The creative team for “What of the Night,” the one-woman show about Djuna Barnes now at the Lucille Lortel, have set themselves up for a terrible fall. Big and bold, in 18-point type, they announce in the lobby that there is “no doubt that Barnes would have hated ‘What of the Night.'” They mean only to promote their rescue of Barnes from her extreme reclusiveness, but the ensuing hash proves Djuna the master of them all. Djuna would hate this, and you will too.

Djuna Barnes had one of those spectacular ex-pat careers that made 1920s Paris the place to be. She roared through the decade with Colette and Man Ray, Peggy Guggenheim and Gertrude Stein. Along the way, she fell in love with Thelma Wood, and the tortured demise of that relationship would form the basis of her greatest work, the novel “Nightwood.” The book’s champions, from T.S. Eliot to Edwin Muir, kept it before the public eye, which was more than they could do for Djuna. She locked herself into an apartment, just a few doors down from the Lortel, and lived there in retreat for 40 years.

Cobbled together from nursery rhymes,”Nightwood,” and a smattering of other writings, “What of the Night” bounces between Djuna’s last hours and her heyday. Billed as co-creators, actress Jane Alexander, dramaturg Noreen Tomassi, and director Birgitta Trommler try to weave a complicated texture out of material that was already quite complex. Graceless and abrupt, the constant shifts somehow manage to also seem unbearably slow.

At every turn, Ms. Alexander’s task gets more impossible. Not only does the production team hide the elegant star behind a black scrim, but they constantly project stage-wide slides of typed letters and arty pin-ups onto it. At times, it’s actually difficult to make her out. Director Birgitta Trommler, whose credits lie on the dance/theater border, puts Ms. Alexander through paces that seem almost humiliating. When channeling Thelma, Djuna’s tricky, carefree lover, Ms. Alexander must bounce girlishly on a satin-sheeted bed. While she manages to maintain her balance on the bed, her dignity is another matter.

For a piece that tries to illumine Barnes’s artistic process, it provides very few insights about the life that informed it. We do learn that Thelma, after reading the book, came to Djuna’s door and knocked her down, but we never hear any reason for such a muscular reaction. But it’s the play’s attempt to describe a half-century of retreat and paralysis that really trips the team up. Despite their loads of research, the delicate task of theatricalizing a shut-in existence eludes them.

After the show, Djuna Barnes’s own “Nigthwood” rescued me. Hers is a bitter-chocolate novel, difficult and lovely and successful without slides to announce its many layers. Don’t settle for poor Jane Alexander reciting jacket copy about it; go for the real thing. It’s how Djuna would have wanted it.

Until April 13 (121 Christopher Street, between Hudson and Bleecker Streets, 212-279-4200).