To say that Dead Man’s Cell Phone fits Moxie Theatre like a well-worn glove intends no criticism of either the play or the producing company. Or, for that matter, the glove.

The play is by Sarah Ruhl, who is on just about everybody’s short list of outstanding contemporary playwrights. She’s been twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (for The Clean House and In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play), and the panel of judges at the MacArthur Foundation awarded her one of those “genius” grants that you don’t apply for but which label you as “someone to watch” for life once you’re selected for one.

Dead Man’s Cell Phone dates from 2007 and is the prolific Ms. Ruhl’s ninth play produced in the course of seven years. Its premise is a simple one: a woman sitting in a café finds that the man at the next table has died. His cell phone rings and she answers it, setting off a series of adventures that end up exploring the nature of love, family, and how our obsession with technology both facilitates and obstructs our ability to relate to others.

The company is Moxie Theatre, a Rolando-based troupe in its seventh season that is devoted to producing plays primarily written by women and which expand ideas of what it means to be a woman. Among the company’s founders are Delicia Turner Sonnenberg and Jo Anne Glover, who serve as director and star, respectively, of this production.

Here’s how the play and the company fit: Ms. Ruhl’s comic adventure might be called “feminist,” but a better label for it, I think, would be “womanist.” Her story focuses on Jean (Ms. Glover), a nondescript woman who falls in love with a dead man (Matt Thompson) and who embarks on a quest to find out about the man’s life and through it to discover something about her own worth as a person. Despite the questionable nature of some of Jean’s actions, she remains a good-hearted seeker throughout the course of the story. Other woman characters in the play (Kathryn Herbruck as the man’s mother, Lisel Gorell-Getz as his wife, and Yolanda Franklin as a couple of different business associates) also take questionable actions but are strong characters. The men (Mr. Thompson and Jonathan Sachs as the dead man’s brother) are either blowhards (Mr. Thompson) or weaklings (Mr. Sachs). The stories we believe are told through the women’s eyes.

Ms. Glover has demonstrated an uncanny ability to transform herself in playing roles with various theatre companies around town. She’s even convinced me in the past that she’s a variety of heights, ranging from diminutive to striking. Here, she’s at her smallest, taking in the world around her and gamely improvising her way through a situation she couldn’t have predicted when she made the impulsive decision to answer the first cell phone call.

Ms. Turner Sonnenberg’s directorial style is to layer on levels of meaning through careful work on how her performers interact physically. Here, she uses the very funny back-and-forth between her actors to illustrate how power works in society. It is no accident that the cell phone in question is an older flip phone model (credit Angelica Ynfante for her property design). Cell phones were once symbols of power: Gordon, the dead man, had one and used it a lot, while Jean (Ms. Glover) did not own one. Technology has a way of democratizing those who use it, however, and Ms. Turner Sonnenberg’s staging helps us realize that Jean gains power through Gordon’s cell phone. In a sense, this four year old play is dated, because now it’s not a matter of do you or don’t you own one, but whether you’ve bought the latest iPhone, an Android, a Blackberry, or you settled for a lowly Windows 7 phone. But, I’ll bet that most likely you do own a cell phone and the one you own isn’t a flip phone.

The other production elements are basic but clever, particularly Christopher Ward’s set pieces that easily roll on and off stage and Jennifer Brawn Gittings’ costumes that make the show look even more “period” than it might otherwise.

In the end, Ms. Ruhl’s play goes off in some pretty strange directions and what was clever but oddball becomes just odd. Moxie’s game crew hangs in and does it justice, though. The show runs through November 6 in what used to be Cygnet’s space in a strip mall on El Cajon Boulevard near Montezuma Road.

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