Why ask why? Try some lies

If SOMEONE were to ask me why I wrote this strange play "Dead Man's Cell Phone," I might be silent, I might be evasive, or I might outright lie. But imagine that I said that I was interested in the culture of cellphones, in how they have completely altered our emotional, psychic and body states to the point where culture (and perhaps not even evolution) has caught up.

Imagine that I said I was interested in how there is no longer any privacy, nor is there any reason anymore to talk to strangers on elevators. I might say that I don't feel comfortable with modernity. That the last novel to feel contemporary to me was the modernist novel. That I am trying to make sense of the times we live in, the Digital Age. An age that feels bodiless, as though there is no longer any imprint. That I feel, at times, lost.

And what of the morbid quality of the title, this "Dead Man's Cell Phone"? Why connect cellphones with death? If I took a journalistic approach, I would tell you that my morbid approach to cellphones is based on recent studies in Israel that have linked long-term cellphone use with salivary gland cancer and brain tumors, and that a new study in Denmark has linked talking on the cellphone during pregnancy to a wide array of emotional and behavioral problems in the grown children, and that these two studies have tempted me to chuck my cellphone at last. But I haven't chucked it yet. In any case, the following essay is full of lies and this is based on actual scientific evidence, and so while I do exhort you to chuck your cellphone, especially if your family has a history of salivary gland cancer, as mine does, or if you are pregnant, as I had been, I am not qualified to take a scientific stance on the matter.

And truly, am I the best person to tell you why I wrote this play? In fact, I might be the very last person to have any insight into why I wrote it or what you should think about it. So let me introduce to you an expert on my work, Jacques Joli-Coeur. He is a very eminent theatrical scholar, at this very moment now working on a book about ladders and their usages backstage, historical and modern, and the eventual extinction of the ladder as a means of hanging lights. According to Mr. Joli-Coeur, "Ms. Ruhl began writing 'Dead Man's Cell Phone' when a man's phone kept ringing and ringing at a cafe and she wished that he was dead. Ms. Ruhl was reportedly raised Catholic, so presumably she felt guilty about this death-wish, and wrote a play to expiate her bad thoughts about her fellow man. This was in the year 1998."