Dead Man’s Cell Phone

Description
The cracked-angelic Mary-Louise Parker plays a mousy woman who gets drawn into a journey through a dead man’s gruesome past and his rich, unhappy family—with detours into international intrigue and cosmic noodling. Along the way, playwright Sarah Ruhl makes acute observations about how being surrounded by wireless devices has eroded public-private boundaries and made our lives ghostly, atomized and impermanent. Abetted by a rock-star cast (that also includes Kathleen Chalfant and T. Ryder Smith), experimental veteran Anne Bogart applies her flair for somber, geometrical intensity to the playwright’s faintly cloying whimsicality, tamping it down with cool gravitas.—DC