It’s sometimes poetic. It’s sometimes haunting. It’s consistently, well, long.

A hard sell, ’tis, this Portia Coughlin.

Marina Carr ‘s allusive, surreal, and ultimately turgid play gets its D.C. premiere in a confused and confusing production by Solas Nua, the great theater company dedicated to works by living Irish dramatists. The show certainly doesn’t lack for ambition, but it’s somehow both overcooked and undernourished, boasting several fine performances but ultimately sunk by a muddled narrative, tentative staging, and a lethargic pace. The program says the show runs 90 minutes; Solas Nua’s web site ups the ante to 105. But even allowing for the intermission, the press-night performance ran to two full hours. And perhaps because the show’s climax — its narrative climax anyway, if not its thematic one — comes in the very first scene of Act Two, you. Feel. Every. Minute.

According to Solas Nua’s Dan Brick, the press night performance was the cast’s first crack at the show in front of an audience, so it’s possible director Jessica Burgess, whose work is often excellent, has since gone back and tweaked the tempo. But even if it were half as long, Portia Coughlin would still be a funeral dirge, by Carr’s design. The show is nothing if not a meditation on misery, loss, and doom. Example: What does a coffin smell like? “A cross between honeysuckle and new-morn putrification.” This from the lips of Blaize Scully (Rusty Clauss), the aged and cruel matriarch of the cursed Scully clan.