T. Ryder Smith to Replace Bill Camp in Dead Man's Cell Phone

T. Ryder Smith will replace Bill Camp in the title role of Dead Man's Cell Phone, the new play by Sarah Ruhl The Clean House, Eurydice currently in previews at Playwrights Horizons' Mainstage Theater. Camp, who is currently appearing in the play, must leave because the production schedule for his upcoming film, Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp and directed by Michael Mann, has been moved up. Smith will join Dead Man's Cell Phone on February 19 and opening night will remain on March 4, as scheduled.

The cast of Dead Man's Cell Phone includes Tony, Emmy and two-time Golden Globe winner Mary-Louise Parker Proof, Weeds, Kathleen Chalfant, David Aaron Baker, Carla Harting and Kelly Maurer, directed by Anne Bogart.

In Dead Man's Cell Phone, Gordon Smith is dead, but his cell phone lives on. When Jean Parker, an empathetic museum worker, answers his ringing phone beside her in a café, she is soon playing unwitting comforter and confessor to the man's grieving friends and family. Before she knows it, Jean is ensnarled in the underbelly of the dead man's bizarre life. Sarah Ruhl's latest work charts the odyssey of a woman forced to confront her assumptions about morality, redemption and the need to connect in a technology-obsessed world.

Smith last appeared at Playwrights Horizons in the premiere of David Greenspan's She Stoops to Comedy and worked with Ruhl in the Goodman Theatre's production of her epic Passion Play in which he played Queen Elizabeth, Adolf Hitler and Ronald Reagan. He shared a 2007 Drama Desk Award as part of the Outstanding Ensemble for the three-actor/fifty-character play Lebensraum and earned a 2002 Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Solo Performance in Underneath the Lintel. Additional New York credits include Thom Pain: Based on Nothing and the world-premiere productions of Richard Foreman's King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe and The Gods Are Pounding My Head.