Rena Cherry Brown, Jennifer Mendenhall, and Nanna Ingvarsson in Solas Nua’s production of Marina Carr’s “Woman and Scarecrow.”

“The whole point of living is preparing to die,” says one character at a pivotal moment in Solas Nua’s new production of Woman and Scarecrow. It’s not just the point of life, but the point of the play itself, most of which is spent inside the mind of an unnamed woman as she spends her final hours succumbing, with both relief and reluctance, to an unnamed malady. If that sounds quite dark, well, it is. You were expecting something a little more uplifting from an Irish deathbed drama? But if it also sounds dreary, that’s where you’d be wrong.

Death is never far away in Marina Carr’s play. In fact, it spends the bulk of the production locked in a wardrobe, occasionally rattling and rumbling to be let out to claim another soul. The Woman’s only protection from the black-feathered and black-lit apparition behind those doors is her Scarecrow, who is a manifestation of her subconscious, or perhaps her soul, or perhaps her guardian angel. Carr doesn’t really explain, other to say that Scarecrow has been with the Woman from the beginning, having latched onto her at the “weaver’s throne.” Your own perception of what she is will depend largely upon your own beliefs and your familiarity with Celtic mythology, which is as much at play here as classical Greek drama is in Carr’s earlier work. What is important is that Scarecrow seems able, temporarily at least, to beat Death back into that wardrobe long enough to give the Woman just a little more time on this plane — time the two of them use to attempt to untie the knotty mess of familial dysfunction, infidelity, and squandered potential that has surrounded the Woman — and, by extension, Scarecrow — all her life. Their ongoing conversations and reminiscences take up most of the show’s two hour, fifteen minute running time, typified by a sisterly love undercut by resentments borne of decades of disappointments.