Dead man’s cell phone
“Dead Man’s Cellphone,” the first play of the VCU Department of Theatre’s 2010-2011 Mainstage season, opened this weekend at the Singleton Center.
Nick Bonadies
Spectrum Editor
“Dead Man’s Cellphone,” the first play of the VCU Department of Theatre’s 2010-2011 Mainstage season, opened this weekend at the Singleton Center.
The play, an imaginative conception from renowned playwright Sarah Ruhl, follows Jean (Rachel McManus), a something something something, as she strives to tie up the loose ends of Gordon (Nate Betancourt), whom she meets for the first time dead in a conspicuously empty café when his cell phone won’t stop ringing.
She answers the phone and takes a message – yes, for a dead man – and from there, we gradually uncover Gordon’s story, through the people Jean meets and whom Gordon left behind. Dialogue frequently addresses questions concerning the meaning of isolation in a society where people are never truly disconnected – as well as the more personal idea of what any given stranger could know about you, equipped only with your cell phone.
The play, staged on an attractive set floating in cold LED-screen blue, featured a number of key moments – like Jean (charmingly portrayed by McManus as an awkward but big-heartedness doer-of-good-deeds) calling for help in the unexplained empty café, “Doesn’t anyone work here?” – that played with a sort of highlighted, self-conscious theatricality.
Nate Betancourt as Gordon, whom we meet initially with his back turned to the audience and, of course, being very still, appears later in a number of full segments in the afterlife. Betancourt shines as the titular dead man – whose frequent business calls, we later discover, are for both “incoming” and “outgoing” human organ trafficking deals – expertly articulating an inner vulnerability in a character that could have easily slipped into a two-dimensional portrayal.
The VCU Theatre Mainstage’s next production, “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” will run from November 11th to the 21st, and is directed by Tawnya Pettiford-Wates. Adapted from the 1782 novel of the same title by Choderlos de Laclos, the play follows two 18th century French aristocrats whose nefarious games target two young women as their pawns.
