Dead Man's Cell Phone

I went to the theater last Saturday night.  My friend, Casey, and I watched Eureka College students in Dead Man’s Cell Phone, which was a bizarre and black comedy.  The play was weird, even by my standards.

In the course of the story, a woman, Jean, finds a dead man and elects to keep the man’s cell phone.  Eventually, through the twists and turns of the plot, she is killed and meets up in an odd purgatory like place with the dead man, Gordon.  He has been alone in this place for the course of the play, because in this version of the afterlife, the person a character loved most was reunited with that character for eternity.  The whole thing does not make much sense until Gordon explains it like so, “most mothers love their children the most, the children their fathers, and the fathers always love the family dog the most.”  One can easily see how this version of the afterlife can be complex and/or interesting.

So Jean and Gordon begin to speak and it comes out that Gordon did not love anybody except his self, and that Jean, who obsessed about the dead man whose cell phone she collected, loved Gordon more than any other person in the world.  So, in Jean’s death, she was united with Gordon, breaking what would have been his eternal solitude.  Jean then explains that Gordon’s mother loved him so much that she committed the rest of her life to mourning her son.  Gordon, feeling loved, disappears to wait until his mother dies and to wait for that time when she will arrive to him.

Jean is then left alone.  She can hear the sounds of all the conversations of the living (it may only be cell phone conversations- the idea is that, like words on paper, the air retains words) but she is alone. 

In that moment, I looked at the woman left loveless and alone for eternity, and I distinctly thought, “That is Hell in the truest sense.”  The idea of a loveless solitude for all eternity is possibly the worst Hell imaginable, much worse than any sort of physical torture. 

Jean discovered that she loved Dwight (Gordon’s brother) the most, and was reunited with him after coming back to life.  At least in this play, and maybe in life, there is still hope for those wandering souls who still haven’t figured it all out yet.  Maybe… hopefully…