Second Stage Readings Series

Dead Man’s Cell Phone

By Sarah Ruhl

Directed by Phil Johnson

Featuring Sandy Campbell, Jason Maddy, Thomas Edward Daugherty, Vicky Dawson, Leigh Akin,  Yolanda Franklin & Mikaela Macias

An incessantly ringing cell phone in a quiet café, a stranger at the next table who has had enough, and a dead man with a lot of loose ends…so begins Dead Man’s Cell Phone. A wildly imaginative new comedy by Pulitzer Prize finalist Sarah Ruhl. A work about how we memorialize the dead and how that remembering changes us. It is the odyssey of a woman forced to confront her own assumptions about morality, redemption, and the need to connect in a tech-obsessed world.

Monday, May 29, 2023  7:30 PM

San Diego Musical Theatre

4650 Mercury Street, San Diego, CA 92111

Meet the Cast

Sandy Campbell

Actor (Jean)

Sandy Is thrilled to be a part of this reading. Associate Artist at Lamb’s Players: A Christmas Carol, The Light in the Piazza, The Music Man, American Rhythm, 1776, Fiddler on the Roof, Boomers and Beau Gest. Resident Artist at Cygnet Theater: Parade, Noises Off, The Norman Conquests, A Little Night Music, Communicating Doors, Assassins. San Diego REP: Mother Road, Rapture, Blister, Burn, Clybourne Park. Other favorites include Handbagged (Moxie), Zhivago ( La Jolla Playhouse), Passion and Master Class (ION), Mr. And Mrs. Fitch (Backyard Renaissance), Sister Act (SDMT), Macbeth (Intrepid Shakespeare Company). Sandy is also a cabaret artist and her CD Crazy World is available on Amazon and Apple Music. She recently directed Good People for Oceanside Theatre Company.

Jason Maddy

Actor (Gordon)

Jason holds an MFA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and is a proud member of Actor’s Equity Association. San Diego Theatre credits include productions at San Diego Repertory Theatre, The Old Globe Theatre, Cygnet Theatre, North Coast Repertory Theatre, Moonlight Stage Productions, San Diego Musical Theater, Lamb’s Players Theatre, and others. Regional credits include The Utah Shakespearean Festival, Illinois Shakespeare Festival, and Kingsmen Shakespeare Festival. Jason is currently the Head of the Acting program at San Diego School for the Creative and Performing Arts.

Thomas Edward Daugherty

Actor (Dwight)

Theatre credits include: Quinn Carney in The Ferryman at New Village Arts; National Tours (Ragtime, Showboat); Kennedy Center (Bounce); Goodman Theatre (All’s Well That Ends Well, Bounce); Chicago Shakespeare (As You Like It, Winter’s Tale, Troilus & Cressida); Drury Lane Oakbrook (1776, The Foreigner, A Chorus Line, Big); Marriott Lincolnshire (Houdini, the Musical); Apple Tree Theatre (Old Wicked Songs, The Dying Gaul); Montana’s Shakespeare in the Parks (Macbeth, The Country Wife). Tom’s day job is as an employment attorney at Klinedinst PC. 

Vicky Dawson

Actor (Mrs. Gottlieb)

Vicky has worked out of New York and LA as an actress and director in film, television, and theater for over 50 years. She currently has three films streaming on Amazon Prime, Toxicity, Amazon Queen, and About Hope. She has been seen in over 100 national commercials and spent two years on both Another World and As the World Turns. She and her husband recently relocated to the San Diego area after raising their family. They are now raising two very active Australian Shepherds, Blue and Charlie. Vicky is excited to be working with The Roustabouts Theater Co. and is looking forward to getting more involved with the San Diego theater community. 

Leigh Akin

Actor (Hermia)

Leigh Akin, is a singer, actor, and illustrator. She has performed across the US in theaters including Soho Rep, North Coast Rep, Bronx Opera, and Skylight Music Theater. At SRT, Leigh has performed Joan in Love Song and Joanna in Move Over Mrs. Markham.  Most recently she was seen as Rachel Parsons in The Outsider and in New Fortune Theatre's production of As You Like It, and in the west coast premier of Book of Leaves with Roustabouts Theatre Co. During quarantine she kept herself busy by producing a series of cooking-show-cabarets from her apartment called "Leigh Sings Songs and Makes Waffles." You can watch them all and see more of her work at leighellenakin.com

Yolanda Franklin

Actor (The Stranger)

Yolanda is excited to be working with The Roustabouts Theatre Co. She is an award-winning actor, director, producer, and now appointed Artistic Director for Common Ground Theatre, which is Theatre-in-Residence at The La Jolla Playhouse for a second-year term.  She recently directed The Cell Plays for the WOW Festival. You can find out all about upcoming shows at commongroundtheatre.com 

Mikaela Rae Macias

Actor (Stage Directions)

Mikaela Rae Macias is grateful to read Stage Directions for Dead Man’s Cell Phone. Previous shows you may have seen her in include Noel, Noel (San Diego Symphony), Songs for a New World (Teatros San Diego), The Mad Ones (Wildsong Productions), Into the Breeches (North Coast Repertory Theatre), The Mother of the Maid (Moxie Theatre, Craig Noel Nomination), and Chronicles of Kalki (Moxie Theatre). The next production you can see her in is Hamlet at Southwestern Summer Shakespeare Festival. She is currently a 4th-year Theatre Performance student enrolled at San Diego State University. Thank you to her mom, Tita, sister, and little cousin for being reminders of what powerful women can do.

Meet the Creative Team

Sarah Ruhl

Playwright

Sarah Ruhl is an award-winning American playwright, author, essayist, and professor. Her plays include The Oldest Boy, Dear Elizabeth, Stage Kiss, In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2010); The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2005; Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 2004); Passion Play (Pen American Award, Fourth Freedom Forum Playwriting Award from the Kennedy Center); Dead Man’s Cell Phone (Helen Hayes Award for Best New Play); Melancholy Play, Demeter in the City (nine NAACP Image Award nominations); Scenes From Court Life, How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, Eurydice, Orlando, and Late: A Cowboy Song. Her plays have been produced on Broadway and across the country as well as internationally and translated into fourteen languages. Originally from Chicago, Ms. Ruhl received her M.F.A. from Brown University, where she studied with Paula Vogel. She is the recipient of a Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a PEN Center Award for mid-career playwrights, a Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, and a Lilly award. She is a member of 13P and New Dramatists and won the MacArthur Fellowship in 2006. She teaches at Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Phil Johnson

Director

Phil Johnson is the Artistic Director and proud co-founder of The Roustabouts Theatre Co. He’s directed for The Roustabouts, Scripps Ranch Theatre, Playwrights Project, and started the new Great Jewish American Playwright Series/JPlays at the JCC. He’s appeared at almost all San Diego theaters and in numerous original solo shows including A Jewish Joke which opened Off-Broadway in NYC in 2019. As an actor, he’s played in Les Misérables on Broadway and on tour; Canadian production of Sunset Boulevard; and the 1st National Co. of Miss Saigon. He is a two-time winner of the SD Critics Circle Craig Noel Award for acting, and he is a founder of the San Diego Theatre Alliance. He last appeared in North Coast Rep's ‘The Remarkable Mr. Holmes' with Guntopia's Katie Karel.