It’s a fitting sort of thing, really, that we never get a look at the house that surrounds and entraps the big, sad family in Don Nigro’s “Armitage” — because the house, as written, is a sprawling mausoleum of a place, full of ghosts, that never stops growing. It’s overseen by its builder, patriarch and principal captive, Zachary Pendragon (Matt Bowdren), who relentlessly adds rooms onto and on top of it: a symbol of his enormous wealth and soul-sucking restlessness. The house is eating him and he is eating it. Everyone is being devoured.

As Elaine, one of several characters who exist across time and space, all in the same house, Emerald Toller is manic and a bit mad, much like “Armitage.” ALLISON LOVE/Staff

But the house, as produced by the University’s drama department, is not the Gothic prison Nigro has envisioned for his sprawling family saga: in place of scored beams and expanses of molding molding are handfuls of abstract shapes on which the cast can settle, shake and scowl. It’s a moody set for a moody bunch of actors; and, like an echo chamber, the empty picture frames and hollow black boxes refract their woeful monologues and snatches of psychic turmoil until the show shakes with whispers.

The house is the thing — the show’s strongest organizing metaphor, elbowing out of the way other, lesser themes like nation-building and the incestuous overlap of time — but it is not the only one: overseen, in an apt turn of choreography and design, by director and University professor Kristin Kundert-Gibbs, there are ghosts (real ones, not literary), a long-linked series of voiceovers, and, most important, the things themselves: from the moment “Armitage” begins, it doesn’t ever quite end. There are no scene breaks; the narrative covers several decades with little distinction. The story rolls on.

The task, of the audience and cast and crew, is to keep up: because Nigro’s language, like his plotting, is dense and roiling. Among many others, he cites Tom Stoppard as an influence and it shows: there are flecks of Stoppard’s madcap metaphorical amoralism just about everywhere. (Sample line: “Hell is beautiful. That’s the Hell of it.”) But — like Stoppard — Nigro’s play is ultimately more beautiful than it is meaningful.

But, like Nigro’s efforts, the cast and crew are ultimately more admirable for what they’re trying to do than what they actually pull off. Some of the performances are up-and-down (Emerald Toller, as Opheliac painter Elaine, flails in the over-knotted second act; and Libby Ricardo, though usually adroit as an actress of many moods, is neither ruthless nor noble enough in her servant-girl wickedness), and there are others that are up-and-up. Bowdren as Pendragon, and Tressa Preston as his wife, Eva, are naturals at playing with Nigro’s bursting, spidery lines.

Even with all that, the biggest share of blame rests with the playwright himself, whose play sprawls on for 30 minutes too long, weighed down by two or three too many expository specters. There are gorgeous individual moments and scenes; but “Armitage” sags slightly more than it shines, courting affectation.

Pick it up and shake — you might catch a hollow sound.

Catch “Armitage” through today at 2:30 and 8 p.m. at the Seney-Stovall Chapel