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.