If the current season didn’t feature “The Gospel According to Guirgis,” Austin Pendleton would surely take the prize for audacity. “Orson’s Shadow” imagines the turbulent London premiere of Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros” in 1960. Sir Laurence Olivier starred in the play, along with his mistress Joan Plowright. It was directed by Orson Welles, who landed the gig through the midwifery of his friend and disciple Kenneth Tynan. All of these luminaries appear on the stage of the Barrow Street Theatre – where Mr. Pendleton’s play opened last night – all of them and more. Whenever the action threatens to grow serene, expect a visit from Vivien Leigh, Olivier’s half-mad wife.

It sounds dubious, I grant you, like “Travesties” with promptbooks. Viewed one way, Mr. Pendleton wants to combine our deathless interest in bad celebrity marriages with the recent vogue in all things Tynan. Neatly coincident with the 2001 publication of his diaries, a bleak chronicle of his emphysema and sadomasochism, Tynan’s life has become fodder for all sorts of plays and movies.

But Mr. Pendleton’s intention is deeper, and older. The play predates the appearance of Tynan’s diaries. It opened five years ago in Chicago, taking a long time to reach New York – an unusually long time, considering the play’s quality. While it has its share of tawdry, dishy flourishes, as when Leigh complains that Sir Larry doesn’t satisfy her sexually, it leaves plenty of dirty laundry unaired. If you believe Tynan’s diary, and David Thomson’s biography of Welles, Leigh once tried to seduce the young critic, and had been seduced by the young director (respectively). Both episodes go unmentioned here.

Mr. Pendleton has written a play about geniuses, and how they fail. Consider the menagerie. When still in his 20s, Tynan was celebrated as the finest drama critic since Shaw: a stylish, intemperate, fiercely intelligent writer, with an incandescent personality to match. Leigh, a genuine talent, grew bipolar, a condition aggravated by her marriage to the legendary Olivier (and by Tynan’s devastating reviews). Before he destroyed himself (the balance of the blame is surely his), Welles achieved things no one had dreamed of achieving; to this day he represents the American theater’s ultimate Road Not Taken. Acting careers don’t get much better than Olivier’s, who, for half a century, was essentially synonymous with greatness. But Mr. Pendleton shows us the personal chaos that hounded him offstage, failures no less real for transpiring in the dark.

The plot begins twisting in Dublin, where Ken has gone to see his friend and father-figure Orson. Director David Cromer’s mise-en-scene is just right. We are in the darkened Gaiety Theater, where Welles has been starring in “Chimes at Midnight,” his Falstaff-centric version of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” plays. The only illumination comes from the ghost light, the single lamp that always burns onstage. Tynan materializes, tall and stuttering, lit by the cigarette pinched between his third and fourth fingers. Partly for Welles’s sake, and partly for his own, he wants Welles to direct Olivier in “Rhinoceros,” a play that nobody particularly likes.

We hear Welles before we see him, a clever way to meet a radio star. The disembodied voice soon attaches itself to a shape heavily descending the stairs. The sight of Jeff Still’s bulky figure appearing from the shadows, Harry-Lime-style, makes the pulse pound: It’s Orson Welles.

It’s not, of course. In full light, Mr. Still captures much of Welles’s voice but little of his stature. (It crossed my mind that “Orson’s Shadow” might suit radio better than the stage.) While he lacks Welles’s insinuating charm, Mr. Still does convey the mix of affection and irritation he showed Tynan. He patronizes the young critic by telling him travel will hurt his fragile health. Tynan shoots a dagger back to his itinerant, failing friend: “Well, Orson, you know how it is. One shows brilliant early promise and then one travels!”

Tynan is brought to life by Tracy Letts, a name you might have heard. He has written the remarkable plays “Killer Joe” and “Bug,” and now demonstrates, improbably, that he’s as gifted an actor as he is a playwright – funny, exasperated, and charismatic. Mr. Letts serves as the narrator, a device that gives the play a lively theatricality. Describing Welles, he imparts the play’s most harrowing line: “I try to tell him he’s a living genius, and once one is called a living genius, one only exists to disappoint.”

The Tynan-Welles relationship is the strongest in the play. Mr. Pendleton hasn’t provided Joan Plowright (Susan Bennett) a completely formed character, and the friction between the preening Olivier (John Judd) and the deranged Leigh (Lee Roy Rogers) claims too much of our time. Scott and Zelda fans will recognize the tune. Mr. Pendleton maneuvers the two of them, and all the other principals, together at the end, for a hopeless rehearsal of “Rhinoceros.” But nothing much really happens in this play.

Mr. Pendleton instead wants to create a constellation of personalities, to show what transpires when vanities collide. The script is full of graceful crosshatching. At one point, Welles compares Notley, the Oliviers’ estate,to the Amberson family home: an inspired piece of writing that binds art and life together with a tone of lost happiness. Later, Olivier describes how difficult it is to take care of sensitive people like his wife. But he says this to Tynan, who knows all too well, because of his love for Welles. Later still, Vivien turns up at rehearsal. As she manhandles Welles’s young assistant (Ian Westerfer), she transforms into two of her characters, Blanche DuBois and Scarlett O’Hara, simultaneously.

On second thought, this shouldn’t be a radio play. Radio would deprive us of a chilling, ingenious sight that follows Leigh’s arrival. Sick with tuberculosis, she asks Tynan, her lifelong tormentor, for a cigarette. Hesitantly, he obliges. She persuades the critic, sick with emphysema, to smoke with her. She even lights his cigarette with the tip of her own. There the two of them stand, damned and knowing it, puffing their way to oblivion. Leaning against a wall upstage, Orson Welles takes it in with a smile – a witness, for once, to somebody else’s self-annihilation.

Mr. Pendleton doesn’t sentimentalize. Such people flickered brilliantly then sputtered out, he seems to say. You may quibble with the presentation now and then, but the play achieves a sad, shabby grandeur. “He was some kind of a man,” says Marlene Dietrich at the end of “Touch of Evil.” “What does it matter what you say about people?”

(27 Barrow Street, 212-239-6200).