Sarah Ruhl is one of contemporary American theatre’s best and brightest, so I was very much looking forward to seeing Dead Man’s Cell Phone. Unfortunately, the MT Pockets production of the play was extremely disappointing. The play itself is good, but the performance was a letdown.

Ruhl’s play follows a fairly non-descript woman named Jean, who finds that a stranger named Gordon has died in the same café she’s having lunch in. When his phone rings, she answers it, beginning an obsession with answering his calls that lasts throughout much of the play. Jean manages to hang on to Gordon’s phone, and even meets his family: his haughty but loving mother Mrs. Gottlieb, his semi-estranged wife Hermia, and his resentful younger brother Dwight. Jean and Dwight form an intimacy, partly based on their shared love of embossed paper (which works out well because he works in a stationary store). However, it comes out that Gordon made his living trafficking human organs, and when his phone rings with a message that there’s a kidney to be picked up in South Africa, Jean decides to go and try to convince the person to donate the kidney rather than sell it. Gordon’s unscrupulous business associate shoots Jean, and she travels to the afterlife where she meets Gordon—who turns out to be rather an ass—and has the revelation that she really does love Dwight. She awakes in South Africa as Dwight arrives to rescue her, and returning home she finds that Hermia has happily returned to ice dancing, Mrs. Gottlieb commits suicide to join Gordon when Jean reveals her afterlife adventure, and Dwight is ready to start a life with Jean. The two commit to loving each other deeply and passionately.

There’s a lot of interesting potential to work with in the play—a blend of light, almost ethereal philosophy, cynical humor, and the fantastical that characterizes Ruhl’s work. But the MT Pockets production, directed by Seret Cole, didn’t manage to capture the magic of a Ruhl play. Overall the performances were wooden and there was virtually no chemistry between the actors. The final scene, where Jean (Amanda Algee) and Dwight (George Barber) was especially painful in this respect, because Ruhl is very much a dramatist interested in the emotional interconnections between people, and Algee and Barber simply didn’t work as a convincing couple. I wasn’t convinced they were on good speaking terms, much less that they were committing to a meaningful life together. Algee gave it the old college try, but Barber struggled to play well off any of the other actors, and his awkwardness seemed to infect every scene he was in. But he wasn’t the only one whose performance left something to be desired. Deborah Morgan (Mrs. Gottlieb) didn’t particularly emote—it was hard to tell whether she was being purposefully aloof (somewhat in the model of Lucille Bluth in Arrested Development) or whether she was struggling to remember her lines. (I had the pervasive suspicion throughout the show that the actors were not comfortable remembering their lines).

The one genuinely strong performance was Justin Grow’s Gordon. His mid-play monologue reflecting on his life and death was the only portion of the play I was actually convinced by. Grow is a consistently strong actor, and he lifted the role substantially by creating a complex Gordon who was both selfish and self-justifying and yet capable of empathizing and even appreciating others’ gestures of compassion. While Grow was very good, the interactions between him and Algee during Jean’s vision of the afterlife was weaker than Grow’s monologue, because, again, they simply didn’t click as performance partners. The timing didn’t feel natural, and it was unfortunate because each of them could have been much better if the chemistry were there.