A Perfect Connection.(Dead Man's Cell Phone)(Interview)

Byline: Adam Green. editor: Valerie Steiker

Mary-Louise Parker stars in Dead Man's Cell Phone, Sarah Ruhl's enchanting new play.

In romantic comedies, a future couple's journey on the bumpy road to love always begins with a comically inauspicious encounter known in the trade as a meet cute. In Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone, which opens this month at Playwrights Horizons, a young woman named Jean meets the man of her dreams in a cafe when she asks him to either answer his ringing cell phone or turn it off, only to discover that he no longer has a pulse.

Part metaphysical screwball comedy and part medieval morality play, Ruhl's lyrical meditation on love, loss, and the hunger for connection confirms the 34-year-old playwright as one of the most original theatrical voices of her generation. Under the direction of Anne Bogart, the production also marks the welcome return to the New York stage of Mary-Louise Parker, who emerges from the small-screen Weeds with a Golden Globe and a new baby to play a lonely museum clerk stuck on the ultimate unavailable man. "This is the longest I've gone without doing a play since I was seventeen," Parker says. "I'm an actress--plays are my vitamins--and I just couldn't take it anymore."

Parker chalks up her three-year hiatus from the stage (she gave a lovely performance in the 2004 revival of Reckless ) less to the vicissitudes of motherhood and career than to a dearth of scripts that sparked her interest. But as soon as she read Dead Man's Cell Phone, she knew she had a live one. "I'm almost always attracted to writing that has a poetic spareness to it," she says. "And Sarah is the kind of writer whose poetry and intellect and wit are evident even in her stage directions. In one scene, she describes my character as 'an Edward Hopper painting, a woman without her shoes.' That just kills me."

At lunch at a restaurant near her apartment in the East Twenties, Ruhl, slight and girlish, her strawberry-blonde hair pulled back to frame delicate features and pale skin, looks more like a freshly scrubbed grad student than a mature artist who in the last two years has seen her work produced at theaters from Louisville to Latvia, been a Pulitzer finalist, won a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant," moved to New York, and given birth to a daughter.

"It's shocking if I stop and think about it," Ruhl says. "I kind of have the greatest job. You get to be alone when you want, then you get to be with people when you start to feel lonely. And sometimes you get to hear people laugh at your jokes in public, which is the really exciting part. After my first play was produced, I thought it was too decadent and pleasurable a thing to do too much of, but Paula taught me that it was OK--maybe even more than OK--to follow what you love."