Prospect Theater Project

Dead Man’s Cell Phone

Monday, June 7th, 2010 | Announcements, Coming Soon, Current Season, Home, News, Season 09-10 | No Comments

Dead Man’s Cell Phone, by Sarah Ruhl
Prospect Theater Project
520 Scenic Avenue, Modesto CA
(209) 549-9341 or
house@prospecttheaterproject.org
Friday-Sunday, July 9-August 1
Thursday (July 29), 8 pm
Fridays and Saturdays, 8 pm/ Sundays, 2 pm
$15

In one of Edward Hopper’s most famous paintings (Automat, 1927), a woman sits at a table, a cup of coffee in front of her. She is alone, as are most of the people in Hopper paintings, even when others are there to share the landscape. (See Nighthawks [1942] and Office at Night [1940].) Dead Man’s Cell Phone, by the young playwright (born in 1974) Sarah Ruhl, conveys much the same mood as Hopper’s paintings, though presented in a very different medium and a radically different style. It’s a play about disconnectedness –a comedy really, because, for all the seriousness of its theme, the play is really funny. (In some ways, Ruhl resembles Arthur Adamov, the now-forgotten offspring of the absurdist era in playwriting.)

The play’s protagonist, meek, mousy Jean (described by another character as “a paleish woman, sort of nondescript”) comes alive only when handing on to people she doesn’t know imaginary messages from a dead man she’s never met (while he was alive, that is). But she’s not much different from the other characters in Cell Phone. They all talk past each other, driven by their own self-fantasies or from a need to connect. Each of them presents a different picture of Gordon, the dead man, who, it transpires, was truly and utterly awful. The effect is pointillistic. Visual images come and go behind the actors, people swirl around them, their umbrellas on high and their cell phones at their ears. Disparate meetings and soliloquies coalesce to build a mood of separateness and misunderstanding, which is played out through each character’s incomprehension of the other characters’ motivations and inner fiber. What is surprising, though, is the humor in this play. In even the most savage passages (the “dead man’s” monologue in Act II, for instance), how funny the lines are! A love scene in the making is disrupted by a cell phone ringing and Jean’s inability not to answer it. Her wooer Dwight admonishes her. “Life is for the living,” he says. But the phone rings again and Jean, of course, answers it again. “When something rings, you have to answer it, don’t you?” she queries in another scene. My favorite line? The dead man Gordon delivers it: “Life is essentially a giant Brillo pad.” Our goodness is scrubbed off even as we leave the house in the morning to start the day.

“I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life,” Ruhl has said. “Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him.” It’s also a terribly funny one.

– David Keymer, for the Prospect Theater Project

The Life of Galileo Galilei

Monday, April 12th, 2010 | Current Season, Season 09-10 | No Comments

The Life of Galileo Galilei
by Bertolt Brecht
Directed by Founding Artistic Director Jack Souza
April 23 – May 16, 2010
Brecht’s masterpiece about the scientist and the dilemma between ethics and authority Prospect is excited to be tackling such a seminal piece of 20th Century theater. Considered by many to be Brecht’s finest work, it is a play that explores huge, world transforming events in their most human and intimate form.

Beyond Therapy

Saturday, January 9th, 2010 | Current Season, Season 09-10 | No Comments

Christopher Durang, Beyond Therapy (1981)
Directed by Ron Lane
February 5-28, 2010
Fri, Sat, 8 pm, Sun 2 pm

Bruce wants to meet someone and so does Prudence. But their Mate Wanted ads haven’t prepared them for what they find when they meet. Bruce has a male lover, Bob, but thinks he’d like to try a woman again. Besides, he wants a child and that’s one thing Bob can’t give him. Prudence doesn‘t know what she wants but it certainly isn’t a bi-sexual whose first comment to her is that she has lovely breasts and five minutes later he’s sobbing into his handkerchief –in a restaurant, no less. They’re not a match made in heaven. Their therapists don’t help at all: Stuart seduces all his women clients and Charlotte talks to a Snoopy doll during sessions. And let’s not forget Bob. From this complicated mess, Obie-Award-winning Christopher Durang (The Marriage of Betty and Boo) has concocted a wild and wooly farce filled to overflowing with laughter.

Arms and the Man

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 | Current Season, Season 09-10 | No Comments

George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man

Directed by Heike Hambley (Bach at Leipzig, Copenhagen)
November 20 — December 13, 2009
(Thur-Sat 8 pm; Sun 2 pm)
Tickets $15

A young woman sits in her window, dreaming of her fiancée, a Bulgarian noble who is off to war. A middle-aged man, Captain Bluntschli, who is a soldier in the opposing Serbian army, climbs in her window. He seeks shelter after a devastating Serbian defeat. As they talk, his lack of idealism affronts her. Her fiancée, Sergius, led the cavalry charge against the Serbian machine guns and won. Sergius’s behavior confirms her picture of the true hero, and Bluntschli definitely doesn’t match up to it. › Continue reading

A Moon for the Misbegotten

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 | Current Season, Season 09-10 | No Comments

Eugene O’Neill’s

A Moon for the Misbegotten

Directed by David Barbaree
(The Constant Wife, Road to Mecca, The Beauty Queen of Leenane)

It’s 1923, rural Connecticut, the Hogan farm. Phil Hogan is as Irish as they come in all respects, including his disregard for the strict truth and his monumental drinking. His daughter Josie lives with him. Outsized in body, she’s reputed to be equally outsized in her taste for men. Rumor has it she’s had it on with most of the men in her neighborhood. But her one real love is the landlord, James Tyrone, who is the only man around who regularly drinks Phil into the ground. › Continue reading

Three Tall Women

Thursday, September 4th, 2008 | Current Season, Prospect Shows, Season 08-09 | No Comments

Three Tall Women, by Edward Albee
Directed by Colton Dennis and featuring Grace Lieberman.
Albee’s Pulitzer Prize winning play is witty, hilarious, haunting, and swims in the dark pools of the human heart’s most inner secrets. The first act presents a lawyer, a caregiver and a rich, bitter and angry elderly matron. In the second act their true identities are revealed, and it is breathtaking to witness, to say the least.
September 26 – October 19, 2008