Dead Man’s Cell Phone

Dramatic Comedy / 2m, 4f / Unit Set An incessantly ringing cell phone in a quiet cafe. 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 MacArthur Genius Grant recipient and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Sarah Ruhl, author of The Clean House and Eurydice. A work about how we memorialize the dead-and how that remembering changes us-it is the odyssey of a woman forced to confront her own assumptions about morality, redemption, and the need to connect in a technologically obsessed world.
Satire is her oxygen…In her new oddball comedy, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Sarah Ruhl is forever vital in her lyrical and biting takes on how we behave. - The Washington Post Ruhl’s zany probe of the razor-thin line between life and death delivers a fresh and humorous look at the times we live in. - Variety [Ruhl] tackles big ideas with a voice that entertains - NPR …beguiling new comedy…Ms. Ruhl’s work blends the mundane and the metaphysical, the blunt and the obscure, the patently bizarre and the bizarrely moving. - New York Times