The Rafterys may live on a hill, but the family are anything but elevated. The highland of On Raftery’s Hill is a pimple on the rural Irish landscape, littered with dead animal carcasses and oozing family secrets far rottener. Marina Carr’s play, which was commissioned by Galway’s Druid Theatre Company and premiered in 2000, mixes Greek myth, King Lear, and Eugene O’Neill (particularly Desire Under the Elms) into a lyrical and unsavory black-comic stew that’s been festering for generations. Throw in a couple of bloody, gunshot hares that transmogrify into a chillingly violent metaphor and all you need is Glenn Close.

Súgán Theatre Company presented Carr’s Susan Smith Blackburn Award–winning Portia Coughlan in 1998. It now unveils just the second production anywhere of On Raftery’s Hill (the Druid staging appeared in London and at the Kennedy Center). Like Portia Coughlan, the play counts among its themes incest and the baleful influence of the dead. As daughters Dinah and Sorrel wrestle with the demon that is their " Daddy, " patriarch Red Raftery, Red’s old mother, Shalome, persists in lugging an old suitcase down the stairs over and over in an attempt to return to her own long-dead dad. Son Ded, intimidated to the point of derangement by Red, sleeps in the cowshed, where he plays his deceased mother’s fiddle and eats his meals crouching on the floor.

The 38-year-old Carr is considered the leading Irish female playwright of the generation that includes Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh. The Irish Times calls On Raftery’s Hill " as depressingly black a tale as could be dreamt up for the stage, making even The Beauty Queen of Leenane seem like a light romantic comedy. " A difference is that whereas McDonagh’s perverse representatives of the wild West of Ireland are driven by primal urges and kitsch culture (both religious and otherwise), Carr’s seem filtered down from Shakespeare and the Greeks.

Red is a hardscrabble Lear, albeit less sinned against than sinning and closer to the farmstead patriarch of Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres than to Shakespeare’s original. At one point in the play, discussion of a local tragedy stemming from incest triggers talk of Zeus and Hera and their " chaps and young ’uns, doin’ it morning, noon, and night. " Indeed, some fetid version of fate seems to rule the Rafterys, rendering escape from the symbiotic, depraved, and violent clutches of the clan impossible. In the beginning it appears that Sorrel, who’s engaged to be married and has been dubbed by her sister " the wan perfect thing in this house, " has a ticket out. But by the first-act curtain, Sorrel’s perfection has been cut to ribbons.

Carr wrenches from the dialect of the Irish Midlands — what she calls a " Hibernal English " influenced by Gaelic — a strangled poetry. And in the Rafterys she presents a disturbing mix of savagery and love. Even the villainous Red vacillates among bewildered tenderness, rationalization, and cruelty. License and regret are mixed with an incongruous pride: Dinah, who was assigned to her father’s bed at age 12, asserts that " I had no summer in me life, just auhum, " then turns on a dime to claim, " We’re a respectable family, we love wan another. " To which Sorrel, shocked into perception, replies, " We’re a band of gorillas, swinging from trees. "

Perhaps the play is intended as an allegory of rural Ireland as a stagnant, rotting, inbred sty. But the Rafterys’ domestic situation, built on traumatizing secrets layered like old floor wax, sups on the sordid and borders on the ludicrous. Next to this incestuous, addled clan, who are up to their necks in enough vitriol to drown O’Neill’s Tyrones and enough Oedipal mishegas to bury his Cabots, Red’s hunting friend Isaac, who sleeps with his cat and claims it throws tearful tantrums, seems like something off a Hallmark card.

At Súgán, director Eric Engel attempts to honor the play’s precarious balance between classical tragedy and satire, naturalism and grotesquerie. Susan Zeeman Rogers’s rough-hewn kitchen set, backed by an abstract strip of grass- and carcass-strewn hillside, does likewise. And the performances are mostly solid, with Melinda Lopez supplying the feisty Dinah with warmth and self-forgiveness and Harvard senior Emily Knapp mixing innocence and minx into the pretty, affectionate Sorrel. John Haag imbues even the vile, vigorous Red with coarse charm. Saddled with a wig out of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Súgán’s artistic director, Carmel O’Reilly, does what she can with the character of the grandmother, who’s sunk in faded snobbery and endless-loop travel plans. But if you ask me, there’s one too many Daddy’s little girls on Raftery’s Hill.