"Dead man cell phone?" "No, dead man sell organs."
***
I was staying in school on Friday, as per my Friday-habit-of-staying-back-in-school (say hi if you see me at my class bench), watching my classmates go for the Friday run of Dead Man's Cell Phone (written by Sarah Ruhl), produced by Hwa Chong's ELDDFS, and watching them flock back to the bench when it ended. When I asked them how it was, many people's faces became weird, the kind of expression you give when you're trying to grasp words from your dramatic vocabulary and realize that a) your dramatic vocabulary is quite small and b) none of the words fit your experience. The first word everyone gave was, "Uh..." The first non-filler phrase everyone gave was, "I don't know" or "I'm not sure". Even the more artistically inclined friends I have gave variations of "I cannot give a definite judgment."
How mysterious. Thus it is with a metaphorical deerstalker on my head and a pipe in my mouth that I entered LT3 and watched the second and last run of DMCP on Saturday, 2 April 2011. And when I emerged from LT3, two hours later, I have an elementary idea why people had such vague impressions about it.
A lot of it has to do with the audience-actors interaction. When the play finally started at 7.50pm, 20 minutes after the stated starting time, the LT was packed with people promised a comedy and a love story, but Dead Man's Cell Phone isn't exactly a romcom, although it is supposed to be romantic and funny, at certain points. The absurdism and magic realism weaved into the script is key to understanding the play - but the general feeling I got from the audience was "This barely makes sense, I think it's supposed to be funny/artsy, but no one else is laughing so I won't." Which is a pity because Ruhl's dialogue is sensitive and subtle, and requires equally dedicated expression and acting to work their magic onstage. After the show, I was talking to one of the crew, who confided that Friday's run was better because "the audience was better." Apparently, the Friday audience laughed at more jokes. I was mystified. I know theatre, by its nature, is an interactive art – but this was the first time I’ve heard someone blame the audience for not “getting” the play. True, sometimes the message is lost between the stage and the seats, or that the audience is too distracted. This happened many times during the first half of the show. The solution is not to replace the audience, but to heighten their dramatic attention - remove the distracting elements, delivering one's lines better, and allow what is said (and meant) to sink in.
Let me raise some examples. I believe the supposed failure (of audience engagement) in the first part can be attributed to the very demanding role of Jean (Tan Ee Hsien) in the first scene. It is demanding because Jean is the only speaking character in the first scene, and the audience grapples for its first sense of the story through her. It is also demanding because Jean is supposed to be "sort of nondescript" as described by Gordon. Sadly, where Ee Hsien tried to act out "nondescript", I saw "disconnection". Although she was our protagonist, I felt very little empathy or investment towards her throughout the play. Ee Hsien fared better when she interacted with other characters, but she didn't have the free-spiritedness to carry off Jean's irresistible attraction to her outer world and her disregard of her self. For any thespian, to disregard the self is difficult. But I believe the character of Jean required just that - it required a desire to experience the external world more than her own mindscape ("I want to remember everything. Even other people's memories."). Ee Hsien was too self-conscious, and I felt that her best acting occurred when she is involved in Gordon's family as opposed to her moments of solitude and self-reflection.
On the other hand, Gregory Alva Ng who played Gordon had fine control in what exactly his character wanted to say and how to say it. The monologue in the second act required an absolute self-assurance, which Gregory delivered with precision and delight. A lesser actor may have passed off as arrogant, but Gregory’s Gordon was subtle in his sorrow, quick in his attitude shifts and confident in his position. The constant striding and well-intentioned blocking Gregory used to punctuate his points gives the audience enough time to digest the meaning behind the dialogue. Gordon was entirely believable and empathizable, despite his choice of career and infidelity; for that I applaud the actor.
Of course the characters of Jean and Gordon asks for different treatment by the actors - Jean is sentimental, quirky, spontaneous and fearless in her own little way; the audience will find it difficult to connect with her individuality; while Gordon is equally self-centred, the audience gels with him much quicker because he is egoistic - he demands attention and effortlessly gets it; his ruthlessness is a charm; his state of being dead, and being obsessed by Jean, requires you to listen to his story, a dead man’s tale. But for both characters – in fact all characters – Ruhl has given them a unique voice and something worth pondering about. While sometimes Ruhl’s dialogue may border on preachy lamentations (c.f. the Other Woman’s complaint about modern women’s inadequacies), many other lines are nuanced, funny in context, deeply ironic and worth some slow and leisurely thinking. Which brings me to a major complaint – the pacing. Be it the fault of the actors or the director (Jesslyn Chee), I found the dialogue sliding too quickly from one character to the next, without enough time for the impact of the words to reach the audience. This is why many a times, conversations in DMCP sounded deliberately obfuscating and alienating to the audience, when it is simply delivered clumsily, without special attention to stress on different words and the varied meanings the dialogue could have produced. I believe this is also why I found Gordon’s monologue the most effective – Gregory had complete control over his words, without being trapped by the rhythms of conversation – and scenes with more than three talking characters the least effective. The dinner scene was particularly difficult to watch because each actor focused on their parts instead of the exchange of words and the relationships between the characters, which should have primacy in a collaborative scene.
I had a major problem with Dwight (Werty Heng). He was meant to be an awkward, overshadowed, and needy younger brother – this was pretty much covered by Werty. But Dwight is also supposed to go through a transformation into a more assertive, eloquent, and responsive person, an important aspect which I felt Werty failed to explore. Take the small monologue where Dwight talks about the signals flying through the air, blahblahblah. This represented Dwight’s newfound verbosity – previously silenced, he should be flowing with confidence, overjoyed at finding a listener in Jean. But Werty stayed in awkward Dwight mode, stumbling over those lines which represented his freedom. Just before Dwight and Jean kissed, when Dwight was supposed to be aggrieved by Jean’s involvement in Gordon’s business, Werty chose (actively or passively) to stick to a deadpan face, cornering Jean. Not having read that part of the script, I actually had a small jolt of panic, thinking, oh my he’s psychotic and he’s gonna rape her. When they kissed, it wasn’t much better – my friend exclaimed during the intermission – “Where got people kiss don’t move one!” All the galaxies and stars and glowing houses and candles only served to strengthen the disconnection, which is highly ironic given the play’s insistence on human connection. I know there is always a dilemma between the modesty of the actress (i.e. “Okay I kiss you but no tongue ar.”) and the believability of the kiss. Sadly, modesty won and we, the audience, had to work our imaginations extra-hard and tell ourselves, “Alright, their lips are together, this means they’re in love. Okay. Okay. Lol where got people kiss so long one. Wa got stars. Wa got paper houses. So romantic. Okay curtain closing. Wa still kissing. Lol.” Even at the end of the play, where Jean and Dwight kissed yet again, the connection wasn’t there, which contributed to the audience’s disenfranchisement. Love requires not just paper but also connection. What was delivered was, in the play’s language, sending an “ily:)” text message.
I don’t have much to say for the other characters, but I will try. Mrs Gottlieb (Joy Chee) was played by a valiant 18 year old, who tried her best being the manic and imposing matriarch. I give her 4 stars for manic and 2 for imposing. I liked Jennifer Yip’s rendition of Hermia, especially the drunk scene, but she was still rather clumsy on the emotional scenes (c.f. “You have given me back ten years of my marriage”), I suggest, again, more pauses, and more emphasis. I know people will be mad at me saying this, but I wished the Other Woman (Tung Shi Yun) had bigger boobs, because somehow big boobs make the character more believable. Shi Yun also has the bad luck to deliver the most clichéd line in the entire play – I’m talking about “Oh, Gordon!” which she said with as much sincerity as Chinese pork.
I liked the director’s treatment of the fight scene between Jean and the Other Woman (outlandishly but appropriately dressed in a red parka), which presented the right amount of absurdism without deviating too much from the story; however, I am confused by the lesbian subtext because lesbians, like lesbian sex, confuse me. Other sexual references in the text, e.g. Dwight’s paper fetishism, I regard as unfortunate and distracting flaws in the script.
On set (Andrea Quek) and lighting (Esther Lee) design, I was unimpressed by the “minimalist, stylized, empty urban landscape... a la Edward Hopper”, mainly because other theatre groups have mentioned and used the DMCP-Hopper connection (see here, here, and here), so it wasn't original. After the play, I went to Google “Edward Hopper” and read through his entire Wikipedia page, and searched up some of his paintings. Edward Hopper was known to be a mild-mannered man and probably wouldn’t have been so hysterical as to roll in his grave, but he probably would have frowned and buried his face in the nearest clump of dirt.
One thing was the lighting. Hopper’s paintings employed lighting that was almost Baroque-like in its dramatic discrimination between light and darkness, but with the sterile quality of the Precisionists. Sadly, the technical constraints of LT3 often result in faded light edges instead of sharp, geometrical ones; spotlights became ambient light; and where the scene required a whiter, more clinical light, the stage could only provide a diffused yellow wash. Regardless, I wished the lighting crew could have tried to work around their limitations and surprised us with creative solutions instead of saying, “Oh, you know, yeah. Sorry.”
I disliked the set not only because it didn’t deliver the emptiness and alienation it promised, but also because of the problem with space. I thought the flexible set of three white flats, which certain media were projected on, didn’t provide the flexibility the play required. Especially, when scenes required a much smaller space for intimate one-on-one conversations, the flats, which were fixed to the ground, couldn’t be shifted to bring the stage space closer. I, however, thought that the scene in the stationery shop worked – the scattered boxes and rolls of paper had a shrinking effect on the “room”. Otherwise, the stage was far too big for the cafe scene and other scenes with less than three characters.
Finally, I am mostly satisfied with the film producer (Kwok Li Chen), who did his best with the disjointed images of the subway and surrealist black-and-white images when Gordon did his monologue. The TV static when Gordon dies is great, concept and coordination-wise. I am less appreciative of the space image when Jean and Dwight kissed, and the random sparks of colours which also appeared in parts of Gordon’s monologue. I don’t know who is responsible for the audio which played in the limbo scene, the tongue-in-cheek “music of the spheres”, but I like it very much. Actually I like that whole scene very much, except the end when Gordon shouts, “Mother!” which... just didn’t work.
So DMCP was not bad. It’s not bad given I only paid $7 to see it. I would have sympathized with the lack of time/time-management and the technical limitations, in light of BT1, but that’s not really my job, no. Still, I hope the next production (in May! I read parts of the script, it’s quite funny! Not sure why I’m advertising for LD!) will be better. I will probably be there too.
Dead Man’s Cell Phone, written by Sarah Ruhl and produced by Hwa Chong ELDDFS, has finished its run.
god i love the joke
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