By Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, June 6, 2007

"I've never been completely comfortable with cellphones," admits playwright Sarah Ruhl, whose new work, "Dead Man's Cell Phone," is having its world premiere at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company through July 1.

"With cellphones there's no privacy, there's no quiet," Ruhl says, elaborating on her unease with the notion of being perpetually in touch -- "this idea that you're always on, you're always available." And yet, "people are so un- available," she adds. "We just retreat into having conversations with people we know already."

Her play began with the simple image "of a dead man in a cafe" and a woman sitting nearby, Ruhl says. She let that picture marinate for many months, wrote the first act, got stuck. After a while, she tackled the second act. In Ruhl's plays, where even stage directions are poetic, second acts can get pretty metaphysical. "You have to be willing to contend with the great mysteries," she explains.

As the play opens, the dead man of the title (played by Rick Foucheux) sits inert at a table in a cafe, his cellphone ringing. The woman at the next table, Jean (Polly Noonan), thinks he's dozing and answers it for him. Once she realizes he is beyond waking, she keeps his phone, takes his calls and becomes enmeshed in his life -- and afterlife.

Noonan also played a key role in Ruhl's ambitious "Passion Play, a Cycle" at Arena Stage in 2005. Ruhl says the actress's ability to "make an emotional transformation just immediately" fits with her own perception "that we move from state to state in a kind of quicksilver way."

Rebecca Bayla Taichman, who staged Ruhl's "The Clean House" at Woolly in 2005 -- the best known and most produced play of the 33-year-old playwright's career -- is directing the new work. Early last month, Ruhl was on hand for cuts, rewrites and modifications as rehearsals began. Melissa Crespo (a budding director herself) watched Ruhl's daughter, Anna, a plump and rosy 1-year-old, while her mother worked.

While "Dead Man's Cell Phone" is having its premiere run here, Ruhl's "Eurydice" will take its New York bow at Manhattan's Second Stage. All that, plus a baby, a husband, new curtains unhung in her New York home and a developing play about, ahem, vibrators.

"It's a little overwhelming in terms of scheduling," Ruhl says. "I try not to look two weeks ahead in my calendar because I get too panicky."

She will take part in a post-show discussion tonight with Woolly Artistic Director Howard Shalwitz.

Shakespeare Theatre Company's Michael Kahn has a modest goal: "I'm interested in trying to uncover all of the secrets that Shakespeare represents." In his modern-dress "Hamlet," which runs through July 29, the "secrets" will be emotional and psychological. "This is one of the most human of Shakespeare's plays, but it's also one of the most ambiguous. Every character's motives are complicated."

The artistic director says he "wanted to work on the play moment to moment, without trying to squeeze it into a small concept." His only concession to "concept" theater is the use of Asian puppetry in the play-within-the-play when Hamlet catches "the conscience of the king," and that was after Kahn found a reference to "puppets dallying" in the text.

Jeffrey Carlson, who has the title role, recalls Kahn telling him, " 'We're just going to tell the story,' and I said, 'Oh, thank God!' " Kahn's former Juilliard student says, "There's so much scholarship on the character and many people have an opinion. . . . Living through it is something most people don't think about unless they play the part."

Carlson played the title role in "Lorenzaccio" for Kahn in 2005. His co-star from that show, Broadway actor Robert Cuccioli, is back as Claudius in "Hamlet." Carlson also appeared on Broadway in Edward Albee's "The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?" and in the ill-fated Boy George musical, "Taboo," but the tall, slim, 31-year-old actor's highest profile gig came last fall, as Zarf/Zoe, the transgender rock star on the television soap "All My Children."

Carlson says the key to doing Shakespeare is a blend of technique -- a facility with the Bard's text, rhymes and rhythms -- and feeling. "In Shakespeare, you're always climbing," he says, "because you're juggling so many things in the air -- both technically and with your soul." He likens it to a "dance between the mind and the soul that you're always negotiating. . . . It's a very intense dance." Playing a tortured character who "never shuts up" can take a toll, but "a wonderful toll," he says.

"I get quite moved watching anybody work on that part," says Shakespeare Theatre eminence Ted van Griethuysen, who is doing triple duty as Hamlet's father's ghost, the First Player (called Lucianus) and the Gravedigger. "It's one of the highest tests anybody will ever meet as an actor or as a person."