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