{"id":12101,"date":"2009-05-12T19:01:55","date_gmt":"2009-05-12T23:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2009\/05\/12\/12101.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:52:02","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:52:02","slug":"book-report-dead-mans-cell-pho","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2009\/05\/12\/book-report-dead-mans-cell-pho\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Dead Man’s Cell Phone"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger had picked up The Clean House and Other Plays<\/i> by Sarah Ruhl, largely because it came to hand on the shelf, but also because I had read reviews and comments about her other plays. That included a remarkable essay on her play Dead Man’s Cell Phone<\/i> that I think I read in the local paper when the play was produced here, although I don’t exactly remember now, and it appears to have originally been for the Los Angeles Times<\/a>. Or not. I don’t honestly remember the sequence of events.\n

Anyway, I took our The Clean House and other Plays<\/i>, and I let it sit around for a while, and then I read The Clean House<\/i>, which is a really remarkable play. I mean, there are plays that I read that I think this is why I like theater<\/i>. One of those plays that would not work on film, or as a novel, or on the radio, a play that makes use of the stage and the presence of the actors and the audience. I haven’t written up a Book Report because I haven’t read all the Other Plays. And then I saw Dead Man’s Cell Phone<\/a> on the shelf at the other library, the one that only lets me have New Books for seven days, so I skipped ahead and read that.\n

It seems like a good play, and there are bits of it that might work very well, but it isn’t anything close to as walloping as The Clean House<\/i>. It went over the top, here and there, which was a Good Thing, but somehow the admixture of banality and extremity didn’t knock me out the way it did in the other play. I’m glad I read them in the order I did; I’m very much looking forward to reading (or possibly someday seeing) her newest play, In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)<\/i>, which deals with sexuality and technology from a very different perspective, it seems.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger finds the\u2014hey, why can’t we call them mobile phones, like they do in England? I mean, who cares whether they are cellular, right? The important thing is that they are mobile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12101"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18767,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12101\/revisions\/18767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}