Parallel Universes, Portals to the Afterlife and Why Sarah Ruhl is a Playwright and not a Pearl Diver in Costa Rica

Some see life simply - we are born and after awhile, we die.. Kind of like a moth.

Others say we reincarnate. One minute you’re sitting poolside in a bikini and the next minute you’re Sammy Kaye’s butler.

Some religions believe the most spiritual souls return to Earth as a cow - which might explain our country’s high obesity rate.

Some religions believe in a God, while other religions believe in many gods and there once there was a small cult in Los Angeles who believed God was one of the Lennon Sisters though they eventually split when they couldn’t agree on which one it was.

Back when I grew up in New Jersey, there was a gypsy psychic/fortune teller named Mrs. Fatima, and she would give me small details on past and future lives of mine and explain parallel universes as well.

Parallel Universes always intrigued me for this reason. When you make a major decision in your life, whatever path you didn’t take, the universe takes for you. In other words, your soul duplicates itself and goes down both paths.

In fact, according to Mrs. Fatima, none of these souls are aware of the other. And it happens for all our decisions, literally millions of our souls living millions of different lives all being us. No wonder I have such a bad credit rating. Pretty wild concept.

Here was a good example she once gave me. In one universe, John F. Kennedy was the President. In another, he was my barber.

And then there’s portals. Several characters in Ruhl’s play are sucked in, tossed and yanked into portals that takes them to a whole new place and a whole new journey. As for us, we can accidentally step into an invisible portal and suddenly be sucked, tossed and yanked somewhere else. One second we are here and then poof! You disappear and are somewhere else. Something I’m sure Hugh Grant has thought about over the years.

In Dead Man’s Cell Phone, the characters have souls that live on, leave the body and go off on their own adventures. Mrs. Fatima said we all have what she called ’traveling souls’, souls that leave as our bodies sleep and return when our bodies awake. That explains why we have vivid and sometimes lucid dreams, and it explains why I once had to pay a $100 fine when my soul left my body and was caught shoplifting groceries at Target.

So how does all this get you to buy a ticket to see Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone? It doesn’t…. But what it does do is gets you thinking of buying that ticket and now if you don’t buy that ticket another of you will and he will have the pleasure of this wonderful evening out at the theater, and you will have stayed home yet somehow paid for it. Just another reason to watch your credit score.

So now, in this universe Sarah Ruhl is a famous playwright and not a Pearl Diver in Costa Rica - but, and we wouldn’t know this, but somewhere in her youth she might have been fascinated watching pearl divers in Costa Rica and thought about being one when she grew up. If indeed that happened, and if indeed you accidentally walk into a portal or your soul leaves your body and you transport to Costa Rica - look her up - they say she RUHLS over all other pearl divers except one - The Amazing Hugh Granto.

Richard Dominick