Dead Man's Cell Phone Literary Devices

White Clouds and Blue Skies
Dead Man’s Cell Phone is a fun and quirky play about a shy and timid woman who finds a man dead at a café with his cell phone ringing, and she feels compelled to answer it. The Actors Theatre in charlotte did a fantastic job in presenting this story. The actors, wardrobe, stage setup, and props were all very unique and creative. One aspect that really grabbed my attention was the blue sky and clouds background throughout the play.
Blue skies and clouds can be connected with a lot of different ideas. They often come along with a great summer day. The air is warm and it seems like there is endless possibilities of what can be done. A cloud can also be thought as a lonely spot all by itself in a large blue frontier with hundreds of the same cloud all around it. All of these ideas can be related to Jean in the story of Dead Man’s Cell Phone.
Jean is a seemingly lonely woman who probrobly lives her life day to day searching for a purpose.
She is like a cloud in a sea of blue watching the world without much interaction. She is an ordinary girl that blends in with the rest of the population. One day Jean is in a café eating her bisque. The man’s cell phone next to her keeps ringing without him answering. When she goes over to his table to ask him to please answer it she realizes he is dead. She must have felt a connection with this man because she feels compelled to honor his memory by answering his cell phone and meeting with his family to console them. Jean even goes as far as telling lies to the family that Gordon (the dead man) loved them. Jean thought anything was possible and thought she had a purpose to honor this man she doesn’t
know.
Jean continues to meet Gordon’s family and even has dinner with Gordon’s widow, Gordon’s mother, and Gordon’s brother. Jean instantly feels a connection with Gordon’s brother, Dwight. He is another average man. He works at a stationery shop. Dwight has lived his life isolated and lonely in his brother’s shadow. He is a lot like jean in the instance of a lonely cloud watching the world around him. At one point in the story when Jean and Dwight are together, paper houses fall from the sky to possibly symbolize that these two lives are joining together to be with one another.
Later on in the story Jean actually goes to “Heaven” and meets Gordon. After a long conversation between the two, Jean realizes that Gordon really is an evil person and did not deserve to be honored the way Jean tried to for him. At that point she realizes that a lonely, somewhat boring stationery worker named Dwight is who she really is in love with.
Gordon’s Mother is an older woman. She is very aristocratic and has a hard time dealing with the death of her son. She feels that she is lost without him. After Gordon’s death she seeks the support of everyone around her. She even welcomes Jean, whom she had never met before. By the end of the story it is apparent that Mrs. Gottlieb is the only person that truly loves Gordon. She decides that she is going to join him in “Heaven” amongst the clouds.
Dead Man’s Cell Phone is a fantastic play that represents unlimited possibilities for love and life. It portrays that love can be found anywhere. Two lonely “clouds” in a world of evil and plainness can meet on any circumstance and fall in love.