Dead Man's Cell Phone
by Sarah Ruhl
(at the Bainbridge Library)
October 16, 17 SATURDAY & SUNDAY 7:30 pm
Dead Man's Cell Phone
A modern Comedy
by Sara Ruhl
Directed by Kate Carruthers
An incessantly ringing cell phone in a quiet café. A stranger at the next table who has had enough. And 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.
“A beguiling comedy…..a hallucinatory fantasy that blends the mundane and the metaphysical, the blunt and the obscure, the patently bizarre and the bizarrely moving.”
CAST FOR Dead Man's Cell Phone:
Jennifer Jett
David Cowan
Ann Wilkinson
Jennifer Corbin
Karla Cole
Sam McJunkin
SARAH RUHL was the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant and Pulitzer Prize finalist for her play The Clean House. Dead Man's Cell Phone, an odyssey of a woman forced to confront her own assumptions about morality, redemption, and the need to connect in a technologically obsessed world.
“A beguiling comedy…..a hallucinatory fantasy that blends the mundane and the metaphysical, the blunt and the obscure, the patently bizarre and the bizarrely moving.”
Ruhl studied under Paula Vogel at Brown University, and gained widespread recognition for her play The Clean House, a romantic comedy about a physician who cannot convince her depressed Brazilian maid to clean her house, which won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2004 and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005.
Her play Dead Man's Cell Phone premiered in New York City at Playwrights Horizons in 2008 in a production starring Mary-Louise Parker. It had its world premiere at Washington D.C.'s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in 2007. It was produced at Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2009.
In September 2006, she received a MacArthur Fellowship. The announcement of that award stated: "Sarah Ruhl, 32, playwright, New York City. Playwright creating vivid and adventurous theatrical works that poignantly juxtapose the mundane aspects of daily life with mythic themes of love and war.
In February 2009, her play In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) premiered at Berkeley Rep. The play opened on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre with previews starting on October 22, 2009 and an official opening in November 2009. This marked Ruhl's Broadway debut. "In the Next Room" was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was nominated for the 2010 Tony Award for Best Play, Best Actress, and Best Costume (the Costume nominee was former Bainbridge Islander, David Zinn, whose father, Bob Zinn, was a familiar actor on Island stages.