It's been too long since I wrote or blogged or posted or whatever the hell this is. The season is winding down, and I think we're going out with a bang rather than a whimper. I know I took a huge chance by taking on a Sarah Ruhl play, for a number of reasons. Most people (i.e., the general public) don't know who the hell she is. People who work in the theatre know her work . . . and some are enchanted by it and others are turned off (or frightened?) by it. For the actor, her work is particularly challenging because she gives you very little to work with. She demands that an actor bring lots and lots to the table / rehearsal space. For the public, her work is challenging because she really stretches or completely ignores most dramatic conventions. If one demands verifiable reality from start to finish, she will certainly challenge one's perceptions. She's intimidating for a director because there are so many demands and so many wonderful opportunities for provoking news ways for the audience to watch. I really like what she calls her "Hopper moments," where a character is alone and still, seen almost as a piece of sculpture in a specific environment. As a director, I not only have to honor those moments, I have to find a way to celebrate them. I think the pedestal that Sarah places Aristotle on is a bit shorter than the one I use, but it's great fun to look at the world from her perspective.
Bringing Jenny Strassburg and Alex Dittmer up from New York to do this play was not only the right thing to do, it was a real gift. Wonderfully talented people, a joy to be around, people who bring fresh ideas and focused commitment to the work. When I'm creating the painting that is a play, it's great to have a deep and vibrant palette to work with.
One of the nicest surprises was the review that we got. (The review for the last production -
Boston Marriage - was . . . ummm . . . stupid.) This one was not only very positive (that sure helps the phone activity) but intelligent and perceptive. Thanks to Nicola Smith for really getting it, and for writing about it so clearly. Here's the review:
Shaker Bridge’s Exhilarating ‘Cell Phone’
by Nicola Smith
Valley News Staff Writer
Saturday, May 14, 2011
The playwright Sarah Ruhl, who has been awarded a MacArthur fellowship and twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in drama, is one of the most highly touted writers to come up in American theater in the last decade, and after seeing her comedy Dead Man’s Cell Phone in an exhilarating production at Shaker Bridge Theatre in Enfield, it’s not hard to see why.
Her writing is daring and inventive, and pushes at the boundaries of conventional dramaturgy. Sometimes she slips, but she slips in a way that commands your attention, because she’s tried to reshape your notion of what’s possible in a play. She’s not throwing out the dramatic arc entirely, the kind that says you go from Act I to Act III with certain obligations to be met at points A, B and C, but she’s certainly experimenting with it in a way that shifts your perceptions.
Samuel Beckett did this decades ago, as have other playwrights, so while Ruhl is not yet a game changer the way Beckett was - at least not with this play - she is clearly interested in the big questions of life and has the talent to grapple with them in ways that make you think. Even a few days after having seen the production, I’m still going over it in my mind, which isn’t always the case with plays.
Early on in the show, I confess to having felt fidgety. Where was Ruhl going with the play, and why did it seem so disjointed? Was she laying on the quirkiness too thick? Were the characters endearing in their eccentricity or merely annoying? Some of her observations about how technology seems to devour our lives and alter our behaviors are true, but aren’t particularly original at this point. But near the end of Act I and in Act II, Ruhl quickens the pace, the loose threads begin to draw together and she resolves doubts with a gratifying catharsis both comical and poignant.
The premise is this: A young woman sitting in a care is annoyed by the incessant ringing of the cell phone of the man sitting at the table next to her, and asks him politely to answer it. He doesn’t respond and the phone keeps ringing. As you can surmise from the title, the man is dead and can’t answer the phone. But it’s what the young woman, Jean, does next that rockets the audience into a weirder, pixillated sphere. She answers the phone.
That in itself isn’t so extraordinary. Who hasn’t walked by a public telephone booth (back in the days when there were telephone booths that people stepped into to make a call), heard the phone ringing for no apparent reason and answered it - or been tempted to - just to see who was on the other end, and what the caller wanted? It’s one thing, as a stranger, to briefly interject yourself into somebody else’s drama. But it’s quite another to then take messages for the dead man, named Gordon, meet his family and pretend that you worked for him, which is what Jean does.
She’s a compulsive fabulist, unable or unwilling to stop telling tales about a man she never knew, partly, we sense, because she is lonely and also because she, in a way, has taken on the dead man’s identity, inherited his life - and so, she thinks, his obligations. But there’s the pickle, or the horns of the dilemma. What if the man Jean has invented for herself, and, it turns out, for his family, bears no resemblance to the real Gordon? Jean’s Gordon is sentimental, dedicated and thoughtful. But in reality, Gordon was amoral, crass and opportunistic. Unwittingly, Jean has set into motion a chain of events that do not, safe to say, go as anticipated. But whose fault is that? Gordon, because he lived a life less than pure? Or Jean, who couldn’t resist playing the chivalrous knight? Or is this just the way life goes?
Bill Coons, the director of the play and of Shaker Bridge Theatre, has done a terrific job of confidently juggling all the comedic balls in the air. He keeps the audience just enough off balance to unsettle them, which is what theater ought to do. Coons always picks interesting material, and he’s to be commended for bringing new works and newer playwrights to the attention of Upper Valley audiences.
He has assembled a strong cast here. First and foremost is Jenny Strassburg, who plays Jean as a sweet, addled, slightly crazy do-gooder. She’s always a second away from being exposed as a fraud, but has enough wits about her to recover her footing in time. Because Strassburg is able to convey the utmost sincerity, even when bringing out statements that strain credulity, she’s able to make the unbelievable believable and funny at the same time.
Jeannie Hines, playing Gordon’s widow, Hermia, is neurotic and controlled, until she lets loose in a glorious drunk scene in Act II. Robin Ng, playing Gordon’s mother, with a wig that makes her look a little like John Adams in one of his presidential portraits, is imperious, demanding and as nutty as the rest of them. Caitlin Glasgo, who plays a woman once involved with Gordon, and another woman who expects to profit from his business, holds her own against Strassburg’s Jean.
Alex Dittmer, in the dual role of Gordon and Gordon’s brother Dwight, who falls for Jean, is deft at playing the two sides of the fraternal coin, and is particularly fine in the monologue that opens the second act, when Gordon tells the audience who he really is. This is Gordon’s moment, and I think it’s also when Ruhl puts the audience on notice that here’s a theatrical voice to be reckoned with.
The uncertainties of Act I, the halting communications and miscommunications and the pointedly surreal characters now begin to make dramatic sense. Dittmer has the mannerisms and speech of a self-obsessed, self-important thug down pat: Is it a coincidence that he reminded me of the long, unsavory parade of self-justifying Wall Street bankers who appeared on TV during and after the economic collapse of the fall of 2008?
Ruhl wrote the play well before the events of that fall - and it’s possible she was thinking more of American wars than American avarice - but she seems to have uncannily anticipated the atmosphere of corruption, the frenzied, unbridled consumption and the self-delusional thinking that made the last decade a virtual replay of the Gilded Age, only with Blackberries.
Dead Man’s Cell Phone continues at Shaker Bridge Theatre in Enfield through May 22.
I'll be taking some production shots during this last weekend of the show, and I'll post them soon. If you haven't seen this one yet, take a chance.
- Bill
