"Dead Man's Cell Phone" at SBU

Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone is not my favorite play – I find it unremarkable and overrated. So I went in to Stony Brook University’s production (directed by Deb Mayo) with some trepidation – I wanted to like it, since some of my friends are acting in it, but my experience with this particular script has been less than satisfactory. That said, both of the seemingly mutually exclusive things I looked forward to happened – I sincerely enjoyed this performance of Dead Man’s Cell Phone, and at the same time I was able to put my finger on why exactly the script doesn’t resonate with me.

This play is about, to my current understanding, the alienating effect that constant cell phone use has on our society. By being constantly in touch with those who are not physically present, we disembody ourselves – an effect metaphored by death in this pay – and we yearn for the love of those in our actual proximity. This sustained loneliness results in social awkwardness. The accumulative impact of this morbidity and awkwardness is a sense of dark humor in Sarah Ruhl’s play. This humor comes across beautifully in SBU’s production. Nancee Moes, playing Jean, carries the play by embodying the full spectrum of morbid awkwardness, from falling in love with a dead man (Diogo Martins) and adopting his cell phone to keep him alive, to falling in love with his less charismatic brother Dwight (Eric Michael Klouda) in his dark and lonely stationary store. Klouda brought his character’s awkwardness alive by playing a clear objective in throwing himself at Jean. The situation in which he plays this action makes his character read as pathetically passionate, which works in favor of the play. Victoria DiCarlo was brilliant Mrs. Gottlieb – she plays her character’s need for constant attention to great comic effect, stealing the show in the scenes that feature her.

This cast did a fantastic job of bringing the best out of what I take to be a severely flawed script. This is my second time seeing Dead Man’s Cell Phone, and I wasn’t able to put together an account of what this play’s driving at until about halfway through this production. After the initial laughs at the awkwardness of Moes’ and DiCarlo’s characters, the play becomes a snoozer until the very end of the first act, when Dwight asks Jean if she loved his brother. “Oh!” the realization hits me, “That’s why she took his cell phone! I get it.” Unfortunately, my previous experience seeing the play was so unremarkable that I forgot that Sarah Ruhl makes it very explicit at the very end of the play that that’s what’s going on. Since this is the second time I’ve found a good chunk of the play a snoozer (and, to this cast’s credit, this time it was only a chunk) I have to wonder how many others have the same problem. As if that’s not enough, Ruhl falls into the self-indulgent trap that lies smack in the way of most playwrights, and ended the play a scene after it was finished. Honestly, we don’t need the epilogue telling us how things turned out for Mrs. Gottlieb. She’s fun, but the play’s not about her.

Dead Man’s Cell Phone is taking a break for Thanksgiving, but will return in Staller Center Theatre 1 on December 1^st through December 4^th at 8PM on Thursday through Saturday, and at 2PM on Sunday. It’s worth a look or two (some parts are double cast) for the sake of this brilliant cast. However, it’s a poor choice for the Stony Brook Theatre Department. There are so many plays out there that need to be done in college theatre because they’re still too experimental for the main stream. To do the same play as everybody else and their dog, especially one as flawed as Dead Man’s Cell Phone, is a disservice to the capabilities of the Theatre Department, and to the craft at large.