Dead Man’s Cell Phone

Sarah Ruhl gets off on quirk. The acclaimed Amer­i­can play­wright behind “The Clean House” and “Melan­choly Play” offers a bizarre and play­ful look at death and our depen­dency on cell phones with “Dead Man’s Cell Phone.”

This Equity Coop pro­duc­tion is a rare treat at the Fringe –an expert group of pro­fes­sion­als hav­ing some fun together. Sit­ting in a charm­ing café, Jean (a note-perfect Eileen Bar­rett) dis­cov­ers the man across from her (Stephen Aberle) has died. Fur­ther­more, his cell phone will not stop ringing.

So what does she do? She answers it, thereby cement­ing a rela­tion­ship between them. Jean then spends her time vis­it­ing var­i­ous fam­ily mem­bers and acquain­tances of the dead Gor­don, cre­at­ing alter­nate real­i­ties and happy end­ings for them, and going to tremen­dous lengths to do so.

The play goes from quirky, to silly, to down­right ludi­crous and back again, but through it all the pro­duc­tion remains level – level and won­der­ful. The per­for­mances are exquis­ite: Suzanne Ris­tic soars as the scorned widow with a pen­chant for divulging sex­ual secrets, whereas Zena Daruwalla com­mands the stage with lip­stick. Mar­ion Eis­man chan­nels Chris­tine Baran­ski as Gordon’s mother who invites Jean into their lives, for bet­ter or for worse. Aberle offers expert deliv­ery of an excep­tional mono­logue about the mun­dane nature of life. It’s so deli­cious, that its abrupt end is heart­break­ing. If I could, I’d hand him a Jessie dur­ing cur­tain call.

In all its cut­ting and manic hilar­ity, the play explores the per­cep­tions and assump­tions peo­ple make of each other, and how tech­nol­ogy can destroy and con­fuse those things. As the play­ful under­dog Dwight, Ari Solomon asks “Peo­ple say I love you on cell phones and where does it go?”

Direc­tor Kevin McNulty makes great use of what could be a cav­ernous space at Fire­hall, and together with set designer Pam John­son, they’ve made the exces­sive scene changes and mul­ti­tude of loca­tions a real treat to watch unfold. In see­ing so many pro­fes­sion­als in a Fringe pro­duc­tion, one can’t help but think of the dev­as­tat­ing cuts our arts com­mu­ni­ties are cop­ing with.

But that’s not to say that there’s any­thing wrong with pro­duc­ing in the Fringe. More than any­thing “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” feels like a love let­ter: to Van­cou­ver the­atre, to what the Fringe can be, and to a down­right won­der­ful production.

Dead Man’s Cell Phone
Part of the Van­cou­ver Inter­na­tional Fringe Fes­ti­val
Fire­hall Arts Cen­tre
Remain­ing Per­for­mances:
Thurs­day Sep 16, 6:00 pm
Sun­day Sep 19, 7:00 pm