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

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.

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. He’s a mercenary. He joined the Serbian army pure and simple because the Serbians got to his village before the Bulgarians, and he sees Sergius’s actions, however successful they were, as nothing but folly. Sergius survived solely because of a mistake on the part of his army’s quartermaster. Bluntschli’s gunners were sent the wrong caliber of ammunition and so they couldn’t decimate the Bulgarian cavalry when they attacked against all the perceived wisdom of military engagement. His prosaic view of war, of everything! -he carries bon bons in his cartridge belt because chocolates are more soothing than bullets in the heat of battle—irritates her but she hides him anyway. The next day he leaves but she finds she can’t forget him. Then Sergius returns. His demonstrative heroism is wearing, and is he really all that he pretends to be?

George Bernard Shaw was one of the greatest and most influential playwrights of the twentieth century, a master at combining social commentary and biting wit. Arms and the Man had been one of his most beloved plays since it opened in London in 1894. It has been a favorite of theatergoers ever since with actors from Ralph Richardson to Kevin Kline and John Malkovich playing the “chocolate soldier” Bluntschli, Olivier, Brando (in his final stage appearance, in 1953) and Raul Julia playing Sergius and Glenne Headly and Helena Bonham Carter the tempestuous and overly romantic young Bulgarian, Raina. Arms is one of two plays by Shaw to be made into a musical –a Viennese operetta, The Chocolate Soldier in 1908. (The other was Pygmalion (1913), the basis for My Fair Lady (1953). Shaw subtitled Arms and the Man “A Pleasant Play,” and a pleasant play it is. The dialogue is light but Shaw lards it with witty observations on a variety of topics: class relations, social pretension, the folly of romanticism, the brutal reality of war. Veteran director Heike Hambley (Copenhagen, The Physicists, Bach at Leipzig) has assembled a first-rate cast to bring this theater classic to life once more. If you don’t laugh at Arms and the Man, ask your doctor to check your pulse: you may already be dead.

Prospect Theater Project
520 Scenic Drive, Modesto
For tickets, call 549-9341

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.  Tyrone is just waiting around on his inheritance: when it comes through, he’ll leave town but only after selling the farm to Phil at a good price. But Tyrone’s a drunk: he doesn’t always remember what he’s said and he’s just been offered five times as much for the farm as the Hogans can pay. Phil tells Josie that Tyrone has agreed to sell the farm away from them. Angry and hurt, she sets out to entice Tyrone into her bed: once he’s bedded her, she knows he’ll feel obliged to marry her. Out of this sordid scheming, O’Neill fashions a tale of romance that breathes poetry from its very pores –it’s funny too! Josie and Tyrone both have something to lose. Josie may be tough as nails outside but she’s vulnerable and hurt inside. Tyrone numbs himself with alcohol to hide a terrible self-loathing. At last, their love is too fragile: their vulnerabilities doom their one last chance for redemption. Moon has been a magnet for actors since its opening on Broadway more than fifty years ago. To name a few, Colleen Dewhurst, Jason Robards, Jr., Kevin Spacey, have all tried their hands at the roles of the doomed lovers. Now it’s the turn of the talented cast at the Prospect.

Fridays-Sundays, September 18-October 11, and Thursday, October 8
Thursday, Fridays, and Saturdays @ 8 pm; Sundays @ 2 pm
Tickets $15
Reserve tickets by calling 549-9341 or emailing house@prospecttheaterproject.org