Depending on who you ask, Sarah Ruhl has been either buoyed or hindered by directors with a taste for visual trickery. In the playwright’s previous New York productions, “The Clean House” and “Eurydice,” Bill Rauch and Les Waters saw to it that her surreal, unabashedly sentimental works were plastered with string houses, satanic tricyclists, and indoor hailstorms of half-eaten apples. This blend of cerebral showmanship, of swinging for the fences both visually and emotionally, has won the talented 34-year-old a slew of admirers and just as many detractors.

Anne Bogart, the guiding force behind “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” and herself a revered manipulator of stage space, works with a much smaller palette as she attempts to invest Ms. Ruhl’s whimsical narrative with the atomized pulse of actual lives being lived. But as the plot slides from a shrewd gloss on technology to a well-calibrated melodrama to a rather shopworn treatise on altruism, the author’s less welcome qualities intensify under the added exposure. This particular house is a little too clean.

It all starts one afternoon when the nice enough, bright enough, pretty enough Jean (Mary-Louise Parker) has her lobster bisque interrupted by the steady chirrup of a cell phone owned by the restaurant’s only other patron. His name is Gordon (T. Ryder Smith), and he has just died of a heart attack.

Out of curiosity at first, and then an ill-defined blend of solicitude and thrill-seeking (“I want to remember everything. Even other people’s memories”), Jean makes off with the phone and inveigles herself into Gordon’s mysterious line of work as well as the lives of his semi-loved ones — his domineering mother (Kathleen Chalfant, in what amounts to a glorified cameo), put-upon brother (David Aaron Baker), unloved widow (Kelly Maurer), and mysterious mistress (Carla Harting). By inventing a series of complicated scenarios designed to soothe these frayed relationships, Jean becomes a guardian angel in reverse for Gordon.

She is so busy creating an idealized existence for this man that she scarcely begins to articulate anything about her own life. We hear briefly of a dog and of an office job at a Holocaust museum, and that’s about it. But how much do we really know, or at least remember, about Scheherazade? Both live by and for telling stories, and despite Ms. Parker’s efforts to undercut Jean’s borderline saintliness with an eye-catching distractedness, Ms. Ruhl is more interested in the transformative effect of these stories than in the woman who impulsively decides to share them.

Unfortunately, the journey toward self-knowledge is riddled with some of the author’s increasingly predictable devices. Ms. Ruhl specializes in a sort of drive-by imagism, with virtually every character peppering the audience with self-consciously poetic metaphors of wildly varying impact. We learn from the hapless Dwight, for example, that his burgeoning relationship with Jean is like the letter “Z” (two people connected with a diagonal) and, four lines later, that their commingling of souls is like tearing and partially exchanging their own clothing. (“You gave me one of your buttons.”) In their previous scene, we learn that embossed paper feels like branches, a leaf, tablecloths, and wool.

Now, going back to the first set, I find the clothing concept to be both charming and — given what we subsequently learn about the job Gordon had and that Jean tentatively broaches — chillingly apt; in light of the recent death of Dwight’s brother, it also has a welcome biblical tinge of rending one’s garments. The “Z” bit, meanwhile, strikes me as forced and meaninglessly vague. (No comment on the tablecloth paper.) Others might easily love the “Z” and dismiss the buttons as something out of Magnetic Poetry.

The larger point is not which among this glut of comparisons make emotional sense, but rather how the audience is to make sense of characters who indulge in such relentlessly whimsical equivocations. And while Ms. Ruhl’s previous directors used smoke and mirrors to counteract this trend toward preciosity, essentially choosing for her by spotlighting or illustrating individual examples, Ms. Bogart leaves the stage relatively spare, letting G.W. Mercier’s class-conscious costumes and Brian H. Scott’s chilly lighting carry much of the visual load. The lines of dialogue are left to fight for themselves, and as a result, fewer of them get out alive.

And when Ms. Ruhl’s language fails to pass muster, her plots are unlikely to take up the slack. After a twee visit to the afterlife (where people kiss with their hair and go to the Laundromat once a week), “Cell Phone” devolves into musty cloak-and-dagger antics that come off as a pale Xerox of Paula Vogel’s metaphorically rich “Third Man” references in “The Baltimore Waltz.”

Although Ms. Parker overplays her mousy shtick early on, she gives Jean a blinkered tenacity that makes her actions moderately plausible. But the sketchy demands of the plot get the best of Gordon’s family, with the priceless Ms. Chalfant reduced to withering-socialite clichés. Only Gordon himself holds his own against his well-meaning interlocutor: Mr. Smith, whose cadaverous appearance and Krusty the Clown-on-Valium voice lend him a ghoulish authority, provides “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” with a pungent boost when he resurfaces in Act II. But when the dead man gets all the best lines, his cell phone isn’t the only thing that would benefit from a recharge.

Until March 25 (416 W. 42nd St., between Ninth and Tenth avenues, 212-279-4200).