Sarah Ruhl’s new play is at least partially about a woman’s absurdly strong attachment to a cell phone, so it makes some sense that the playwright is chatting away on her phone when she shows up to an interview. “Terrible manners!” Ms. Ruhl said, excusing herself.

“It’s rude to the person on the phone and to you, both,” she said to a reporter. Ms. Ruhl reproaches herself for giving in to the changing culture, and her play, “Dead Man’s Cell Phone,” which opens tomorrow at Playwrights Horizons, is an attempt to explore some questions of the digital age.

At 34, Ms. Ruhl, born and raised in Wilmette, Ill., has already met with enormous success in New York and at regional theaters around the country. She received the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2004 for “The Clean House,” which was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 and played at Lincoln Center in 2006. In 2006, Ms. Ruhl also won a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.

Now, “Dead Man’s Cell Phone,” under the direction of Anne Bogart, presents the story of Jean (Mary-Louise Parker), a lonely woman who attempts to find human contact using, yes, a dead man’s cell phone.

Ms. Ruhl described “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” as a brand of humor not often seen on American stages, a kind of reductio ad absurdum. And her lyrical plays often enter a metaphysical realm, with characters that go in and out of secular and spiritual worlds.

Still, her play really comes down to manners. “Are manners a kind of anachronistic shell?” the playwright asked rhetorically.

Her work suggests that our means of connecting actually disconnect us from those nearby. Ms. Ruhl pointed to cab rides in New York as an example of yet another experience turned digital. “The fact that there’s TV makes you think, ‘I ought to be doing something, receiving some information. Get my cell phone out and call someone. Try to get some information,'” she said. “What happened to driving in a taxi and looking out the window?” Gone, she said, are the days of chatting with the driver across the plastic divider. Instead, the driver is on one cell phone, and the passenger is on another.

“When I first got a cell phone, that’s the kind of thing that would totally horrify me,” she said. “And yet now, it’s normalized.”