There's this guy in a café, you see, who quietly dies in his chair, and then his cell phone rings. A stranger at the next table answers the noisy device and discovers that it has been rendered ownerless—forever. At first, Jean is reluctant to alarm the callers and takes messages that she knows the man they identify as Gordon Gottlieb will never answer. Later, her self-imposed duty to the dead grows to include consolation—most of it improvised as needed—for his family members. Soon she finds herself embraced by the bereaved clan and, more ominously, by his former business associates.
The 2007 premiere version of Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone suffered from a heightened mysticism engendered by big-budget pageantry and the role of Jean misconceived as a tabula rasa. The Enthusiasts being a small start-up company, its funds are as limited as the dimensions of their Athenaeum studio quarters. Ironically, these very restrictions make for a far superior production, reducing the conceptual clutter, along with the no-longer-alarming diatribes on portable-phone culture, to bring the story's interpersonal dynamics to the foreground.
Director Toma Tavares Langston's efforts to impose a linear narrative on Ruhl's often meandering script (think dialogues with the departed in a corporate-bland afterlife, or dirty deals involving sinister foreign agents) are accomplished through lively pacing and the focus on psychological detail exhibited by his cast of mostly young non-Equity actors. For example, the Gottliebs' reactions when Jean claims to be a co-worker of the late Gordon alerts us immediately to the shady nature of his employment. This, in turn, generates suspense regarding the legacy that Jean strives so valiantly to whitewash, so that when the truth emerges, we share the posthumous advocate's shock and revulsion.
Erin Kelly Outson's refusal to play the socially unmoored Jean as a caricature of mousy spinsterhood allows her to participate actively in forging her unexpected destiny—visibly tailoring her fabrications to what each survivor would want to hear, say, or vehemently defending her possession of the electronic key to a new future replete with adventure, companionship and even romance. (How fitting that the shy brother engaging Jean's affections should be a seller of stationery—paper's permanence representing the antithesis of words immediately consigned to the limbo of cyberspace.)
Her fellow pilgrims in this fragile universe also get their say, addressing us directly, even sometimes breaking through the fourth wall, in their anger and frustration at the ephemeral nature of communication in an increasingly isolated world. Now will you remember to shut off your you-know-what before the show?
