“Iphigenia 2.0,” Charles Mee’s latest experiment in chaotic collagism, incorporates texts by everyone from the doomed World War I poet Wilfred Owen to a self-designated “killologist” named Dave Grossman, in addition to Euripides. One voice, however, is notably absent in Mr. Mee and director Tina Landau’s tumultuous yet oddly static free-for-all: that of the gods. Just as most 2.0 iterations of computer software promise increased options for the user, “Iphigenia 2.0” (the first in the Signature Theatre’s season-long Mee retrospective) takes the terrible demand made upon Agamemnon — kill your own daughter if your army is to set sail to Troy — and hands it over to the people.

Providing the Greeks with free will has become something of a trend among playwrights. Neil LaBute turned Oedipus’s return to his mother’s breast into a premeditated act in “Wrecks,” Sara Ruhl’s “Eurydice” put the heroine’s twice-damned fate firmly in her own hands, and now it’s the goddess Artemis’s turn to step down. Mr. Mee suggests that Agamemnon’s own soldiers, clad in Desert Storm mufti, refuse to budge unless he renders literal the notion of “shared sacrifice” by slaughtering Iphigenia (Louisa Krause).

This has many consequences. For one thing, while Artemis ultimately spared Iphigenia in Euripides’s telling, it’s hard to have a deus ex machina without a deus. It’s also hard to muster up much sympathy for Agamemnon (Tom Nelis), who is suddenly answerable to those below him, and so the protestations of Queen Clytemnestra (a formidable Kate Mulgrew) become all the more compelling. (Mr. Nelis’s cowed king is matched by Seth Numrich’s ineffectual Achilles: Scampering around Blythe R.D. Quinlan’s rec-room set like a spider monkey, trembling at the sight of Clytemnestra’s décolletage, making unfulfillable promises to both sides, this Achilles is all heel.)

More crucially, removing the gods eliminates the pulse from the play. The power of Greek tragedies hinges on the audience’s awareness that the will of the gods cannot be flouted, at least not without severe consequences. The impatiently thrumming fingers from above must be heard or at least sensed at all times, up to the inevitable moment when they become a fist. But even moral judgments, Mr. Mee asserts, now rest entirely in the hands of the living: something finally is done that is so deeply wrong that the world must rise and crush it in order for the world itself to go on.

Which is not to say that the troops don’t pack their own punch. Many of Mr. Mee’s and Ms. Landau’s most beguiling sequences come as the four soldiers bark out “warrior values” and conduct ferociously precise maneuvers, stopping briefly to pay tribute to their women back home. These pounding martial displays, accompanied by sound designer Jill BC Duboff’s polyglot wonderland of everything from the White Stripes to the Gypsy vocalist Saban Bajramovicz, convey a queasily convincing corollary to the adrenaline rush of combat. (They also, as it happens, feature one of the play’s few references to the gods, when a soldier played with chilling righteousness by Will Fowler vows to introduce his enemy to the afterlife: “The whites of my eyes are the last thing you will see / before you kiss the feet of my God.”)

As interesting and even exhilarating as these sequences are on a case-by-case basis, though, each one feels untethered from whatever precedes or follows it. Mr. Mee and Ms. Landau have far too much on their minds — too many texts to incorporate, too many lessons to impart, too much stagecraft to employ — to march to any tempo but their own. One gets the impression that they might easily have had 45 additional minutes of knockout material to add throughout “Iphigenia 2.0,” more or less at random, with no appreciable change in coherence. The inverse of this, sadly, is that nearly as much of what is in the show could be removed just as easily.

And so, even without Artemis and her bitter bargain, the cast and crew of “Iphigenia 2.0” find themselves facing a quandary not unlike that of Euripides’ marooned and war-hungry soldiers. Awaiting the overarching force that might propel them toward resolution, they languish, brimming with terrible energy in search of a worthy outlet.

Until September 30 (555 W. 42nd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-244-7529).