Sarah Ruhl clearly has talent to burn. Her last play, “The Clean House,” a messy but often piercing work that reached New York last fall after several regional productions, began a still-unabated drumbeat of acclaim for Ms. Ruhl. Still several years shy of her 35th birthday, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient, with two new plays poised to open in New York.

Playwrights Horizons will present “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” this winter, but first comes Second Stage Theatre’s “Eurydice,” a dose of self-satisfied surrealism that aims to retell the Orpheus myth through Eurydice’s eyes. And like her twice-dead heroine, the author has taken a marked step backward.

As in “The Clean House,” Ms. Ruhl displays a knack for well-turned aphorisms and a welcome eagerness to expand mainstream theater’s visual parameters. But she and director Les Waters clutter the stage with verbiage for its own sake, undercutting their own eye-popping images with a maddening lack of narrative discipline.

While everyone agrees on the essentials of Eurydice’s story — she dies on her wedding day; Orpheus is permitted to retrieve his wife from hell if he can make it aboveground without looking back at her; he fails — the specifics quickly diverge. Virgil chalked her death up to a botched seduction by Aristaeus, Zeus’s son; Ovid blamed it on dancing water nymphs. Ms. Ruhl, perhaps with an eye toward Icarus, has Eurydice (Maria Dizzia) plummet to her death after unwisely following a stranger (Mark Zeisler, who does double duty as a tricycle-driving lord of the underworld) to his high-rise apartment.

The play’s most welcome addition to the myth comes in the form of Eurydice’s tender, deceased father (Charles Shaw Robinson). He is anomalous among the dead in that he has resisted drinking from the waters of forgetfulness and therefore still speaks English; the rest of the underworld has adopted what Ms. Ruhl coyly terms “the language of the stones.” In case that isn’t precious enough, we also hear from three of the stones — a chorus of Greek gadflies partial to Victorian music-hall garb and wisecracks delivered in unison.

Upon descending to the underworld with no memory of her past, Eurydice at first thinks her father is a mere porter. But he eventually reintroduces her to the glories of language and, more crucially, love.

Ms. Ruhl takes Rainer Maria Rilke’s conception of a distracted, ambivalent Eurydice, “deep within herself, like a woman heavy with child,” and tweaks it to place the blame for Orpheus’s cataclysmic lapse squarely on Eurydice’s shoulders. This time, however, Eurydice is heavy with father: Her dilemma is whether to rejoin her husband in the living world or remain behind with the father she has finally grown to recognize. On one level, she had made her decision before she had any inkling of her imminent death. “A wedding is for a father and a daughter,” she explains at her own wedding. “They stop being married to each other on that day.”

As with “The Clean House,” directed off-Broadway last year by Bill Rauch, Ms. Ruhl knows how to create beautiful stage pictures. It would take several dips in the river of forgetfulness to expunge the memory of Eurydice’s father painstakingly creating her a four-walled room, complete with a door, out of string. (Hell is not merely other people, Ms. Ruhl suggests; it’s other people and no privacy.) And those oblivionmaking waters are brought to haunting life via another of her and Mr. Waters’s visual coups: an elevator — going down, of course — with water pouring from within it. Scott Bradley’s sets, Meg Neville’s costumes, and Russell Champa’s lighting are all beyond reproach.

Playwright-director Mary Zimmerman, a Second Stage veteran, has a similarly capacious eye; her unforgettable “Metamorphoses” also featured plenty of onstage water and a reimagining of Orpheus and Eurydice, while that string-house bit evokes some of the experiments in perspective she employed in “The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci.” But although she shares with Ms. Ruhl a blend of whimsy, portentousness, and unembarrassed sentimentality, Ms. Zimmerman sees to it that her resplendent visuals nearly always mirror the kaleidoscopic text.

Ms. Ruhl, by comparison, has yet to show a willingness to sift through the multitude of poetic fragments in her head and cull the ones that best match her off-kilter vision. When Orpheus (an enjoyably mellow Joseph Parks) manages to smuggle a book down to Eurydice, who adored reading when she was alive, she stares uncomprehendingly at it before shouting, “What do you do? What do you DO?!” Words do plenty in Ms. Ruhl’s world, often a good bit more than they should.

She has a particular weakness for fuzzy, effortfully profound turns of phrase. “Life is like a good meal.” “A song is two dead bodies rubbing under the covers to stay warm.” The language of the stones sounds like “if the pores in your face opened up and wanted to talk.” And dead men’s tongues taste like oatmeal. All of these comparisons — some of them intriguing, some of them cumbersome — do battle with, rather than complement, the arresting visuals. Eye and ear battle for supremacy throughout “Eurydice,” resulting in a queasy feeling that those uncommunicative stones might be on to something.

A voice as specific as Ms. Ruhl’s requires a comparably shrewd directorial hand, and Mr. Waters fails to harness the stylistic pandemonium into a unified whole. The performances are all over the map, with Ms. Dizzia’s unspoiled naturalism resting uncomfortably alongside Mr. Zeisler’s arch villainy and Mr. Robinson’s touching formality. Surprisingly, the most impressive competition to the visuals comes not from any of the performances but from sound designer Bray Poor’s authoritative rendition of Orpheus’s fabled music. Drenched with severe harmonies and plangent strains of longing, Mr. Poor’s admirably complex score plausibly evokes a musical gift capable of moving heaven (or at least hell) and earth. Fittingly for Ms. Ruhl’s noble but fatally overstuffed enterprise, though, it’s an ill-timed word that negates his efforts and sends Eurydice right back.

Until July 21 (307 W. 43rd St., between Eighth and Ninth avenues, 212-246-4422).