“Dead Man’s Cell Phone” an existential romp at TheaterWorks
HARTFORD — “Dead Man’s Cell Phone,” produced by TheaterWorks and running through March 15, is a quirky, existential, absurdist romp through a metaphysical park of the mind.
Existentialism deals with the individual’s ultimate isolation, freedom of choice, and responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions — a conceit the play, written by Sarah Ruhl, jumps into with both feet.
Ruhl leaps into the deep end of the dysfunctional family gene pool, sweeping the audience along for the inquisitive ride, where Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens, and John Dunn are quoted with equal felicity, and questions of connection and alienation in an electronically wired world are dissected.
It is rather ironic that the more we are connected via cell phones and the like, the more isolated and emotionally disconnected we feel.
Finnerty Steeves plays a woman, Jean, in a café who discovers a man, Gordon, who has quietly but most assuredly died. Gordon is played with cold charisma by Craig Wroe, while Steeves plays a frumpy gal, who tries to help everyone, including herself, by lying in a good way about a history she invents between Gordon and herself.
The play sometimes feels like a cross between the film “While You Were Sleeping,” and “The Royal Tenenbaums,” where a lonely woman meets a highly dysfunctional family and insinuates herself into their lives.
That family consists of, an anemic, meat-eating, and metaphorically man-eating matriarch played by the fine Anne-Lynn Kettles, Gordon’s stiff-backed, unhappy widow Hermia (Lee Heinz), and the meek brother who loves stationary, Dwight (Mark Shanahan).
The white, austere set, designed by Michael Schweikardt, is a perfect blank slate for the various scenes in the café, the Gottlieb’s dining room, the stationary store, and South America. The set is exquisitely enhanced by the washes of intense colored backdrop lighting, including the deep reds and warm yellows, kudos to lighting designer John Lasiter.
Director Rob Ruggiero is inventive and unobtrusive as always, making choices that feel at once organic and compelling, such as when he has Hermia and the mistress speak from the audience isle, or when Jean is knelling at the church using the stage as the railing.
The fight scene between Jean and the other woman, choreographed by Matthew Scott Campbell, feels self-conscious and inauthentic.
Where have all the phone booths gone? What a different world we live in today, with iPhones and Blackberries and who knows what else next. The answers to questions are at our fingertips, but does that make our need to retain information superfluous? We really don’t need to remember anything, or rely on our own brains for information, because it can always be found in an instant outside ourselves.
TheaterWorks has added a new component to their theater experience — with a terrific art gallery and bistro on the first floor. In conjunction with the New Britain Museum of American Art, the gallery has a stunning collection of original oil paintings from pulp magazines of the 1940’s with gangsters and criminals, along with other fine original works.
TheaterWorks Executive Director Steve Campo has created an artistic marriage between theater and the visual arts that synergistically enhances both — something your cell phone will never do.

DEAD MAN'S CELL PHONE

3 Stars
Theater: TheaterWorks
Location: 233 Pearl St. Hartford.
Production: Written by Sarah Ruhl. Directed by Rob Ruggiero. Set designed by Michael Schweikardt. Costumes designed by Katherine Hampton Noland. Lighting designed by John Lasiter. Sound designed by J. Hagenbuckle. Fight choreography by Matthew Scott Campbell.
Running time: 2 hours, plus a 15-minute intermission
Show Times: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., with matinees on Saturdays and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. The show is scheduled to run through March 15.
Tickets: Unassigned seating is $37; $47 on Friday and Saturday nights. Center reserved seats $11 extra. $10 student rush tickets at showtime with valid ID (subject to availability). For tickets call 860-527-7838 or visit their website at www.theaterworks.org.
ACTOR…CHARACTER
Finnerty Steeves … Jean
Craig Wroe … Gordon
Anne-Lynn Kettles … Mrs. Gottleib
Joey Parsons … The other woman, a stranger
Lee Heinz … Hermia
Mark Shanahan … Dwight