The set of Magic Circle Theatre’s production of Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone is abstract, constructed of vertical panels painted with diagrams of what looks like the human ear and heart, book-ended by two gauzy panels. The floor is painted like a cell phone keypad. Two cafe tables sit onstage, but any allusion to an actual cafe is left up to your imagination. It all seems to portend that we’re entering a metaphysical, psychological arena.

And so we are.

Jean (Linda Dale), wearing a casual get-up that looks more college co-ed than the quirky, emotional woman she is, sits at one table, nose buried in a book while meekly spooning soup into her mouth. Gordon (Skip Kadish), dressed in a dapper-but-not-pretentious suit, sits at the other table – stock still and staring off in space. His cell phone rings unanswered on his table. He’s the dead man of the title, but it takes Jean a moment to catch up with us. After entreating him to answer it, to no avail, she answers instead. She has a disjointed conversation with the person on the other side, then finally realizes that the man whose phone she just answered is… you know… kaput.

“You’re going to be just fine,” Jean says to him. She’s not very freaked out. She’s almost giddy, in fact, and starts talking to Gordon’s lifeless visage.

Jean keeps answering more and more of Gordon’s phone calls – his mother, his wife, a business associate. She attends his funeral and ingratiates herself on Gordon’s mother, Mrs. Gottlieb, who grieves in a curiously angry way, played by Jane Press.

Press nearly steals all her scenes, partly because Mrs. Gottlieb is such a severe, obnoxious, honest character; partly because she possesses an unloosed acid tongue a la Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; but also because Press plays her like a domineering Jewish mom stereotype, the accent straight outta of Queens, New Yawk. And that’s OK in a play that mixes dream sequences with visits to the dead, spoof with sentiment, physical comedy with metaphorical stuff (humans are becoming increasingly disjointed and fragmented is one major statement).

Jean is an anomaly. Dale plays her doe-eyed and innocent, hiding behind a curtain of blond bangs, voice booming unexpectedly, like an older person would overplay a younger person; meek like a mouse in some instances, flinty in others (when she insists on hanging onto Gordon’s cell phone and answering its calls). Jean tries to fix Gordon’s somewhat grieving but mostly just dysfunctional family by telling clumsy and well-meaning lies about Gordon’s affections for them. And it’s a testament to these people’s broken relationship to the man that, no matter how uncharacteristic, they believe what she says about him. And maybe this is Dale’s nuanced acting working, but Jean seems to almost buy into her own lies, beautiful constructs she’s admiring.

Jean lies to Gordon’s mistress – played Saturday by Jolie Kobrinksy (alternating with Dierdre McCauley) – telling her that Gordon’s last words were poetically affectionate of her. Kobrinsky, who plays the “other woman” with confidence (“A woman should know how to walk in a room. ‘I know how to walk in these shoes!’”) and vulnerability, lets her character melt over the kind conceit.

When Gordon’s wife, Hermia (Sherry Kefalas), drunk and swirling with pathos (is she crying or laughing or both?), confides in Jean about her distant marriage with Gordon, Kefalas plays the previously timid character with gusto.

“I should have spent more time trying to love him,” she says, “instead of wishing he was someone else.” But, drunkenly (and Kefalas does drunk good), she turns on Jean: “You don’t know your ass from your Dickens! Ha!”

When Gordon reappears in the second half (yes, Skip Kadish has lines), he reveals himself to be a charming, pragmatic, amoral kind of guy who thinks it’s a kick in the head that he’s dead. He gets a monologue that’s aimed at the audience, adds dimension to the other characters, and addresses, most directly, death – including who a dying man would want to expend his last words on and why.

Comedy, philosophy, metaphysics: Dead Man’s Cell Phone shuffles them all together in one deck, like a cut-n-paste job, which is one of the trademarks of modern art and culture. Though director Robin McKee keeps the pace moving forward, the narrative vignettes zigzag. It goes shorthand in some places: A romance between Gordon’s brother Dwight (Richard Boynton) and Jean skips ahead, like fast forwarding to the action sequences of a movie. Which is fine in a work like this, where the cryptic and poetic whole is greater than its parts. There are messages floating around in there: humans need real closeness, instead of relying on the cold algorithms of technology; death is not The End; our lives carry more significance than we give them. But like the digital cell phone noises that shoot through the atmosphere in Dead Man’s Cell Phone, the signals that carry those messages are elusive and fragmented. It’ll take some work to piece it together. We might have to have a conversation about it. With no cell phones.

DEAD MAN’S CELL PHONE plays 7:30pm Friday and Saturday, 2pm Sunday, through June 27, at Magic Circle Theatre, 8 El Caminito, Carmel Valley Village, Carmel Valley. $22/general; $20/student, senior. 659-7500, www.magiccircletheatre.net