Ever on the prowl for the latest self-destructive hottie, the tabloids and paparazzi need look no further than Fort Greene. Lulu may be close to 120 years old, but the rapacious siren shows no sign of slowing down or learning her lesson.

Frank Wedekind, whose youth credibility got a lift in 2006 with the musicalization of his 1891 play “Spring Awakening,” never got to see “Lulu” performed in its entirety or published during his lifetime. (A few private performances took place, including one in which Wedekind tellingly took on the role of the man who finally punishes Lulu for her libertine ways.)

But the scandalous, unsparing, worrisome, wearisome “Lulu” has been a fixture of European theater virtually ever since, bolstered by the popularity of Alban Berg’s 1937 opera version. And Michael Thalheimer’s propulsive if glib production, presented by Germany’s renowned Thalia Theatre, actively courts those youngsters who, thanks to “Spring Awakening,” are newly conversant in the warped ways of German Expressionism.

They may recognize themselves in the title character. Fritzi Haberlandt’s Lulu, with her assertive chin and pixieish shag haircut, is a bundle of loose-limbed, agitated insolence who could have clomped over directly from Williamsburg. She barely even realizes, let alone cultivates, the allure she has for men of all ages and sizes, most of whom wind up married to her and/ or dead.

She wants comfort and security and a bit of excitement, and it’s hard to accuse her of losing interest in her suitors when she never had much interest to begin with. Lulu regards their subsequent agonies and even deaths with the same affectlessness as she does the half-dozen other names that Wedekind famously gave her.

Aside from a series of barely there minidresses, Mr. Thalheimer’s spartan, largely uninflected direction strips the arresting Ms. Haberlandt of any overtly sexual physicality, redirecting the role of aggressor to the male characters. This shift carries through to the play’s many sexual couplings: Lulu’s white underpants are frequently glimpsed, but it’s the men who shed their clothes with ludicrous regularity.

Aside from a few vaguely adolescent utterances of affection, this Lulu is a fidgety blank slate upon which her lovers project their own fantasies and judgments. Mr. Thalheimer renders this idea literal (arguably too literal) by confining the set elements to a large, bare white wall upon which Lulu’s shadow is cast.

As her prospects grow dimmer, culminating in a dank London garret peopled by none other than Jack the Ripper (the role that Wedekind played in 1905), the wall creeps steadily forward, foreshortening the stage and boxing in our debased anti-heroine. It’s a gimmick, and it should register as one, but somehow Mr. Thalheimer pulls it off. He uses the Harvey Theater’s deep stage to full advantage early on, unobtrusively priming the audience to react to the characters’ increasingly circumscribed straits.

Not all of his innovations are equally welcome. The play’s length has always been an issue — Wedekind originally split it into two fulllength plays — and Mr. Thalheimer addresses this by cutting it to the bone and racing through what’s left. Generations of censors have had their way with “Lulu,” but while the naughty bits used to be at risk, Mr. Thalheimer has instead hacked at virtually everything else.

The resulting breakneck pace, abetted by Bert Wrede’s feedback-heavy power-pop score (which, incidentally, could be lifted directly from Duncan Sheik’s “Spring Awakening” score), results in only a fraction of the text making it onto the English-language surtitles. Even then, the flood of dialogue, delivered with laudable stylistic consistency by the 13-member Thalia cast, threatens to monopolize the eyeballs of anyone not fluent in German.

Unfortunately, the bowdlerization also robs Lulu’s suitors of nearly all their individual qualities. The artistic ambitions of the artist Schwarz and the playwright Alwa, the halfhearted kindnesses of her scrofulous old pimp/father figure — these broad but nonetheless instructive filigrees have been supplanted by a kaleidoscope of doomed men, each breaking apart at Lulu’s touch only to reconstitute in a semi-familiar, equally fungible form.

One of Wedekind’s translators, Carl R. Mueller, has argued that “Lulu” might be “the foundation stone of the modern theatre,” although I personally give the edge to Georg Büchner’s “Woyzeck.” Wedekind devoured the newly rediscovered works of Büchner while in his early 20s, and the influence is unmistakable. “Woyzeck” is famous in the Western canon for its malleability; Büchner died before he could complete the play or even specify the order of its scenes, all but forcing directors to impose their own sequence. Mr. Thalheimer’s radical streamlining of “Lulu” has made her torrid, tragic tale similarly — and frustratingly — interchangeable. With so many men in so little time, it’s hard to catch one’s breath, let alone gasp.

Until December 1 (651 Fulton St., between Ashland and Rockwell places, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).