Much of surviving ancient Greek theater teaches, and re-teaches, the same motto: “Don’t be so full of yourself.” If a soldier climbs an exceptionally tall ladder, Zeus whacks him off with a thunderbolt. Gods don’t like pride, and the sacred precinct (there was an altar where today we would stick a footlight) reminded its audience of that time and again.

No one ever learns, though. Through the ages, every playwright with a pulse has tried to stamp the ideas of his own time on the myths, overriding ancient concerns with whatever they find more pressing. In 17th-century France, Racine saw the Greeks as pure drama. Massive allegories were boiled down to their romantic elements, and the hardy classical personalities suddenly lost themselves in Gallic self-absorption (and incredibly long monologues).

In “Andromaque,” Racine scuttled a couple of inconvenient plot points (just as Euripides would have done) to make a plangent tale downright pitiful. After Troy’s defeat, the victorious Pyrrhus makes off to his island kingdom with his war booty. One of his prizes, Hector’s widow Andromaque, catches his eye, so he woos her, despite having murdered half her family. She agrees – to do otherwise would mean sacrificing her son’s life – but now almost everyone has a grudge against Pyrrhus.

His jilted fiancee, Hermione, can’t get the man’s attention any other way, so she talks Orestes into murdering the wedding party. But even before he can unsheathe his sword, some Greek guests rise up and do the slaughtering themselves, enraged at the thought of a Trojan queen. Hermione whines and turns against Orestes, Orestes starts to go a little berserk from the guilt (though his hands are clean), and Andromaque kills herself on her new husband’s funeral bier.

“In a Hall in the Palace of Pyrrhus,” a new dance theater adaptation of “Andromaque,” takes the work one hubristic step further. Not only do the bleeding remnants of the Trojan War prose on about their love lives, but various textual insertions imply that the performers themselves are also on stage to confess. A tuxedoed “adviser” warns us that although the show isn’t “Andromaque,” it is about adult interpersonal relationships.

Director/choreographer Daniel Safer wades out into some deep waters, trying to steady Racine’s bathos with his own ironic quips. It’s a bad job he sets himself, one that quickly goes from wry to painfully self-conscious, from physically aggressive to choreographically monotonous. Mr. Safer enjoys a bit too much the easy contrast between highly pitched emotional outbursts and winks at the current day – women in Pyrrhus’s palace drink a lot of Diet Coke, but they also plan their suicides and rend their togas.

The outfits can’t take much rending, actually. Ruth Pongstaphone (who designed the costumes and set), deconstructs any number of classical images. Many of the asymmetrical robes have partial wings jutting out from one shoulder, like a highly padded comment on the Nike statue. When standing still, the ensemble looks great, but these aren’t costumes built to move. They tangle around legs and obscure body lines – sometimes literally tripping the actors. Much like Mr. Safer’s production, it only works from a distance.

As is too often the case in dance theater productions, Mr. Safer can’t find the “double threats” he needs. If a dancer looks good, he hasn’t got the voice, and the better actors move (at best) unconvincingly. Emmitt C. George’s Orestes has the best, most audible voice, but even the few dance moves required of him seem awkward.

Jennie Marytai Liu’s Andromaque does a great deal of athletic running about the palace, but every time Mr. Safer has her pound a chair into the floor (perhaps 10 times a scene), she looks like an angry customer at Ikea.

Racine’s plot calls for recriminations, reversals, a nasty guilt trip, and the collapse of an island state. But in Mr. Safer’s update, after gunshots wipe out the wedding festivities, Hector’s ghost (Sillapin Thong-Aram) anoints Andromaque, and they dance together amid the rubble. Racine’s whining survivors (and his truest insights) are gone; Mr. Safer only has time for lovers.

As any Greek would warn them, pride goeth before the fall. Although in this case, it goeth even before the summer ends.

Until August 13 (66 Wooster Street, between Spring and Broome Streets, 212-868-4444).