The Black Box Theater will be filled with people eager to see the play Dead Man’s Cell Phone. presented by the Niles West Theater Department starting Thursday, Nov. 6 to Saturday, Nov. 8.
“A dead man’s cell phone is about a woman in a cafe who hears a [man’s] cell phone ringing, so she goes over to his table and realizes that he’s dead, so she takes his cell phone, and throughout the show learns about him, his life, his mysteries, his secrets, and all that jazz,” sophomore actor Grant Killian said.
“When I first encountered the show,” theater director Andrew Sinclair said, “it took me a long to see the reasoning for it. When I saw it at Steppenwolf Theatre, I didn’t like it. So, I went to see it again and I liked it a little bit better. Then I read it. I took me about three reads until I felt like ‘I got it.’ It is not an easy play and it requires the actors, technicians, designers and audiences to think a lot about what the message of the play is. I think that is point of the piece. Since we live in a world that is hinged on technology and we are always reachable by a mobile device in our pockets. We want answers NOW – and we don’t want to have to wait or think. This play is more important than ever. I think audiences should come and see this play if they want to see something different. It will require all audience members to think. I always think that is a good marking point of art.”
Dead Man’s Cell phone will be the department’s thespian show. “Our thespian show is a show with just the people that have been in the department for over a year and earned a bunch of points. It’s run by students themselves,” Killian said.
“This has been a challenging piece for the cast and crew, which is why we chose it as our 2nd annual Thespian production. All of the cast members, student designers, crew heads and production crew members are inducted members in our International Thespian Honor Society. These sophomore, junior and senior students are our advanced theatre students and I wanted to give them a piece of theatre that wasn’t easy to tackle. The actors especially have had to embody and motivate very odd characters who do and say things that are very far from their comfort zones. Sarah Ruhl writes about strange people – individuals who are on the fringe – and I think that is a cool challenge for any actor to have to play. At Niles West, we haven’t done a show as unique and as challenging as ‘Dead Man’s Cell Phone’ When the play was released in 2007, it won several major awards, including the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play. The playwright, Sarah Ruhl, also won the MacArthur “Genius” Grant, naming her one of the brightest new stars in the artistic world. However, audience reactions to the show were mixed. Some people got it and some people didn’t. Some people thought it was a work of art and some people thought it was a half-baked idea with no real motivation,” Sinclair added.
The play will be shown on Thursday at 4pm, Friday at 4 pm and 7:30 pm, and Saturday at 7:30 pm in the black-box theater.
