Nothing captures the popular imagination like a reclusive janitor who draws pictures of little girls – especially if those little girls turn out to have male genitalia. So Henry Darger, the Chicago savant who spent his life on a 15,000-page book called “The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal,” has been the succes d’estime of this decade.

Discovered at his death in 1971, Darger’s unreadable tome accompanied reams of vibrant illustrations, and his bizarre pictures now headline the discussion about “outsider art.” On display at the American Folk Art Museum, his creepy innocence has inspired books, a documentary film, a Mac Wellman play, and just this week at Dance Theater Workshop, a dance piece from Pat Graney.

In “The Vivian Girls,” Ms. Graney doesn’t add much depth to the existing stacks of material. Overwhelmed by the scope of the original, her neat gestures can’t carry the evening, despite an occasionally charming image. For those experiencing Darger’s work for the first time, the projected slides of his watercolors will totally overshadow the dancers in front of them.And if the barrage of Dargernalia has already wearied you, “The Vivian Girls” will do nothing to revive your enthusiasm.

Because of the volume of Darger’s output, any approach to it has to be selective and oblique. In Darger’s opus, serial battles between the brave Vivian girls and various militias – men and monsters both – often end in tears, hangings, and dismemberment. Ms. Graney chooses to emphasize vulnerability rather than heroism, editing out images of the girls with guns while running through endless pictures of the girls in chains. Darger had great faith in his little army, but Ms. Graney would rather show them as picturesquely as possible – dozing on a set of gigantic books or passively watching their own adventures on the screen.

In his paintings, when a girl’s skirt blows up, it is Darger’s inexperience that shows – each heroine displays a tiny penis. Even more distressing than a gun-toting cherub, these naively drawn hermaphrodites are the most haunting images from Darger’s work. Watching a grown woman striking childish poses with the appropriate appendage sewn delicately onto her costume, one does feel the frisson of the original. But Bob and Colleen Bonniol’s visual design crushes the delicacy of such moments.

At first, the projections cleverly select images out of each painting, displaying a girl in isolation before fading in the cave or forest around her. But soon the backdrop just becomes a slide-show of Darger’s greatest hits. Two fiery hands occasionally appear, Photoshopped onto the image as a reminder of the girls’ powerlessness. The really heavy hands, though, belong to the Bonniols.

Ms. Graney intentionally restricted her movement vocabulary for this piece – in the program, she mentions studying the movements of patients with palsy. In miniature, she succeeds – girls perform tiny, angry hopscotches or a knock-kneed butterfly negotiates a shaky pair of pointe shoes. But Ms. Graney makes obvious mistakes with too many unsophisticated projections and a clunky, overwhelming set. The dancers, described by Ms. Graney as “mature,” have certainly mastered the glassy stare, but their grace is occasionally in question. As actresses, though, they are each careful observers of a child’s stamp and incipient pout.

Eventually, “The Vivian Girls” buckles under Ms. Graney’s need to give her evening a shape. During an awkward set-change, the enormous, 12-foot-high stacks of books disappear and smaller ones take their place. Then, nearing the end, each dancer trades in her white pinafore for a colorful dress and Mary Janes. But Darger has not written “Alice in Wonderland”; his little girls do not grow up or observe some sort of neat character arc. Taking on Darger, Ms. Graney has taken a vast, odd, formless tiger by the tail. Without the bravery to be vast and formless in response, Ms. Graney’s toothless creations get mauled.

Until May 7 (219 W. 19th Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, 212-924-0077).