The Dead Mans Cell Phone

I went and saw the Boise State Theatre production of The Dead Mans Cell Phone by Sarah Ruhl, directed by BSU's own Valerie Baugh-Schlossberg. The story starts out that a woman sitting in a cafe hears a mans phone ring, and when he neglects to answer it several times, she gets up to go answer it herself, only to find the man dead. She continues to answer the phone for several days after this dead mans funeral. She becomes romantically involved with his brother, tries to console the mourning wife and mother, and also tries to make his shoty business decisions right again. However, in her relationship with the dead mans brother, Dwane, he soon becomes jealous of the attention the main character, Gene, is giving to his dead, and frankly not well remembered, brother. Gene then dies due to a series of unfortunate events and finds herself alone with Gordon, the dead man. She questions

why she is there with him of all people, seeing as how she had only "met" the man a few short days before hand. He tells her that when you die, you go to the person or place that you loved most in your worldly life, she loved him the most. However, Gene refuses to give up, and eventually finds her way back to earth and her way back to Dwane, and they fall madly in love, do to the death of his brother.
I think that in a sense this dramatic was very artistic. I think that Ruhl has written an excellent piece. Although weird in some places, the experience of seeing this play will in a way draw the viewer into the idea of how technology separates society into their own world, when it is really meant to bring us all together. I think that technology is good, when you don't let it destroy you. It was made so that you could be accessible at all times, so you can be reached if needed; however, some use it to tear people apart and build a wall in between themselves and the rest of society.This play addresses that well. It has made me think about how my life might go on after I have dies because of these things that we are so obsessed with having. We see the necessity of having the ability to be reached at all time through our phone, but neglect the fact that there is people outside of our phones, and they would like to be talked to rather than just e-mailed of texted.
As for our theatrical reproduction of this play, I think it went really well for the theatre space that we had. The audience was small and intimate and felt as though they were looking onto someones private life, as if the person that had died was watching their life pass by after they were gone. It has a very delicate  complexity about it due to the fact that sometimes the dead man, Gordon, is watching what happens after his death, he even talks to you about what he thinks is good and bad about what happened the day he dies.
I think that the play write is trying to inform her viewers about how important actual society is rather than the technological side of our lives today. She is making a warning perhaps to not get so wrapped up in technology that when we die, people are more interested in the things we leave behind then the actual fact that they have lost someone near to their heart, or should have been near anyways.