As a light rain fell in Newport News, we pulled up to Peninsula Community Theatre for their production of Dead Man’s Cell Phone – which turned out to be very apropos, as the entirety of the play seems to take place in a light rain – with umbrellas adorning the roof of the stage, and cast members walking around with umbrellas and rain jackets.  This is a modern absurdist play, where the main character, Jean (played by an outstanding Destiny Deater), discovers as she is eating lunch at a café that the man at the table next to her has died.  Jean takes it upon herself to take possession of the dead man’s cell phone and ensure that his affairs are put in order, and that his family is at peace, despite never having met him while he was alive.

The first act of the play is equal parts thought-provoking and funny, as Deater’s Jean is believably making it up as she goes.  She claims to the dead man’s family that she worked with Gordon (the dead man), and she has to consistently make up more lies to keep them believing that she in fact knew him.  Jean, it seems, has been lacking in human interaction, and when Gordon (played by Lawrence Nichols) died next to her, she had an impulse to find that missing human connection, and this is how she is going about it.  Of course, Jean’s ideal of the nice dead man next to her is not reality, and she quickly discovers the messiness of his relationships in life through interactions with his wife Hermia (played by Lyra Hale), his mother Mrs. Gottlieb (Peggy Kageleiri), his brother Dwight (Clifford Clark), and the woman he had an affair with (Josephine Peirce). 

Deater does a fantastic job making every interaction she has on stage feel natural, even though they are in such an absurd plotline.  She is especially good in her conversations with Hale’s Hermia, with Deater’s natural conversation bouncing well off of Hale’s perfect comedic timing.  Director Dillon Bates did an excellent job staging the play and coaching his cast, with Clark and Deater having easy chemistry, Nichols coming across as appropriately slimy from beyond the grave, and Kageleiri’s stern disposition not getting in the way of clear care for her deceased son.  Although this play’s main message of technology getting in the way of human interaction may or may not stand the test of time, it is still a fascinating study of how death works in the digital age, and was extremely well put on by PCT.  Bravo!