Well, there’s Rick Foucheaux in a chair playing a dead guy again. And look — Sarah Marshall is acting crazy as only she can. And come to think of it, this is another Sarah Ruhl play that concerns itself with the afterlife. Is there anything original happening here?

Yep. Pretty much everything, actually. Dead Man’s Cell Phone, the world-premiere Ruhl now onstage at Woolly Mammoth, tests your patience a bit in the early going, but ultimately rewards you with a funny and surreal evening of theatre. If the opening scenes sometimes feel like a Saturday Night Live sketch gone on way too long, the second act, especially, shows us that Ruhl — and everyone else in director Rebecca Bayla Taichman’s unhinged production — knows exactly what she’s doing.

Synopsis? There’s this guy, see. And he, uh, dies. But his phone just won’t stop ringing! Jean, the woman at the café table next to him, clearly doesn’t have all that much going on in her own life, so no sooner does she answer the phone just to stop its infernal keening than she’s found a purpose. She attends his funeral and meets his family, embellishing all the while the posthumous role she’s invented for herself in the expired fellow’s life. Does hilarity ensure? Most assuredly. But this is closer to a Wes Anderson or a Hal Hartley movie than to the Weekend of Bernie’s slapstick it probably sounds like.

Ruhl is tackling the big ideas here — obligation, mortality, and what happens to our souls (not to mention our bodies) after we stop answering. From the ingenious minimalism of the set (and the business suits worn by the stagehands who manipulate it) to the archness of the performances, this show a highly stylized affair, but not so much that the heart of the piece is obscured.

As Jean, the bio-embellishing phone-answerer, Polly Noonan exudes mousy vulnerability but also dignity and strength. You may share the other characters’ exasperation with her devotion to a man she never met, but it’s impossible not to hope she escapes her folly. Rare is the actor who can play material this baroque without straying off-key, so it’s no surprise that Noonan is a veteran of four previous Ruhl premieres. (She was also the kindly girl on the bus who offers Principal Rooney a gummi bear at the end of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. )

Rick Foucheaux, meanwhile, gives us exactly the kind of insecurity-masking cocksure swagger he should have had when he played Elia Kazan a couple of months back. No matter; he rocks here. None of the other cast members are meant to be playing actual human beings, but they’re all fabulous. As the dead guy’s mother, Marshall comes off as a cross between Lynne Cheney and Hannibal Lecter. Naomi Jacobson is the widow who takes the adage that we all grieve differently to an extreme, Jennifer Mendenhall plays the Other Woman with hilarious other-womanly poise.

It’s not for everybody. People with a low tolerance for ironic attectation will probably want to bail long before the scene wherein brother-of-the-departed Dwight (a fine Bruce Nelson) tells Jean he got his name because his mother “felt sorry for the name Dwight.” Adventurous playgoers, however, will want to take this call.

Dead Man's Cell Phone plays until July 8; tickets can be purchased here.