Dead Man’s Cell Phone

I FOUND MY CALLING Parker holds the line.

Photograph: Joan Marcus

Sarah Ruhl remains an acquired taste for me, but there’s a new cook in the kitchen for her latest, Dead Man’s Cell Phone. Or, to spin a metaphor off the title, she got a better service provider. Experimental veteran Anne Bogart, debuting at Playwrights Horizons (a place in dire need of more stylish directors), applies her flair for somber, geometrical intensity to the playwright’s faintly cloying semi-intellectual whimsy. Bogart’s cool gravitas helps tamp down some of the play’s sentimentality.

Ruhl’s previous New York outings, The Clean House and eurydice, suffered from uneven casts and directors who failed to stage against the grain of winsomeness. Here she gets a rock-star ensemble headed by the cracked-angelic Mary-Louise Parker as Jean, a mousy Holocaust Museum worker who answers the annoying phone of one Gordon (Smith) in a café. Seconds later, she realizes that he died at his table. And yet, she continues to answer his calls. So begins Jean’s vicarious journey into Gordon’s gruesome past (turns out he’s a human-organs trafficker) and his rich unhappy family, with detours into international intrigue and cosmic noodling. Along the way, Ruhl makes some acute observations about how being surrounded by wireless devices has eroded public-private boundaries and made our lives ghostly, atomized and impermanent.

At her strongest, the writer makes surprising connections between ownerless cell phones and organs smuggled across nations. In Bogart’s production, these ideas crackle in a visually and aurally impressive production (sets by G.W. Mercier, sound by Darron L. West). Perhaps I’m finally receiving Ruhl’s signal.

—David Cote