Imagine you are sitting in a café enjoying some food and a cell phone rings. Maybe you are annoyed or distracted but as it continues to ring and the owner does not pick it up, you become curious. You see that the man whose phone has been ringing is dead.

Maybe you pick up the phone. Maybe you answer it. Maybe then you are forever linked to this person through their cellular device.

This is the scenario that opens “Dead Man’s Cell Phone,” the play that recently closed at UNI’s Bertha Martin Theatre inside the Strayer-Wood building

Directed by Cynthia Goatley and written by Sarah Ruhl, this play about a woman thrown into an awkward situation has more than its fair share of laughs but also comes with a certain measure of philosophy.

A woman named Jean is seated across a café from Gordon. When Gordon’s phone rings, Jean soon realizes that he is dead. Jean takes up his phone and assumes the responsibility of dealing with Gordon’s mother, brother, wife and mistress.

A whirlwind romance starts between Jean and the dead man’s brother, Dwight, but Jean cannot pull herself away from the responsibility she has found in Gordon’s phone.

Later we discover Gordon had been a dealer of organs on the black market. Jean, out of responsibility, decides to try and continue his work.

Without giving too much away, we then get a glimpse of what the afterlife might be like with pipelines and the people we love waiting for us. This may seem like a lot, and it is, but the play felt like it lasted only 45 minutes. In reality it was over two hours, so clearly they did something right.

To be honest, I didn’t really care for most of the first act. The scenes where Jean meets Gordon’s family and his mistress for the first time seemed like they were moving joke to joke almost like a sitcom and it wasn’t what I was expecting. By intermission, I had broken one of my rules as a critic — I judged the show after the first act.

I assumed that since I didn’t really get or enjoy the first act, the second would be more of the same. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

While the story does go a bit far out, the second act was really quite good. This was the point in the play when the serious talk comes in and makes you think about the afterlife. The worst thing I can say for the plot overall is that one might have to wait for the second act to come.

The acting was impressive. A standout performance came from Callie Baack, who played Jean. Baack has an everywoman quality to her that makes her very relatable and easy to get behind.

Noah Hynick turned in a subdued performance as Dwight, the dead man’s brother. Hynick gives off a charismatic nerdiness that is downright lovable.

Madison Fairbanks gives a short but memorable performance as Hermia, the widow. Her longest scene consists of her talking to Jean while drunk and it is uproarious.

Keegan Patterson plays the eponymous dead man and while it may seem like his part would be rather small, he delivers a powerful monologue in the second act and it is riveting.

The set was also great. Seating was placed in the round and the set mostly consisted of two café tables, and a long dinner table. Unless the stage is very expansive and detailed, I prefer plays with smaller set pieces as it causes audience members to focus on the acting rather than the furniture.

One unexpected bright spot was at the end of the first act when Jean and Dwight profess their love for one another in the stationary shop where Dwight works- During this scene, paper houses descend from the ceiling and pieces of tissue paper also fall. It was a great example of the set being married with the content of the play.

Overall I thought “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” was a very solid play. It asked hard questions about the afterlife while still retaining some levity. The cast worked together well and the set was understated and only showed what was necessary.

The story is strange but engaging. There are times when it seemed odd and out of place but overall it made sense. Hopefully, we won’t find ourselves in the same situation Jean finds herself in but it’s interesting to watch how someone would see things differently afterwards.