According to recent studies, the average person spends 4 hours and 49 minutes on their phone each day. That usage creates a profile of the person you are and the people who are important to you. What would your profile look like if someone found your phone in the minutes following your unexpected death?
That’s the premise of Sarah Ruhl’s dramedy, “Dead Man’s Cell Phone,” on stage at Golden Gate Community Center through October 13.
Director Frank Blocker provided this synopsis.
“A lovely, mousy young woman is annoyed by somebody’s cell phone ringing in a café one day and she goes to answer it out of frustration and realizes he’s dead. She takes over the cell phone and realizes his life was a mess and she tries to fix … his broken relationships with his wife, with his girlfriend, with his mother, with his brother, after the fact.”
Delinah Rosario-Mercado plays the young woman, and offered this explanation of what inspires her character, Jean, not just to answer the dead man’s cell phone, but actually to meet with the people in his life.
“My character is just genuinely a very curious person,” Rosario-Mercado said. “She kind of almost falls in love with this man that she doesn’t know and she’s never really met just through the fact of having his cell phone…. It’s just a mix of curiosity, a mix of wanting him to be alright and a mix of just going for it.”
Along the way, Jean makes a series of surprising discoveries, not only about the disrepair of the dead man’s relationships, but also about the strange and macabre way he made his living.
But it’s not just the ability to vicariously sleuth their way through the remnants of an anonymous man’s life that will keep audiences enthralled. It’s also the overarching theme that playwright Sarah Ruhl weaves into the tapestry of this play.
“It’s sort of a statement on how our lives are all encapsulated now on our cell phones, and it kind of challenges us to imagine what’s going to happen when you die and someone gets your cell phone and tries to decode who you were,” Blocker said.
But there is one more reason audiences will love this show.
“Acerbic wit,” added Blocker. “It’s a comedy. It’s not, you know, ha-ha screaming funny comedy, but it’s a smart comedy and it certainly relates to what we go through in our times with cell phones and how we are ruled by them.”
Remaining performances are October 11 to 13.
MORE INFORMATION:
Go here for specific play dates, times and a full cast list.
Go here for more on The Studio Players: https://www.thestudioplayers.org/.
The Studio Players’ production is directed by Frank Blocker and features Delinah Rosario-Mercado, Melissa Hennig, T.J. Albertson, Emilie Baartman, Lynnelle St. Albord and Christopher Noonan.
The play explores how we remember the dead and how that memorialization changes us. It is a wildly imaginative comedy that chronicles the journey of a woman forced to confront her presumptions about morality, redemption, and isolation in a technologically obsessed society and explores the paradox of modern technology’s ability to both unite and isolate people in the digital age.
Lead actress Delinah Rosario-Mercado confesses to having found herself in situations where she’s been annoyed by the ringing of someone else’s cell phone.
It’s been very interesting watching the cast, who all have lived with cell phones for most of their lives,” observed Blocker. “Even they feel like there’s a lot to be said here about human connection versus what the computer and the interwebs think we are, and how we’re defined.”
According to Consumer Affairs, nearly 57 percent of Americans consider themselves “mobile phone addicts.”
Rosario-Mercado doesn’t feel she’s in this group. “Don’t get me wrong, I definitely can be a bit attached to my cell phone, but I think for the most part I like to kind of live in the moment and just be there, and I think that’s something we don’t see a lot of today.”
Three in four people admit to feeling uncomfortable without their phones.
One in six sleep with their phones at night.
While Rosario-Mercado doesn’t sleep with her phone, she does admit that the longest she’s ever turned her cell phone off is “probably, a couple of hours, maybe a day.” But she hasn’t done it much longer than that because she uses her phone for work, too. “But I definitely like to use it to stay in touch with my family, and I get a little anxious when I turn it off for too long.”
One in two (47 percent) admit to panicking when their battery drops below 20 percent.
The average cell phone user checks or uses their phone 144 times a day.
Among the top uses are photography, internet surfing, navigation (mapping routes to desired locations), e-commerce (online shopping), social media (reading and posting to Facebook, Instagram, X), podcasts, watching U-Tube and other video content and banking.
Generation Z is more “connected” than their older counterparts. On average, they utilize 6.6 devices (including smartphone, PC, laptop, tablet, smartwatch).
Many (42%) of American households own two connected devices: a smartphone and either a laptop, tablet, or smartwatch/wearable.
Ninety-one percent of teens use their cell phones simply as a way to pass the time, and over half of those teens say that they often use their cell phones this way. More than 8 in 10 teens also report that they use their phones to connect with other people or learn new things, while half of teens use their devices for the exact opposite purpose, to avoid social interaction.
