Don’t blame the tone-deaf, agonizingly stilted revival of Joe Orton’s “Entertaining Mr. Sloane” on young Chris Carmack, he of the rippled stomach and flat affect. The three seasoned veterans surrounding the “O.C.” hunk fare nearly as dismally, which lands the problems squarely at the feet of director Scott Ellis.

Granted, Orton requires a delicate touch. His well-made cocktail of Wildean wit and licentious depravity, so daring in the mid-1960s, took almost 20 years to find an accommodating home on the New York stage. Since then, though, Orton’s tragically slim body of work – he was killed at the age of 34, after writing only three major plays – has proved hugely influential: Nicky Silver, Noah Haidle, Christopher Durang, and countless other playwrights have continued to hammer away (with varying accuracy) at the proprieties of middlebrow theater. Conveying the daring that these plays generated at the time, as a result of their increasingly provocative efforts, is only slightly easier these days than unearthing the scandalous raunch in a Restoration comedy.

Even taking these difficulties into account, though, Mr. Ellis – who scored earlier this year with “The Little Dog Laughed,” another four-person comedy of sexual manners – flails and hedges from the very first scene. The lazy blocking and rudderless array of acting styles squander Orton’s vicious dissection of desire as well as what had promised to be one of the season’s more tantalizing bits of star casting.

That would be not Mr. Carmack but rather Alec Baldwin, whose early stage career included one high-profile Orton revival (1986’s “Loot”) and who himself could have made a galvanizing Mr. Sloane not so long ago. Here he has shifted to the dowdier role of Ed, one of two siblings to fall under the title character’s amoral spell.

The other is his sister Kath (Jan Maxwell), who embroils Mr. Sloane in a ludicrously Freudian dalliance within minutes of taking him in as a boarder at her dingy boarding house “in the midst of a rubbish bin.” (Allen Moyer’s drably effective set renders literal this description, as the water-stained, figurine-stuffed living room is framed by a stage-length photograph of a trash heap.) She and Ed vie for the ingratiating young man’s attentions – Ed hires him as a chauffeur, a decision based largely on the sort of outfit required:

ED: Do you wear leather … next to the skin? Leather jeans, say? Without … aah …

SLOANE: Pants?

ED: Get away! (Pause.) The question is, are you clean living?

Ed and Kath’s father, Kemp (Richard Easton), is the only one to see through Mr. Sloane’s manipulations. Kemp has met this young man before under even less savory circumstances; mixed with the cresting sexual jealousy, his accusations result in a situation rife with violence, blackmail, and savage witticisms. (“I had a boy … killed in very sad circumstances. It broke my heart at the time. I got over it, though. You do, don’t you?”)

What separates Orton’s work from that of Wilde and so many of today’s acolytes is the sense of impending menace, the feeling that any physical interaction could become a caress, a punch, or worse. But every instance of physical contact shown here, whether violent or amorous, has a tossed-off feel, as if it were rehearsed about an hour beforehand. This indifference to the physical mechanics on Mr. Ellis’s part is absolutely crippling.

His laissez-faire attitude carries through in the lack of any sort of cohesive style among the actors. Mr. Carmack proves out of his depth from the beginning, while Ms. Maxwell – who has found dramatic truth in everything from “A Doll’s House” to “The Bald Soprano” to “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” – offers a flouncy, fussy take on Kath that results in that rare thing: a truly terrible performance by a truly great actress.

Mr. Baldwin, meanwhile, seems to be channeling Charles Nelson Reilly, with his fey hand gestures and thick glasses. The overall impression is obvious and woefully underexamined, although Mr. Baldwin regains his bearings with some of Orton’s more pungent epigrams – “It’s all any reasonable child can expect if the dad is present at the conception” – as the tone darkens.

With the exception of those occasional morsels (and Ms. Maxwell’s skill at conveying Kath’s temporary state of toothlessness), only Mr. Easton’s splenetic, drooling old codger shows any firm grasp of period style or rooted character work. He doesn’t land any more laughs than the rest of the “Entertaining Mr. Sloane” cast, but at least his laughs are earned. And at least when old Kemp seems baffled and lost on the stage, it’s intentional.

Until May 21 (111 W. 46th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, 212-719-1300).