By the end of Josh Fox’s “You Belong to Me,” Part V of his massively ambitious Death of Nations project, you know how the nations must be feeling. Bludgeoned and battered, your patience evaporated, you feel like snuggling down in a nice casket and giving up the ghost. As an indictment of bellicose nationalism and a formal homage to (among others) Robert Wilson and David Lynch, “You Belong to Me” has its functional, even triumphant, moments. But in sending up the arrogance and overindulgence that indicate a state in decline, his International WOW company falls prey to the self-same faults. Mr. Fox may be shooting for Euro-auteur swagger, but his slipshod indulgence and total lack of discipline are pure U.S. of A.

Each of the three hour-long acts checks in with a country in the last days of a war: First, we meander through the Confederate South, complete with a lynching, a hoyden getting tumbled by the crick, and two teenagers gangraping a stone-faced slave (Okwui Okpokwasili). Then, with the addition of some red velvet, the scene shifts to the death spasms of World War II Germany, featuring a hysterical villainess (Irene Christ) assisting her Nazi lover’s suicide and planning her own. Before her maid’s shrieks (and the whoops of the attending Valkyrie) have quite died away, the stage transforms into a mental hospital, populated by American vets of the war in Afghanistan. At this point, the show itself seems to be suffering posttraumatic stress disorder — the patients wear plushy animal costumes, and the slave woman from the first act snuffles about as a wheelchair-bound polar bear.

The first and third acts don’t exactly spiral out of control so much as start at “out-of-control” and progress calculatedly to “mayhem.” In the Southern scenes, images are used purely for their shock value, or come sliced whole out the image bank for “ruined Americana.” Apples? Check. Women singing Shaker-style? Check. Ms. Okpokwasili carves out a genuinely spooky effect — during her assaults, she seems to be slipping from actress to pregnant slave and back again, making her “Brechtian remove” as recognizable as shell-shock. But while she keeps herself rigidly in check, the rest of the stage convulses with haphazard activity. And when she returns in the third act — to give birth, finally, to a fluffy bunny — she can no longer offer an anchor to the dull zaniness around her.

The second act, however, spoken nearly entirely in German (with supertitles), is a beast with different, more dangerous spots. Perhaps his German dramaturges, Frank M. Raddatz — a onetime collaborator with Heiner Müller — and Sharlene Strie took a firmer hand, or perhaps finally letting his actors work in dialogue instead of monologue revolutionized Mr. Fox’s style, but here the play comes into its own. Painting in broad, blood-spattering strokes, Ms. Christ and the pistol-waving maid (Angelika Sauter) deliver a delirious, Jacobean guignol. Mr. Fox is known for letting his actors create much of their own text — clearly he should cling to Ms. Christ for his salvation.

The other installments of Mr. Fox’s cycle have had the same boom-and-bust rhythm. His “The Comfort and Safety of Your Own Home” took New York as its canvas, bussed in audience, and then staged an uncomfortably realistic office shooting. “The Expense of Spirit” involved a barnstorming performance by Deborah Warner, which hammered its way bluntly and lastingly into the audience’s minds. But both also lost their way, took too far long to end, and wasted the sympathy he earned by refusing to edit out, well, anything at all.

Mr. Fox has been getting the same reactions for the better part of a decade; critics roll over and show their bellies for his theatricality, his scope, his chutzpah. Those elements still remain, but so have the other, less desirable factors. It’s impossible to fault Mr. Fox for his appetite — more of our directors should eschew simple financial care and try for the same grandeur in enlightened, state-subsidized climes. But there are still excesses Mr. Fox must learn to control — the rambling, sophomoric monologues, the reliance on mania to manufacture dramaturgical peaks. Without them, he might be a great director. With them, he will simply go on being applauded for his ambition, which is the avuncular way of tasking a director for his desperate lack of technique.

Until January 23 (150 First Ave., at 9th Street, 212-477-5288).