Dead Man's Cell Phone: from poignant to bizarre

What starts off promising - a dead man's cell phone rings interminably in a small cafe, and a strange woman sitting near him can't keep herself from answering it - steadily veers away from enjoyable and into annoying. 

Why? The potential is here. Playwright Sarah Ruhl is more than well-respected in the world of theatre. Many of the actors in this production are obviously skilled - Stephen Aberle and Eileen Barrett, as the main characters, both stand out. Even the set design was clever... I must lay the complaint at the feet of the director, Kevin McNulty, for not daring to cook the play well enough to bring out it's flavour. Overall, the pacing was so rushed that delivery often came out as bland as high school Shakespeare, which seems more a feat of memorization than characterization. It doesn't seem possible that this could be successfully done as an hour-long show, honestly. The material needs more build-up, more silences, to develop any real human flavour in such a surprising work. And, as the story moved from poignant to bizarre, the camp or charm which might have prepared the audience to suspend their disbelief and go along was missing - which just made it all seem weird by the end. High scores for effort, but the potential of the play wasn't realized, leaving easy laughs as the main connection between actors and audience.

Dead Man's Cell Phone is part of the Vancouver Fringe: for more information go here.