she is smitten by his cell phone, instantly attached to it because it appeals to her imagination, giving her a mission.

Jean dedicates herself to tying up all the loose ends of this dead man’s life, speaking to all the people who call the cell phone. Evidently, Jean has no life and wishes to take over someone else’s, but she is also simply super nice, believing that she is doing a good deed for a dead man, fulfilling what must have been his last wishes.

She builds him up, loving him, as it were, because it is easy to love someone who is already dead. She sanctifies someone she never knew, putting him on a pedestal. She’s nuts, but it’s fascinating to watch her get entangled in a stranger’s life, seeing her slowly realize that Gordon wasn’t such a perfect guy. Jean’s devotion to Gordon is like Nick Carraway’s loyalty to Gatsby after he dies, except Jean never knew her idol while he was alive.

The play is full of dark whimsy and oddities. Is Gordon a first crush for Jean, who has a creepy innocence and needs to move into the world of the living and admit people’s flaws? Tierney Michon plays Jean, convincing us that this young, attractive woman blunders along in a world of innocence and naiveté.

Gordon came from a family with a domineering mother, Mrs. Gottlieb, who despises the loss of proprieties in the modern world. She loathes people who speak on cell phones while sitting on toilets. Where are the boundaries of decency today?

Jean crosses a bizarre boundary, becoming an executor of the memory of Gordon. She plays his secretary, improvising how to please everyone he knew.

Jean’s mission is absurd because she claims that Gordon had wonderful last words for everyone who knew him. She says that Gordon gave her the cell phone, wanting her to convey all these messages to people. For the mistress, Gordon had the message: “I love you.” For the mother, he was sorry that they were estranged and planned to return her call that very day. He wanted his wife, Hermia, to know that she was the salt of the earth. They had intimacy problems, but under it all, he finally understood her.

In Jean’s hokey rendition of the death, Gordon must have clung to life for quite some time, pouring out his heart, composing off-the-cuff poetry to be passed along to his loved ones.

Phaidra Yunker plays the mistress, capturing the creepiness that can afflict unacknowledged women drenched in bitterness. She’s not in Gordon’s will, and she feels she’s entitled to something. What shall it be? Her hatred of sentiment demonstrates that she doth protest too much. She hates what she has not had from Gordon. When the mistress praises glamour, we realize how often she must have felt cheap.

Aimee Klein plays Hermia, the lonely widow who composes pathetic fantasies to cope with her husband’s infidelity. Ms. Klein also composed and recorded original music for this production of the play.

Mary Cochran plays Gordon’s mother with great presence and is a walking iceberg.

Colin Froeber plays Dwight, Gordon’s pathetic younger brother, who is perfect as Jean’s belated love interest because he clings to a world of cutesy fantasy like a kindergartner.

We enter a world we are not supposed to see because these characters are all evading their own faults. The family skirts the secret of what Gordon really did for a living. The tension brings the audience closer to Jean, who needs to find out more about this mysterious dead man.

It turns out that Jean likes Gordon better the less she knows about him, the more he is simply dead to her. When he shows his true personality, she is disgusted. Jean may be a chaste necrophiliac.

This fascinating play emphasizes female insecurities, heightened by Gordon, a cold, self-absorbed male, leaving a path of emotional wreckage behind.

Jean moves on from Gordon by hooking up with a character who is just as weird as she is. They will most likely produce strange, insecure babies. Is this a prophecy about the digital generations of our future?

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If You Go

What: Dead Man’s Cell Phone
Where: Theatre B
When: Sept 23 - Oct 16
Info: 701.729.8880