First things first: Debbie Allen’s all-black production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” deserves to be remembered for many things, some of them good and several of them bad. But it is not, as many have stated, an example of color-blind casting. If Phylicia Rashad were playing the wife of Ned Beatty rather than James Earl Jones, with Jessica Alba and Daniel Dae Kim smoldering away as Maggie and Brick instead of Anika Noni Rose and Terrence Howard, that would be color-blind casting. This is color-coded casting, an acknowledgment and refutation, rather than a transcendence, of the historically limited opportunities for minority actors.

Indeed, from a racial perspective, the most interesting twist in Ms. Allen’s fascinating-despite-itself revival of Tennessee Williams’s 1955 Southern potboiler is that the servants are all several shades lighter-skinned than the bibulous, avaricious, and (of course) mendacious clan for whom they work. With a production as lopsided and often wrongheaded as this, one has time to notice this sort of thing.

Among the other sights and sounds on garish display as Maggie and Brick, her dissolute ex-jock of a husband, return to the palatial Mississippi estate of Brick’s vulgarian father, “Big Daddy” Pollitt, on the occasion of his 65th — and most likely final — birthday: career-capping performances by Mr. Jones and Ms. Rashad (Ms. Allen’s sister) as Big Daddy and his excitable wife; one bizarre and ill-conceived directorial choice after another from Ms. Allen; a coming-out party for Ms. Rose (“Caroline, or Change”), all grown up as Maggie the Cat; alarmingly realistic fight choreography, and the uncomfortable sight of Mr. Howard struggling mightily to keep pace as the sodden Brick, laid up with a broken foot and a broken spirit.

A gloriously overwritten gumbo of alcoholism, sexual confusion, familial greed, and the lusty codger to end all lusty codgers, “Cat” has undergone a surprising number of adaptations for a piece that was a critical and popular smash from the start. Williams had already made substantial revisions at the request of Elia Kazan, the original Broadway director, and then was forced to scale back the homosexual subtext that fuels Brick’s self-hatred for the 1958 film. By the time he further tweaked it in 1974, not long after “The Boys in the Band” had changed the landscape of gay theater, the complexity of Brick’s miseries could be fleshed out. Williams also took advantage of the intervening years to revisit the original’s often risible faux profanity; Big Daddy is a lot less inclined to use adjectives like “rutting” and “ducking” these days.

This spotty history demonstrates the unusual number of lives “Cat” has seen. The biggest hurdle in terms of this latest reconception involves the context of black life in the pre-civil-rights South: As Ms. Allen has pointed out in interviews, black men in Mississippi circa 1955 were more likely to be tortured and killed for looking at a white woman (à la Emmett Till) than to own “28,000 acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile.”

So she has moved the Pollitt family forward in time to … when exactly? Well, the furniture would appear to date from the mid-1950s, although the new TV and hi-fi system look to be from about 1963. Jane Greenwood’s costumes have an early-1970s sheen to them, but the “twilight sleep” that Brick’s fertile sister-in-law Mae (Lisa Arrindell Anderson) prides herself on forsaking during childbirth was a thing of the past by then.

No matter when it takes place or what color its cast is, certain aspects of “Cat” are nonnegotiable. Act 1 remains a tour de force for Maggie, who summons her near-superhuman charms to get into Big Daddy’s will via Brick’s bed, while Act 2 belongs to Big Daddy, whose (erroneously) clean bill of health spurs him toward a new lust for life and a determination to get his son Brick back on track. Both of these set pieces, among the best in all of Williams, hinge on these two characters’ interactions with Brick.

This dynamic is harder to maintain than it sounds. For virtually all of Act 1, the ice cubes in Brick’s bourbon glass make more noise than he does. Ideally, this relentless passivity takes on a presence of its own; Maggie’s frustration with him and his “charm of the defeated” is mirrored by the audience’s urge to see Brick rouse himself and respond to his father’s impending death, to his older brother’s schemes, to his wife’s nubile attentions, to anything.

But in order for this to happen, the last flickers of Brick’s decisive, effortless masculinity must be visible through the self-loathing and the endless refills. Mr. Howard, whose restless intelligence has enlivened even Hollywood piffle like “August Rush,” overthinks a role that requires as much body as soul. His intensely internalized Brick barely has bones anymore, let alone the muscles on top of them. And so Ms. Allen overcompensates by having Ms. Rose curl herself around their four-poster bed like a stripper’s pole. Brick’s impulse to look away in embarrassment suddenly makes sense, and Ms. Rose’s heretofore shrewd instincts — she molds her syrupy cadences to the text with ease — are reduced to the dismaying sight of Maggie the Pussycat Doll.

This cheapening of Maggie is hardly Ms. Allen’s only or most egregious error. She has a particularly tough time weaving in the offstage dialogue that frequently interrupts the central drama, and she routinely bungles the arrival of these characters when they do finally appear.

Her most baffling notion, however, involves dimming the lights and training spotlights on particular characters during their more tempestuous monologues. If ever there was a playwright who did not need to have his theses underlined, it’s Williams. More than Miller, more than Ibsen, more than even Odets, Williams made it unmistakably clear when his characters’ perfumed chatter ended and their manifestos began. And woe unto any audience members unable to realize that their attention is best directed toward Mr. Jones’s ferociously bawdy Big Daddy, rumbling with the brink-of-hell intensity of a cornpone Jeremiah, or Ms. Rashad’s fearlessly blowsy take on Big Mama.

“Silence about a thing just magnifies it,” Maggie pleads as she tries to pry the unpleasant truth from Brick. And magnifying a thing, as Ms. Allen does to woefully reductive effect, can mute its impact to the point of silence.

Until June 22 (235 W. 44th St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-239-6200).