How do you reach anyone down here?” asks a character in Philip Dawkins’ slapdash new play, holding up her cell phone and railing against the painful metaphor of a bad mobile connection.

The newest work from the innovative Dog & Pony Theatre, “Dead Letter Office” also fails to connect. The strange circumstances dogging the overloaded script’s creation may have something to do with it: according to an article in Time Out Chicago, the company lost the playwright it had originally commissioned to write the play, and Dawkins inherited a setting, a cast, and less than two weeks to come up with a dramatic narrative to suit them.

It’s easy to understand why Dog & Pony would choose to dramatize the inherently sad milieu of a dead letter office, and the set (by William Anderson) is a beauty, filled with obscurely labeled post boxes and random unmailables, and animated by the janky shudder of leaky ceiling panels and a fluorescent light. A chute-and-pulley system unleashes steady streams of dead letters into the space, fleshed out with Stephen Ptacek’s lonely, echoing sound design.

The room’s main occupant is Christian (John Fenner Mays), an ex-boxer and dead letter handler with a lurching, hurt-hipped gait. His uneasy peace is regularly disturbed by Agatha (Susan Price), an outrageously irritating mail carrier whose happiness hinges on the outcome of the clearly doomed Christmas party she’s planning, and a slimy boss, Rolo (Joshua Volkers), who presents with an itchy mix of comic relief and psychic pain.

Rolo’s newest hire, the twentysomething Je T’aime (Kristen Magee), has got, quelle surprise, a dark secret of her own, which is revealed with all the subtlety of lines such as this one, delivered during the impromptu boxing lesson she receives from Christian: “How do I attack without making myself vulnerable?”

It’s hard to decide what the play wants to bill itself as, ghost story or work of harsh realism.

The haunted creakiness of the office is overlaid first with the phantoms of Christian’s memories — an accidental death, a lost family, a foregone career — and then with the eerie, unresolved presence of an actual spirit, which insinuates itself into the action in the final moments of the first act.

But with a cast made up entirely of hyper-damaged over-sharers, who end up thrown together in a final scene of violent, unconvincing catharsis, it hardly seems necessary to add a full-on haunting. This play suffers less from missed opportunities than from an inability to choose among the possibilities of its ripe setup.