Sarah Ruhl is a playwright whose whimsy divides audiences. If you resist her capricious gambits, you wind up an unhappy -- possibly angry -- theatrical camper. "Dead Man's Cell Phone," her latest play, which opened Friday at South Coast Repertory, will test even her most faithful followers. But there's just enough tantalizing substance to rescue its quirkiness from all-out preciousness.
The daffy magical realism of "The Clean House," an earlier Ruhl offering (produced by SCR in 2005), made me want to throw in the towel during the first act. But the work accrued an emotional heft that became profoundly moving by the lyrical end. "Eurydice," her retelling of the Orpheus myth, which was given a sparely wondrous production by Circle X Theatre Co. in 2006, delicately ventured into the fraught subject of father-daughter eroticism. A few dismissed it as quasi-feminist fluff, but the vehemence of the reaction (mostly male) was telling. Charmingly sprightly as Ruhl can be, she hits nerves.
I once felt compelled to defend Ruhl against a visiting New York theater critic who was trashing her meteoric rise over an otherwise civilized lunch. "Dead Man's Cell Phone," however, fills me with a few second thoughts. When I first saw the play off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizon, in a production featuring Mary-Louise Parker and Kathleen Chalfant, I was surprisingly impatient despite my admiration for the actresses and the author. The experience, so unrelentingly loopy, was a bit like bingeing on the bags of Halloween candy you bought for all those no-show kids.
Yet I found myself more willing to go along with Ruhl's glucose rush this time around. True, any play that deploys a hiccup fit to get two characters romantically hitched is working the adorable angle a bit shamelessly. But credit director Bart DeLorenzo for arriving at a farcical style that doesn't try to be too funny or cute. This death-haunted play is both amusing and not amusing on its own idiosyncratic terms, and the production respects its jaunty distance from everyday realism while recognizing its abiding concerns with the conundrums of human nature.
As the story begins, Jean (Margaret Welsh) is communing with her private muse at a cafe whose only other occupant is a well-dressed gentleman, sitting as silent as the grave. His phone keeps going off, which prompts Jean after several polite overtures to answer it. In the process, she discovers the man has stopped breathing. Not wanting to abandon him to a cold and lonely afterworld, she pockets the phone and decides to take messages like a secretary who has futilely fallen in love with her deceased boss.
