Playing the digital age for laughs
Acell phone rings incessantly in a quiet café. A stranger at the next table has had enough. And a dead manwith a lot of loose ends. Sarah Ruhl plays the digital age for laughs in ‘Dead Man’s Cell Phone’, to be staged next weekend by the Theatre Junction group.
Despite its rather morbid name Director Anushka Senanayake says this is definitely more of a comedy than anything else. “It’s not the slapstick kind that does so well here, but it’s funny in a very witty way.”
Anushka formed Theatre Junction last year on her return from the States (where she studies an intriguing combination of Drama and Economics at Converse College) on holiday. The company’s first ever production ‘Time and Motion’, a collection of short plays, was staged to a very receptive audience. With that encouragement they decided to take on a full-length play and Ruhl’s script seemed an appropriate expression of what they wanted to convey. “It’s got just the right pace we want in a play,” says Anushka. “There are all these bizarre little twists and turns which make it pretty abstract.”
The playwright, who memorably penned ‘Clean House’ and ‘Eurydice’, is bitingly satirical in this oddball of a comedy following a sequence of events. Jean (unmarried, no children, approaching 40 and one of those people content to let life pass them by) is sitting at a cafe when a man’s cell phone rings. And rings. And keeps on ringing. As the title suggests, the owner of the phone is dead. Jean picks up, and when she discovers that the cell phone’s owner has quietly died in the cafe she not only dials 911 but keeps his phone in order to keep him alive in a strange way.
She takes messages from the dead man’s business associates, friends, family members…even his mistress. Wanting to bring closure and a sense of fulfilment to these people Jean euphemises Gordon’s last moments and in the process does her own detective work. Slowly, she begins to connect the many hazy dots of the dead man’s life and that’s when she begins to discover that Gordon Gottlied was not all he seemed to be. His past is one of deception and exploitation, and while Jean’s imaginative reinvention of his character brings peace to Gordon’s family it begins to mess with her own.
“The challenge is in maintaining the fluidity of the play,” says Anushka. “And with a longer play you need to focus on keeping it within the frame.” The surrealism of the play needs a special set of people to bring it out and this is why her dynamic young cast ups the ante, she smiles. Dinoo Wickramage, Sulochana Perera, Chalana Wijesuriya, Shazad Synon and Tasmin Anthonisz return to the stage under Anushka’s guidance once more, and the director says she couldn’t have asked for a better group of people to work with.
Come this Friday, it’ll all begin when a dead man’s cell phone goes off at the British School Auditorium. Tickets for the shows on July 26 and 27 priced at Rs. 500, 750 and 1000 are available at the British School Colombo.
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