Dead Man's Cel PhoneWritten By Sarah Ruhl
Clayes Performing Art Center
Cal State Fullerton Campus
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When the playwright Sarah Ruhl works at home, she sits at a desk in her young daughter Anna’s bedroom, beside a window overlooking a paddletennis court amid a red brick apartment maze on the East Side of Manhattan. A white gate, like a picket fence, stretches across the width of the small room, dividing the toddler’s play area from her mother’s. Ruhl, who is thirty-seven and has already won a half-million-dollar MacArthur Fellowship for her plays (which include “The Clean House,” a comedy that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005), writes in a poised, crystalline style about things that are irrational and invisible. Ruhl is a fabulist. Her plays celebrate what she calls “the pleasure of heightened things.” In them, fish walk and caper (“Passion Play”), stones talk and weep (“Eurydice”), a dog is a witness to and the narrator of a family tragedy (“Dog Play”), a woman turns into an almond (“Melancholy Play”). Ruhl’s characters occupy, she has said, “the real world and also a suspended state.” Her new play, “Dead Man’s Cell Phone,” now at the Clayes Performing Arts Center on the Campus of Cal State Fullerton in Fullerton, CA, is a meditation on death, love, and disconnection in the digital age; like her other works, it inhabits a dramatic netherworld between personal suspense and suspended time. “Cell phones, iPods, wireless computers will change people in ways we don’t even understand,” Ruhl told me. “We’re less connected to the present. No one is where they are. There’s absolutely no reason to talk to a stranger anymore—you connect to people you already know. But how well do you know them? Because you never see them—you just talk to them. I find that terrifying.”
Looming over Ruhl’s writing table is a poster of a photograph from Walker Evans’s late-nineteen-thirties series of New York City subway riders, a gift from her husband, Tony Charuvastra, a child psychiatrist. (They married in 2005, after a seven-year courtship.) The juxtaposition of photographer and playwright—both entrepreneurs of tone and atmosphere—is one of those unconscious visual provocations that Ruhl’s plays relish. “I like to see people speaking ordinary words in strange places, or people speaking extraordinary words in ordinary places,” Ruhl has said. Evans wanted to project, he wrote, the “delights of seeing”; Ruhl wants to project the delights of pretense, “the interplay between the actual and the magical.” Evans once wrote about the “dream of making photographs like poems.” Ruhl began her career as a poet—her first book, “Death in Another Country,” a collection of verse, was published when she was twenty—and she sees her plays as “three-dimensional poems.” Evans’s subway photos were taken at furtive angles, with his lens hidden in the buttonhole of his coat and an operating cable up his sleeve; Ruhl’s narrative strategy is similarly oblique and cunning, and she aspires to a kind of reportorial anonymity. “If one is unseen, one has the liberty to observe and make things up,” she told me. “It’s very difficult to overhear a conversation if one is speaking loudly.”
One night, at the Lincoln Center production of “The Clean House”—a tale about an unhappy Brazilian maid looking for the perfect joke in the midst of her employer’s family ructions—Ruhl sat unrecognized behind an elderly couple. “I didn’t not like it,” the woman said after the houselights came up. “I didn’t not like it,” her gentleman friend chimed in. “They turned to me,” Ruhl recalled, and asked, “ ‘What did you think?’ I said, ‘I didn’t not like it, either.’ ”
Ruhl, like her plays, is deceptively placid. She is petite and polite. Her voice is high-pitched, as if she had been hitting the helium bottle. She wears her auburn hair pinned back by a barrette, in demure schoolmarm fashion; in her choice of clothes, too, she favors an unprepossessing look—a carapace of ordinariness, forged out of her Illinois childhood and “the ability of Midwesterners to pulverize people who seem slightly precocious,” she explained. (“In third grade, somebody sent me a poison-pen letter,” Ruhl, who was bullied for being intelligent, said. “I corrected the punctuation and sent it back.”) Nothing in her modest mien indicates her steeliness, her depth, or her piquant wit. Ruhl is reserved but not shy, alert but not aggressive. She feels big emotions; she just doesn’t express them in a big way. “I had one boyfriend who really wished I would yell and scream at him,” she said. Even her laugh is just three short, unobtrusive intakes of breath.
But if Ruhl’s demeanor is unassuming, her plays are bold. Her nonlinear form of realism—full of astonishments, surprises, and mysteries—is low on exposition and psychology. “I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life,” she has said. “Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him. I feel that my plays, in a way, are very old-fashioned. They’re pre-Freudian in the sense that the Greeks and Shakespeare worked with similar assumptions. Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.”
Lightness—the distillation of things into a quick, terse, almost innocent directness—is a value on which Ruhl puts much weight. “Italo Calvino has an essay that I think is profound,” she told me, scouting a floor-length living-room bookshelf until she found Calvino’s “Six Memos for the Next Millennium,” a series of posthumously published lectures on the imaginative qualities that the new millennium should call into play. Of his defining categories—among them quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity—lightness is foremost. “In the even more congested times that await us, literature must aim at the maximum concentration of poetry and of thought,” he writes.
Ruhl, in her plays, contends with the pressing existential issues; her stoical comic posture is a means of killing gravity, of taking the heaviness out of her words in order to better contend with life. “Lightness isn’t stupidity,” she said. “It’s actually a philosophical and aesthetic viewpoint, deeply serious, and has a kind of wisdom—stepping back to be able to laugh at horrible things even as you’re experiencing them.” In “Melancholy Play” (2002), a farce about suffering, Ruhl dramatized the point. Among a group of sad sacks, who are gourmands of grief—they fight over “a vial of tears”—a bank teller named Tilly causes havoc when she pronounces herself happy. “I feel lighter and lighter,” Tilly says. “I am trying to cultivate—a sensation of—gravity. But nothing helps.”
Lightness, Ruhl said, was “probably a family style.” She grew up in Wilmette, Illinois, where she had “a wonderful family. I’m not like a lot of artists in that way.” Her father, Patrick, marketed toys for a number of years, a job that was a mismatch for his intellectual abilities. “He should have been a history professor,” Ruhl said, though he loved puns, reading, language, and jazz. “I think Sarah’s appreciation of music comes from him,” her older sister, Kate Ruhl, a psychiatrist, told me. So, too, did her fascination with language.
Each Saturday, from the time Ruhl was five, Patrick took his daughters to the Walker Bros. Original Pancake House for breakfast and taught them a new word, along with its etymology. (The language lesson and some of Patrick’s words—“ostracize,” “peripatetic,” “defunct”—are memorialized in the 2003 “Eurydice,” a retelling of the Orpheus myth from his inamorata’s point of view, in which the dead Father, reunited with his daughter, tries to re-teach her lost vocabulary.) Patrick died of cancer in 1994, when Ruhl was twenty. That year, because he was ill, the family had to forgo its usual summer trip to Cape Cod; instead, as Kate recalled, “we brought Cape Cod to our house. We pretended we were away—we would watch dumb summer movies, get the kid food we ate on the Cape. We were a really good foursome.” Ruhl, recollecting her father’s last days, said, “He’d be making jokes about having radioactive urine. We’d all be laughing. It was so gracious.”
Ruhl’s mother, Kathleen, who now holds a Ph.D. in Language, Literacy, and Rhetoric, from the University of Illinois, added to the family’s sense of caprice. For most of her children’s growing up, Kathleen was a high-school English teacher who moonlighted as an actress and a director. She would come down to dinner—according to Ruhl, who calls her “vivid”—“doing the maid’s speech from Ionesco’s ‘Bald Soprano.’ ” Ruhl said, “We were encouraged to play at home, so that art-making didn’t seem like an escape from family or a retreat but very much a part of life.” Even Kathleen’s method of inculcating manners was a license to play. “We had Pig Night,” Kathleen said. “One night a week, the girls could be as horrible as they wanted. The rest of the week, they had to make an effort.” The Ruhl children knew all about performance. They were taken on summer pilgrimages to Stratford, Ontario, to see Shakespeare. Ruhl has memories of being bewildered and furious, watching “Julius Caesar” (“lots of white togas”) and going backstage after “The Tempest” to look at the ship (“That was magical”). Kathleen would also tote them to her rehearsals. Even as a girl, Ruhl, who was considered an “old soul” by her family, had a keen analytic eye. “One of the most intense theatrical experiences for her was when I directed ‘Enter Laughing,’ ” Kathleen said. “She got to know all the actors. By that point, people would ask her for her notes. She was six or seven.”
“When other kids were outside playing, Sarah would be wrapped in a comforter drinking tea and reading,” Kate said. “We used to joke that she had consumption.” Ruhl told me, “There was always a little part of me that stood apart and observed and made things up. My mom says that, even before I could write, I would tell stories and she would type them up for me.” Then as now, storytelling worked as an antidepressant for her. “If I’m sad in life, I’ll tell someone something strange and funny that happened to me to make myself feel better,” she said.
The thrill of transformation is something she began learning at the age of ten, through improvisational games at the Piven Theatre, a seventy-seat venue in Evanston, Illinois, whose Young People’s Company, to which Ruhl briefly belonged, can claim such accomplished graduates as John Cusack, Joan Cusack, Jeff Garlin, and Rosanna Arquette. Joyce Piven, the co-founder and artistic director, told me, “We acted stories, myths, fairy tales, folktales, then literary tales—Chekhov, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Salinger.” The theatre, Ruhl said, “didn’t use props, and didn’t have sets. Language did everything. So, from an early age: no fourth wall, and things can transform in the moment.”
As an improviser, according to Piven, Ruhl “wasn’t a standout—she’s not basically a performer.” (Ruhl concurs: “I don’t like being watched.”) But she began taking Piven’s scene-study class, and ended up teaching the work. “She hears the play in all its dimensions,” Piven said, adding, “She writes from a distance, so she can play. Even if you’re writing about a very serious thing and invested up to your eyes, intensity can kill a lot for the actor and the writer.”
Apart from a courtroom drama about a land-mass dispute between an isthmus and an island, which Ruhl wrote in fourth grade, and which her teacher declined to stage—“Perhaps that’s why I’m writing plays now, to exorcize my psychic battle with Mr. Spangenberger,” Ruhl says—she didn’t start writing plays until her junior year at Brown University, in 1995. In “Dog Play,” her first piece, a ten-minute exercise assigned by her teacher, the playwright Paula Vogel, Ruhl synthesized Kabuki stage techniques with a suburban American environment to evoke her grief over her father’s death. The Dog, whose baying “as though his heart is breaking” opens the show, says, “I dreamed last night that I could speak and everyone could understand. I was telling them that he is not dead, that I can see him. No one believed me.”
Vogel, who later cited Ruhl in her award-winning play “Baltimore Waltz” as one of the people “who had changed the way I looked at drama,” told me, “I sat with this short play in my study and sobbed. She had an emotional maturity that no one else in the class had.” Vogel added, “I said, ‘I want to work with you,’ and she answered, ‘Well, I’m going to be a poet. I’m not gonna be doing playwriting.’ My heart kind of sank, but I went, ‘Well, O.K. Good luck.’ ” But Vogel’s appreciation of Ruhl’s work prevailed. “I do think it’s important having someone say, ‘You could do this for life,’ ” Ruhl said. “Paula was that person.”
Ruhl spent the next year at Pembroke College, Oxford, where she studied English literature, and when she returned her sights were not on poetry but on playwriting. Her literary volte-face was due in part to her confusion about the confessional “I” of her poetic voice, which she felt had been exhausted in mourning her father. In “Dream,” for instance, she wrote, “I wake this morning and gather a mouthful of dirt— / words—with a teaspoon, that you may speak to me again.” “I didn’t know what a poem should be anymore,” she said. “Plays provided a way to open up content and have many voices. I felt that onstage one could speak lyrically and with emotion, and that the actor was longing for that kind of speech, whereas in poetic discourse emotion was in some circles becoming embarrassing.”
The turning point for Ruhl came in 1997, at a production of “Passion Play,” her first full-length work, which Vogel had arranged at Trinity Repertory Company, in Providence, Rhode Island. Kathleen drove herself and Sarah to the event. They had an accident, and Sarah was briefly knocked unconscious. Nonetheless, she managed to see her play. “At a visceral level, watching the play, I thought, This is it,” she said. “Some people stood. What whorish playwright wouldn’t be excited about that? It was momentous and strange.”
Ruhl’s theatre aspires to reclaim the audience’s atrophied imagination. “Now, some people consume imagination, and some people do the imagining,” she said. “I find it very worrisome. That should be one thing that people know they can do.” Ruhl writes with space, sound, and image as well as words. Her stage directions often challenge her directors’ scenic imagination as well. In “Eurydice,” the dead Father builds Eurydice a room of string in the underworld. The stage directions read, “He makes four walls and a door out of string. / Time passes. / It takes time to build a room out of string.” Ruhl’s goal is to make the audience live in the moment, to make the known world unfamiliar in order to reanimate it. Here the essential nature of the underworld—its sense of absence—is made visceral by the volumes of meticulously constructed empty space that the string defines.
“I’m interested in the things theatre can do that other forms can’t,” Ruhl told me. “So theatre as pure plumbing of self, in a psychological way, seems very readerly to me.” Her plays are distinguished by a minimum of backstory; the audience is submerged in a series of unfolding dramatic moments. “Eurydice,” for instance, opens, wittily, with Eurydice and Orpheus at the beach. When Orpheus offers her the world, it’s the real one. “All those birds. Thank you,” Eurydice says. “And the sea! For me? When? Now? It’s mine already? (Orpheus nods.) Wow.” The dialogue and the situation have precise, ironic resonances, but the audience has to work for them. The play coaxes the spectators to swim in the magical, sometimes menacing flow of the unconscious. Ruhl prefers the revelations of the surreal moment to the narrated psychological one. In the prologue to “Passion Play”—a triptych that uses for its dissection of faith, politics, and political icons the organizing conceit of the staging of Christ’s Passion in separate acts by the Elizabethans, Nazi-era Germans, and contemporary Americans—Ruhl announced her daring, playfully cajoling the public to focus on the moment and the mythic:
We ask you, dear audience,
To use your eyes, ears, your most inward sight.
For here is day (A painted sun is raised)
And here is night (A painted moon is raised)
And now, the play.
As a storyteller, Ruhl marches to Ovid’s drum rather than Aristotle’s. “Aristotle has held sway for many centuries, but I feel our culture is hungry for Ovid’s way of telling stories,” she said, describing Ovid’s narrative strategy as “one thing transforming into another.” She went on, “His is not the neat Aristotelian arc but, instead, small transformations that are delightful and tragic.” And she added, “The Aristotelian model—a person wants something, comes close to getting it but is smashed down, then finally gets it, or not, then learns something from the experience—I don’t find helpful. It’s a strange way to look at experience.
“I like plays that have revelations in the moment, where emotions transform almost inexplicably,” Ruhl said. “The acting style isn’t explicated, either. It’s not psychological.” In “The Clean House,” for instance, one stage direction reads, “Lane cries. She laughs. She cries. She laughs. And this goes on for some time.” To Ruhl, this kind of emotionally labile performance is a “virtuosic” exhibition of behavior. “It feels true to me,” she said. “Children are certainly that way. I’m interested in these kinds of state changes. ‘I was happy, now I’m sad.’ ” She continued, “If you distill people’s subjectivity and how they view the world emotionally, you don’t get realism.” The irrationality of emotion is one of the themes to which Ruhl’s plays continually return. “I don’t want to smooth out the emotions to the point where you could interpret them totally rationally, so that they have a clear reference point to the past,” she said. “Psychological realism makes emotions so rational, so explained, that they don’t feel like emotions to me.”
In Ruhl’s plays, turbulent feeling can erupt at any moment, for no apparent reason; actors are challenged to inhabit the emotional moment without motivation. Sometimes, during rehearsal, an anxious actor will approach Ruhl to try and pin down the role. She thinks to herself, “Oh, come on, just ride it.” She told me, “I prefer an actor who says, ‘My character doesn’t have a backstory, so I won’t concoct one. I will live as fully in every moment as I can. I will let the language move me, as opposed to a secret backstory of my own.” She likes her actors to have “a sense of irony,” and to be “touched with a little brush of the irrational.”
One afternoon in January, in the fifth-floor rehearsal room of Playwrights Horizons, Ruhl took a seat beside the director Anne Bogart at the top of a horseshoe of white Formica tables. It was the second day of rehearsal for “Dead Man’s Cell Phone.” Behind them was the maquette of the play’s spare proscenium set—its backdrop of sky and its sliding side panels painted in the deep, sombre blues, grays, and browns of Edward Hopper’s palette. The Hopper tones suggested the longing and the solitude that are the play’s internal weather and that the cavernous, mostly furniture-free space magnified. As an epigram to her script, Ruhl appended an observation by Mark Strand about the people who wait in Hopper’s paintings: “They are like characters whose parts have deserted them and now, trapped in the space of their waiting, must keep themselves company.”
“Dead Man’s Cell Phone” is a mad pilgrimage of an imagination as it is invaded and atomized by the phone, which transforms private as well as public space. At a café, when a man sitting next to the quirky Jean won’t answer the intrusive ringing of his phone, she answers it herself, realizing only slowly that the man is dead. In the moment of recognition, staring into his transfigured face, which appears, the stage direction reads, “as though he was just looking at something he found eminently beautiful,” Jean falls in love. “I can be very medieval about love—like the notion that love is through the eyes and that it’s very immediate, as opposed to modern and neurotic,” Ruhl told me. Jean speaks to the corpse; the stage direction reads, “She holds his hand. She keeps hold of it.” In the image, Ruhl’s main thematic tragicomic preoccupations of being both disembodied and disconnected coalesce. To keep alive the reality of her newfound love object, Jean answers his calls and fabricates stories about his dying thoughts to lovers, business partners, and family, all of whom she eventually meets. (The Dead Man’s name, it turns out, is Gordon, and he sold body parts for a living.)
Of the many ghostly figures in this bright play—Jean, who declares, “I like to disappear”; Gordon’s termagant mother, who sees it as her job “to mourn him until the day I die”; Dwight, an unnoticed second son—the Dead Man is the only bona-fide ghost. This being a Ruhl play, he is, naturally, heard from.
“Have a seat,” Bogart said to Bill Camp, the actor who was then playing the Dead Man. “Take your time. And see if we might help you, or not.” The Dead Man has a soliloquy at the opening of Act II, and Bogart was planting the seed of using the audience as an acting partner in the scene. Ruhl is a fan of direct address. In “Melancholy Play,” her production notes admonish theatricals: “The audience knows the difference between being talked to and being talked at. Talk to them, please.” Ruhl told me, “We’re in the theatre and people are speaking to us. You could say it’s more real.” She said to Camp, “There is charm in the monologue—the slow, easy charm of talking to an airplane partner in first class. Don’t be afraid of it.”
“I love that image of being in first class,” Bogart said. Then Camp got to work. “I woke up that morning—the day I died—thinking I’d like a lobster bisque,” he began. Ruhl cast out her sentences straight and true like a fly line, their rhythms setting ideas down crisply and carefully for her listeners to catch. Sometimes she did it with a fillip of observation (“I got onto the subway. A tomb for people’s eyes”); sometimes with a flick of humor (“It doesn’t really make your mouth water, does it, lentil soup?” Gordon asks. “Something watery—something brown—and hot carrots. Like death”); sometimes with the surprise of information (“Ate my sushi,” Gordon says, in a detour about a restaurant run by a former Chinese surgeon who did organ extractions. “You can tell with tuna whether they slice it from the belly or from the tail end. He always gave me the belly. It’s the good part”). By the point in the soliloquy where Gordon arrives at the café, where he learns that the last bowl of lobster bisque has just been sold, the rhythm and command of Ruhl’s language have slyly let out a lot of the story line. “I’m thinking, That bitch over there ate all the lobster bisque, this is all her fault,” Gordon says as he begins to have a heart attack. “And I look over at her, and she looks like an angel—not like a bitch at all—and I think—good—good—I’m glad she had the last bite—I’m glad. Then I die.”
Afterward, parsing the soliloquy with Camp, Ruhl returned to the sushi-eating story. In the text, she said, it seems that the character is “talking about something important, like organs, when actually it isn’t that important in his moral structure. But sushi is the important part of what he’s talking about. There was something thrilling in the way you were talking about the ‘belly is the best part of the tuna.’ That was the place where you slowed down, even though it was parenthetical. That seemed really right to me.” She added, “This is a man who is used to talking at length and to having people listen. There’s a kind of confidence. He’s allowed to improvise and to surprise himself with language the way most people aren’t, because people stop listening.”
Ruhl takes the same pleasure in language. On the way to a preview, eight weeks later, she worried about the calibration of the words in a rewrite of her ending. “I hope I’m not overarticulating,” she said, striding through the chill night air in bluejeans, backpack on her shoulders. In the lobby, the director Mark Wing-Davey, who will stage “Passion Play” at the Yale Repertory Theatre later this year, swept Ruhl up against his massive body like a grizzly bear hugging a salmon. “She’s a playwright with a voice that thrums,” Wing-Davey told me as we took our seats. He went on, “You hear that voice and you think, That doesn’t come around that often.” Ruhl’s theatrical authority bred trust in the audience. In the game of hide-and-seek she played with it, there was always something to be found. It gave them permission to play. No matter how wild the zigzags of logic or the lampoon of conventional storytelling—what she called her “anti-money shots”—the audience was right with Ruhl’s flights of goofy fancy: a cell-phone ballet set to the chattering gab of the spheres, a rendezvous with Gordon on his rung of Hell, a redemptive finale. “I intend the ending to be an actual hymn to love,” she told me. Out of the atomized half lives of the characters, Ruhl’s tale, true to comedy’s mission, stage-managed wholeness: Jean says to Dwight, Gordon’s brother, “Let’s start loving each other right now, Dwight—not a mediocre love, but the strongest love in the world, absolutely requited.”
In the lobby after the preview, I talked to Wing-Davey about the oddness of the play’s ironic detachment and its unabashed optimism. “Why shouldn’t it be?” he said, adding, “Right now Sarah’s life is great—a young child, newly married, the darling of the American theatre scene, her plays are done.” Nonetheless, for good luck at each opening night, Ruhl comes armed with an amulet, a small pink Ganesh-type elephant. If her sister or her husband is beside her in the theatre, as the lights come down, Ruhl’s ritual is to whisper the words of a young, excited, theatregoing Minnesota girl from her favorite childhood series, the “Betsy-Tacy” stories, words that to Ruhl signal “the experience of opening and of forgetting.” “The curtain goes up! The curtain goes up!” she says.
By John Lahr
Mr. Lahr is a writer for the New Yorker where this article originally appeared
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