OK, so I heard that the folks at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation really don’t like the money they award called “genius grants,” but that label has kind of stuck, and it’s not like it’s derogatory or anything.
Anyway, one of those MacArthur winners is playwright Sarah Ruhl, who also was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and wrote a play that starts this week at Milwaukee’s Pink Banana Theatre Co. The play is “Dead Man’s Cell Phone.” Critics have used words such as “beguiling,” “bizarre,” “zany,” “fresh,” “humorous,” “oddball,” “lyrical” and “biting” to describe it.
From the web: “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… A work about how we memorialize the dead and how that remembering, changes us. It is the odyssey of a woman forced to confront her own assumptions about morality, redemption, and the need to connect in a technologically obsessed world.”
Pink Banana’s production of “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” runs from Friday, Nov. 3 through Saturday, Nov. 12, at 255 S. Water St. (That’s the new home of Next Act Theater.) All the shows are at 8 p.m. and cost $18, except for Monday, Nov. 7, which is pay-what-you-can. To order tickets, please click here.