In 1965, as productions like “Marat/Sade” and Genet’s “The Blacks” were convulsing the theater scene, the poet Richard Wilbur drew a line in the sand when it came to his beloved Molière.

“Molière’s comedy, because it is so thoroughly ‘written,’ resists the overextension of any thesis,” scolded Wilbur, whose bouncy translations have become the gold standard for English-language productions of the 17th-century satirist, in his printed introduction to “The Misanthrope.” “The actor or director who insists on a stimulatingly freakish interpretation will find himself engaged in deliberate misreading and willful distortion, and the audience will not be deceived.”

Does having the title character squirt ketchup down his pants before throwing bagsful of garbage all over the set qualify?

These are among the many arguably freakish, undeniably stimulating liberties put forth by Ivo Van Hove in his provocative gloss on “The Misanthrope.” Mr. Van Hove’s gut renovations of the classics have resulted in shocking if often galvanic takes on “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Hedda Gabler,” but the Flemish director’s reputation may be coaxing him into an untenable corner. The shocks in his latest outing appear to stem less from an unsparing willingness to plumb Molière’s bleaker themes and more from a need to escalate his previous provocations.

Somewhat daringly for a director who has weathered fairly sharp accusations of pretension, Mr. Van Hove has chosen as his protagonist one of Western literature’s great straight shooters: the titular curmudgeon, Alceste (a superb Bill Camp). Savaging a peer’s poem, insisting that his beloved Célimène (Jeanine Serralles) cease all other flirtations on the grounds of insincerity, ultimately willing to forsake all of mankind rather than participate in “this pseudo-civil masquerade” (Tony Harrison provided this translation, augmented with Mr. Van Hove’s jarringly modern interpolations), Alceste wears his inability to fawn or flatter as a bitter badge of honor.

His mirthless affect is matched by Jan Versweyveld’s antiseptic set — a glass box adorned with only three central video screens and a low-slung table and bench — which has the uninviting, transitory air of an Orwellian storage facility. Those screens occasionally resort to moody black-and-white footage of the actors evocative of 1980s Calvin Klein ads, but they primarily (and far more effectively) show real-time footage of the actors being filmed by a pair of black-clad camera operators, who shoot through the glass walls of the set. Insincerity, the very attribute that Alceste has devoted his life to combating, is the coin of Mr. Van Hove’s realm in this staging, and he has his actors perform for the benefit of the cameras as often as they do for the audience or their fellow actors.

The atomization of modern culture is depicted in other ways, some of them droll (a sexual encounter ends with the man and woman separating immediately to check their cell phone messages) and others tiresome (the video screens depict a Second Life-style virtual avatar of the foppish Acaste, played by the experimental theater legend Joan MacIntosh, as she describes her many fine qualities). Far more successful are the filmed sojourns backstage, where the characters continue their debates in full view of their offstage costars, and a brief trip up the aisle and out onto East Fourth Street. It is here that Alceste finds the bags of trash that will soon find their way all over Mr. Versweyveld’s set.

(Incidentally, it is also here that Mr. Van Hove’s dyspeptic view of humanity comes into conflict with actual humanity. This scene involves an incidence of fairly intense emotional violence between Alceste and Célimène, and the handful of New Yorkers who happened to stroll into camera range during a recent performance each voiced a level of empathy and concern that was in short supply on the stage.)

The ensemble acting is of an unusually high caliber, with only Jason C. Brown’s ineffectual Clitandre falling short. The intense video close-ups offer a not-to-be-missed view of Ms. Macintosh, whose credits date back to the seminal Performance Garage in the 1960s, and Thomas Jay Ryan offers a welcome burst of naturalism as the reasonable Philinte, the voice of reasonable relativism. Ms. Serralles, who deserves combat pay for the amount of time she spends flung against the walls and floor, successfully conveys the ambivalence she feels for the cantankerous but passionate Alceste.

Still, portraying Célimène’s sanctimonious rival Arsinoé (Amelia Campbell) as a haggard, bellowing harridan is reductive and, well, misanthropic. And only Mr. Camp and the sublime Quincy Tyler Bernstine, as Célimène’s level-headed cousin Eliante, prove completely successful at de-lilting the sing-songy cadences that bedevil so many Molière productions.

But what about the ketchup down the pants? Anyone who saw Mr. Van Hove’s use of V-8 juice as an instrument of sexual domination in “Hedda Gabler” is likely on pins and needles to hear what he has in mind for the thicker tomato foodstuff. It comes as part of a full-fledged meltdown that occurs when Alceste excoriates Célimène and her peers for their disingenuous ways. Whipped cream and a hot dog join what looks to be about a pint of Heinz 57 down his suit pants, with far more than that slathered over his head and face, along with chocolate syrup and crushed Tostitos.

Alceste is spurned to heights of indignation or passion or rage in several scenes in “The Misanthrope,” but this is not one of them. It’s a rather pedestrian scene, one that a director might understandably wish to punch up. But even seen through the willfully perverse prism that invigorated “Streetcar” and “Hedda,” this serves as a virtual textbook definition of the “deliberate misreading and willful distortion” that Richard Wilbur railed against. The desperation on display is not Alceste’s. Rather, it is that of a bad-boy director forced by reputation to become even worse, at the expense of a cast that deserves better.

Until November 11 (79 E. 4th St., between Second Avenue and Bowery, 212-239-6200).