CANCELED: Dead Man's Cellphone

In light of the public health advisories on social distancing, Dead Man's Cellphone has been canceled. Ticketholders have the option to: 

• donate tickets as a tax-deductible gift to the UW School of Drama
• request a refund

Please indicate your ticket preferences on the TICKET OPTIONS FORM, or by emailing the ArtsUW Ticket Office at ticket@uw.edu. 

We hope you will consider donating your tickets back to the School of Drama in order to help us weather the economic impact this will inevitably have on our school. With your support we can continue to bring extraordinary performances to our audiences and learning experiences to our students in the months and years ahead. Thank you.

By Sarah Ruhl
Directed by Andrew Coopman
May 28 - June 7, 2020
    Previews May 23 & 26
    Pay-What-You-Can Wednesday June 3
Glenn Hughes Penthouse Theatre

“Thank God there are still people who build churches for the rest of us so that when someone dies or gets married we have a place to—. I could not put all of this— (she thinks the word grief) — in a low-ceilinged room—no—it requires height.

Jean’s cell phone rings.

Could someone please turn their fucking cell phone off.”

An incessantly ringing cell phone in a quiet café, a stranger at the next table who has had enough, and a dead man with a lot of loose ends. So begins Dead Man’s Cell Phone, a brilliant comedy by MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sarah Ruhl. It follows Jean, an unexceptional woman who embarks on an odyssey into the lives of others when she inherits— confiscates, really—the phone of a (dead) stranger. This is a play about how we memorialize the dead, and how that remembering changes us. It is the story of a woman forced to confront her own assumptions about morality, redemption, and the need to connect in a technologically obsessed world. Second-year MFA director Andrew Coopman directs.