Dead Man’s Cell Phone

While at a café, a man dies. But his cell phone will not stop ringing. The woman at the next table, Jean, picks up the cell phone and ends up stuck in the middle of all his troubles, meeting his widow Hermia, his mother Mrs. Gottlieb, and his mistress. In the course of meeting all these people, she ends up falling in love with the dead man’s brother, Dwight. The dead man himself, Gordon Gottlieb, eventually tells his last moments himself. So begins Dead Man’s Cell Phone, a wildly imaginative new comedy by MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sarah Ruhl. 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.