Dead Man’s Cell Phone
- Written by Sarah Ruhl
- Directed by Anne Bogart
Playwrights Horizons: Stage Kiss, Dead Man’s Cell Phone. Other plays: How to Transcend a Happy Marriage; The Oldest Boy; In the Next Room, or the vibrator play; The Clean House; Orlando; Late: a cowboy song; Dear Elizabeth. She is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and a Tony Award nominee. Her plays have been produced on and Off- Broadway, regionally and internationally, translated into over 12 languages. MFA: Brown University, where she studied with Paula Vogel. Awards: Steinberg Distinguished Playwright, Susan Smith Blackburn, Whiting, Lilly, PEN, MacArthur “genius” Award. In print: 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write (Faber and Faber). She teaches at the Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
(as of 8/09/17)
ANNE BOGART is the Artistic Director of SITI Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. She is a Professor at Columbia University where she runs the Graduate Directing Program. Recent works with SITI include Who Do You Think You Are; Radio Macbeth; Hotel Cassiopeia; Death and the Ploughman; La Dispute; Score; bobrauschenbergamerica; Room; War of the Worlds; Cabin Pressure; The Radio Play; Alice’s Adventures; Culture of Desire; Bob; Going, Going, Gone; Small Lives/Big Dreams; The Medium; Noel Coward’s Hay Fever and Private Lives; August Strindberg’s Miss Julie; and Charles Mee’s Orestes. Other recent productions: Nicholas and Alexandra (Los Angeles Opera), Marina: A Captive. (As of February 2008)
Gordon is dead, but his cell phone lives on. When Jean, an empathetic museum worker, answers his ringing phone beside her in a café, she is soon playing unwitting comforter and confessor to the man’s grieving friends and family. Before she knows it, Jean’s ensnarled in the underbelly of the dead man’s bizarre life. A wildly imaginative new comedy, Dead Man’s Cell Phone is the odyssey of a woman forced to confront her assumptions about morality, redemption, and the need to connect in a technologically-obsessed world.
Featuring
David Aaron Baker
Kathleen Chalfant
Carla Harting
Kelly Maurer
Mary-Louise Parker
T. Ryder Smith
Playwrights Horizons: Cowboy Pictures, Jealousy, Mississippi Moonshine, Born Yesterday, Dead Man’s Cell Phone. Broadway: Angels in America (Tony nom.), Racing Demon. Other Off-Broadway: Wit (Drama Desk, Obie, Outer Critics, Lucille Lortel Awards, MCC); Henry V (Callaway Award, The Public); Red Dog Howls, Far Away (NYTW); Talking Heads, Stories Left to Tell (Minetta Lane); Savannah Bay (CSC). Film: Isn’t it Delicious, Five Corners, Duplicity. TV: “The Affair,” “House of Cards,” “The Guardian.”
Creative Team
G. W. Mercier
Scenic Designer & Costume DesignerBrian H Scott
Lighting DesignerDarron L West
Sound DesignerElizabeth Moreau
Production Stage ManagerPreviously at the Friedman: The American Plan,To Be or Not To Be, The Royal Family, Top Girls, and Time Stands Still. He is a Tony and Obie Award-winning sound designer whose work for theater and dance has been heard in over 500 Productions nationally and internationally, on Broadway and off. His accolades for Sound Design include the Bay Area Theater Critics Circle, Lucille Lortel and AUDELCO Awards. He a two-time Henry Hewes Design Award winner, and a proud recipient of the Princess Grace Award statue.
Photo of Kathleen Chalfant by Joan Marcus.
A beguiling new comedy. Sarah Ruhl blends the mundane and the metaphysical, the blunt and the obscure, the patently bizarre and the bizarrely moving. Her surrealist fantasies are made meaningful – made truthful – by the deeper logic of human feeling.
What a pleasure to have Mary-Louise Parker, one of our most extraordinary actresses, back on the New York stage after a too-long absence.
A rockstar ensemble in Anne Bogart’s visually impressive production.
