Cuddly misanthropy can be a tough sell, especially if you’re focusing on the “misanthropy” half of the equation. Focusing on the puckish side can pay dividends; professional curmudgeons like Walter Matthau and Burgess Meredith wouldn’t have had careers otherwise. But leavening deep-seated dyspepsia with a winsome streak, as Nathan Lane does a few too many times in the otherwise sturdy revival of “Butley,” can quickly read as pandering.

Luckily, Mr. Lane — taking on the titular rotter in Simon Gray’s 1971 dark comedy — and director Nicholas Martin succumb to these defanging instincts only now and then. Once they get an early bit of protracted silent comedy out of the way and shift the focus to Benjamin Butley’s toxic interpersonal relationships, Messrs. Lane and Martin create a memorably curdled wreck. This prickly, droll, faintly tragic character may make for unpleasant company at times, but he is a tonic for those who, while enjoying Mr. Lane’s recent successes as a larger-than-life clown, have pined for the subtler blend of mirth and melancholy he achieved with playwright Terrence McNally in the 1990s.

Not that Butley, a teacher at an unexceptional London university, is a minor-key sort of fellow. Before fretting his way into a drunken coma, as he puts it, he devotes his days to avoiding and/or denouncing his students, not to mention his fellow teachers, his estranged wife, and his infant daughter. Butley’s Wildean bons mots spare none of these victims — “I’m a one-woman man and I’ve had mine, thank God.” But Mr. Gray contrives to bring all Butley’s chickens home to roost with a dramatic tidiness that at times strains credulity: Even Butley greets a late reversal of fortune by applauding its Aristotelian symmetry.

The one exception to his not-so-benign neglect had been Joey Keyston (Julian Ovenden), Butley’s former student turned lover and office mate.(Their shared office, with its swaying fly paper and chipped linoleum, is designed effectively by Alexander Dodge.) But Joey has recently taken up with Reg Nuttall (Darren Pettie), a book editor with working-class origins. Butley receives this bit of news, along with additional bits of bad luck from both his wife, Anne (Pamela Gray), and a fellow teacher, Edna Shaft (the priceless Dana Ivey), over the course of one day. By the end, the accretion of bad news, coupled with Reg’s appearance at the school, spurs the reliably unreliable Butley into a self-immolating torrent of bad manners.

And on top of it all, this teacher is actually expected to teach.”Why don’t these cleaning women do their job properly?” he fumes at his ever-growing pile of ungraded papers. “Ruskin’s cleaning woman threw Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution out with the other rubbish. But then they took a pride in their work in those days.”This quote, with its glib sophistication, is a touch misleading: Butley’s literary tastes have devolved from T.S. Eliot into a stream of Beatrix Potter doggerel. Unlike Broadway’s most recent lecherous professor, the unshakably erudite Hector of “The History Boys,” Butley has long ago lost any passion for his subject matter. The occasional student still turns his head, most recently a “plumed youth” named Gardner (Roderick Hill), but even those days appear close to ending for poor, sad old Butley.

Messrs. Martin and Lane, who collaborated on “Butley” in 2003 at Boston’s Huntington Theatre, are at their best charting Butley’s drunken Act II slide into disinhibited rancor. Mr. Lane’s heavy-lidded eyes glaze over with a mixture of malevolence and self-loathing, and the building fog is plausible each step of the way — which makes it all the more disappointing when Mr. Lane pulls back for his final tirade toward Reg, relying too heavily on his comedic instincts. Through either simple miscalculation or a fear of losing his audience, this timidity deprives the scene of its crucial tinge of menace.

Another reason for this may be the fact that the shifty, spineless Joey doesn’t seem particularly worth fighting over. This is only partly the fault of the blandly handsome Mr. Ovenden, whose main role is to either laugh or wince at Butley’s various outbursts, and who does so capably. But as far as this production is concerned, both he and Ms. Gray, as Butley’s two semi-significant others, pale in comparison to two of Mr. Lane’s other sparring partners.

The put-upon, easily scandalized Edna is the sort of part that Ms. Ivey could do in her sleep, yet this gifted actress once again finds almost unimaginable depths in her brief moments on stage. Her mortified, slightly out-of-control cackle at one of Butley’s tossed-off quips hints at some serious repression. Sure enough, her unmet needs come to the forefront in the last moments of Ms. Ivey’s final scene, when Edna briefly taps into a long-banked reservoir of emotions. She does this without wrenching too much attention from the central story — Edna is too minor a character for that — but rather with a quiet, beautifully honed precision that can only come from a lifetime on the stage. Brava, Ms. Ivey.

She is joined by a junior scene-stealer, Jessica Stone, who does almost as much with even less. Mr. Lane could have seen to it that Ms. Stone, whose giggly, irresistible Pigeon sister came perilously close to swiping last year’s “Odd Couple” revival out from under him and Matthew Broderick, never got the chance to do so again. But here she is, working wonders as a willful student who drags Butley through several circles of hell with her lengthy essay on “Hate and Redemption in ‘A Winter’s Tale.'”

Sadly, Messrs. Martin and Lane aim for a little too much redemption and not quite enough hatred in the autumn’s tale being told here. The unsparing wit of Butley and of “Butley” quickly earns the audience’s respect. Aiming for its affection as well, as Mr. Lane does here, is pushing it.

Until January 14 (222 W. 45th St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-239-6200).