Playwright Sarah Ruhl is wowing the coasts with low tech entertainment about the newest trends in electrical intimacy and personal dependence on technology. After titillating Berkeley Rep audiences with her “vibrator play,” Ruhl’s new comedy, "Dead Man's Cell Phone" opens this weekend (May 9) at The San Francisco Playhouse.

The play was recently staged in New York with Mary Louise Parker, taking a break from her soft-core encore as a morally compromised sweet-heart of a drug-dealing suburban mom on Weeds. “Cell Phone” is the story of a an incessantly ringing abandoned phone, an innocent, irritated bystander and dead man with a lot of loose ends. You do the math.

This past winter, Berkeley Rep staged "In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)", Ruhl's examination of women's sexuality – and the invention of the vibrator --in the Victorian era. The play, which premiered in Berkeley, has the distinction of being the 50th play that Berkeley Rep sends to Broadway. The play will open in New York in November. Sarah Ruhl is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant and Pulitzer Prize finalist for her play The Clean House.

I’m thinking her next play needs to be about Facebook infidelity or murder and killer apps.