SOUTHGATE, Mich.–In an era when we can get spam from the Facebook pages and e-mails of the deceased, Dead Man’s Cellphone seems an apt play for any theater’s season. Open Book Theatre’s current production of the Sarah Ruhl play about a woman who forms relationships by keeping the cellphone of a man she has found dead in a café is a funny story, wonderfully acted by the company, but with a script that can at times drift to as tiresome a moment as a…well…cellphone going off in a theater.

Jean, a young woman (Dani Cochrane) sitting in a café eating a bowl of lobster bisque, is annoyed with the cellphone of a fellow diner that keeps going off. After a few “Hey, aren’t you going to answer that” stares, throat clears and finally a comment, she answers it herself and discovers that the owner of the phone isn’t answering because he has no pulse.

Jean decides to keep the cellphone, and answer it, and she attends the funeral of her dead close-encounter, Gordon Gottlieb (Ryan Ernst), which begins a relationship with Gordon’s mother (Connie Cowper), brother Dwight (Richard Payton) , wife Hermia (Melissa Beckwith) and mistress (Kaitlyn Valor Bourque).

Jean forms an attachment to Gordon, and even appears to fall in love a bit with a man she only knows from his rigor mortis. It’s only natural, as she gets to project onto Gordon whatever traits she is attracted to no matter what the truth might have been when he was walking around. She not only continues to answer his phone after Gordon’s funeral, but she invents stories, in an attempt to give them closure, about what messages Gordon was trying to leave his survivors—a call to his mother that was never really made, and a letter he was trying to compose on napkins to his wife that the waiter unfortunately threw away.

Sarah Ruhl’s writing bobs and weaves between everyday life and the metaphysical. It’s not hard to follow, but some of the plot turns feel contrived and the product of lazy writing rather than a vivid imagination. In fact, while I quite enjoyed the performances, especially of Ms. Cochrane and Mr. Payton quite a lot, there were times when I lamented the flabby scene writing, and kept thinking this is really an 1:15 minute one-act play, not a two hour two-act play with a ten-minute intermission.

To be sure, the play and premise is clever; the cellphone as a modern, but sometimes maddening, device that can connect people, create intimacy, but also separate people and prevent intimacy. Jean and Gordon talk in the second act about the digital chatter that flies through the air–the clouds–being accessible by the departed. There is also an ironic moment when Gordon’s cellphone, in Jean’s possession, goes off during the eulogy for Gordon being given by his Mother. And another when Richard is seriously angry about a tender moment with Jean being interrupted by her insistence on answering Gordon’s phone.

Director Topher Alan Payne cast the play extremely well, and it is in the performances of the actors make Dead Man’s Cellphone very much worth seeing. Ms. Cochrane perfectly embodies the New York bookish, love-lorn, creative-type who makes her living somehow, but we aren’t quite sure how. Ryan Ernst manages to stay eerily still when he is dead, but has a chance later to show his true colors. Richard Payton manages to be goofy, odd, lovable, caring, a little off-balance, and is a master of the facial expression that says more than any lines written for him. Connie Cowper nails the wealthy, eccentric fur-wrap wearing (even inside her house) dilettante who formed only threads of relationships with her two sons, and has an insatiable appetite for steak.

Again, my only peeve with this play is Ruhl’s writing, which feels at times like she couldn’t bear to go back and cut some of her own dialogue, or shorten scenes that desperately needed to be cut down.

Bottom line: An extremely talented cast delivers an interesting and funny take on a storyline that seems like it’s taken right out of Facebook’s trending stories.

Click here for show days, time and details.