Written by Sarah Ruhl
Directed By Anne Bogart
Synopsis: Gordon is dead, but his cell phone lives on. When Jean, an empathetic museum worker, answers his ringing phone beside her in a café, she is soon playing unwitting comforter and confessor to the man's grieving friends and family. Before she knows it, Jean is ensnarled in the underbelly of the dead man's bizarre life.
NEW YORK TIMES:
"But her affection for the unexpected phrase, the kooky observation, the unlikely juxtaposition is essential to her central belief that the smallest and most trivial things in life — a bowl of lobster bisque, in Gordon’s case — can be charged with meaning. And her characters’ quirkiness is in keeping, too, with the play’s doleful central theme, that each human being is a book full of surprises even to intimates, and one that is destined to be left unfinished."
Read the whole review HERE.
NEW YORK POST:
"Director Anne Bogart's staging does well by the surreal proceedings, and the work by the supporting cast is exemplary: Smith is particularly riveting in a long post-death monologue that is the play's single best scene. Only the normally reliable Parker is disappointing, delivering a one note performance."
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NEW YORK DAILY NEWS:
"The production would be more amusing if Anne Bogart's staging and Parker's performance - marked by a zombie voice and clunky walk - were brisker. A comedy about the Ringtone Age moving at the speed of a rotary dial is somewhat disconnecting."
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THEATERMANIA:
"While it starts with a genuinely intriguing premise, Ruhl eventually piles on so much whimsy that it's a strong possibility patrons exiting the two-act piece will quickly reactivate their phones for the express purpose of discouraging friends from making the same attendance mistake."
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VARIETY:
"But while director Anne Bogart's cerebral approach has served to elucidate the work of writers like Charles Mee, bringing coherence to his often unruly collages, it douses Ruhl's oddball lyricism in manneristic coldness. The mismatch between playwright and director stretches the fragile charms of this unsatisfying commission from Playwrights Horizons even thinner."
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NEWSDAY:
"She is, for a while, fun to watch, as are the marvelous Kathleen Chalfant and everyone else in Anne Bogart's affectionate and imaginatively lean production. How long the fun lasts, alas, depends on one's threshold for flights of rhapsodic eccentricity and precious smile-button incongruity. "
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NEW YORK SUN:
"But as the plot slides from a shrewd gloss on technology to a well-calibrated melodrama to a rather shopworn treatise on altruism, the author's less welcome qualities intensify under the added exposure. This particular house is a little too clean."
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TIME OUT NY:
"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."
Read the whole review HERE.
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