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Age recommendation: Sarah Ruhl’s quirky, poetic serio-comedy contains strong profanity and a frank discussion about sex. It deals with moral questions about the black market trade in human organs, as well as telling lies to try to make people's lives better.

Please note: Children under 6 are not admitted to plays or other events.

e-Luminations: The Hopper Influence
Click here to read an excerpt from Illuminations, OSF's 64-page guide to the plays.

Videos:
Thoughts on Sarah Ruhl and the play (3:46)
Early thoughts on the production (3:51)
Why see this play? (1:51)

Synopsis: All of us can remember a moment in our lives when an impulsive decision—introducing ourselves to someone, turning right instead of left, saying yes to a blind date—set us on a course that altered our lives forever. We didn’t know it at the time, but that moment of spontaneity resulted in finding a spouse, a career, or perhaps a life purpose.

And so it is with our heroine, Jean.

As the play opens, the solitary Jean sits quietly in a café. She is bothered by the insistent ringing of a cell phone at a nearby table. She finally asks the owner of the phone to answer it, but eventually she realizes that he can’t—he has just died. In a life-changing moment of impulsiveness, Jean answers his phone, and thus begins a wild journey into the world that was inhabited by the newly deceased man, Gordon.

Having set a tentative toe into the rabbit hole, Jean continues to answer his phone and suddenly finds herself in the front row seat of the roller coaster that was Gordon’s life. His family and his mysterious unidentified profession confront Jean squarely.

Gordon’s mother, wife, brother and mistress are intensely curious as to who Jean is and why she has his cell phone.

Jean walks a delicate line between self-revelation and information-gathering. Despite knowing nothing about Gordon’s chosen career, she identifies herself as his co-worker. “Incoming or outgoing?” she is asked. “Incoming,” Jean responds.

To deflect attention from herself, Jean invents for each of Gordon’s loved ones the last loving words he spoke about them. Despite their initial disbelief that Gordon would actually say such nice things, the family members are gratified and comforted by his words.

Jean develops a special bond with Gordon’s brother, Dwight. They begin a tentative courtship, cemented by a visit to the stationery store that Dwight manages. Jean has a thing for stationery. “I think heaven must be like an embossed invitation,” she says.

The mystery and tension of Jean’s journey tighten as Gordon’s shadowy career intrudes and his co-workers zero in on her, trying to wrest the cell phone and its valuable contents from her. As Jean finally discovers Gordon’s line of work, she is thrust into an odyssey that spans not just the globe but the gap between life and death.

For a character who begins the play dead in a chair, Gordon has quite a bit to say. After a nasty dustup over the cell phone in which Jean is knocked unconscious, she encounters Gordon, and they have a provocative tête-à-tête about the afterlife and the nature of true love.

Jean returns to her corporeal self and is quite clear about what she needs to make her life complete. Gordon’s family members also choose their various paths to love and enlightenment.—Eddie Wallace