With its idling leisure class obliviously sailing toward obsolescence, George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play “Heartbreak House” owes a clear debt to Chekhov, particularly “The Cherry Orchard.” Shaw even called the play “a fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes.” Director Robin Lefevre has taken these cues to heart in the Roundabout Theatre’s creditable new revival, unspooling Shaw’s satire with an unhurried and deeply Chekhovian intelligence that makes up for its occasional lack of vigor.

Mr. Lefevre has taken a fairly radical approach to the work: He plays it straight, with none of the directorial overreaching that inevitably seems to come with revivals from this period. With just one notable exception, the able cast shows a consistently unadorned approach to the text that bespeaks a firm but respectful hand on the wheel.

In fact, one of the production’s weaknesses comes from Mr. Lefevre’s strange diffidence toward Shaw’s (literally) explosive finale. Picture “The Cherry Orchard” ending with the usurping businessman Lopakhin taking his ax not to the orchard but to the actual Ranevskaya house: That gives you a sense of Shaw’s prescient ending, as a World War I German bomber disrupts the sedate goings-on at Captain Shotover’s country estate.

That heavily timbered house (set designer John Lee Beatty looks to have felled an orchard of his own in creating it) accommodates the intermittently formidable Shotover (Philip Bosco) and his willful daughter Hesione (Swoosie Kurtz), plus a revolving door of pontificating houseguests. Hesione and her dashing husband Hector (Byron Jennings) have settled into a nimble marriage of convenience, one that allows Hector to court the rosy-cheeked ingenue Ellie Dunn (Lily Rabe) while Hesione woos Ellie’s stalwart father, Mazzini (John Christopher Jones).

Hesione’s motives are chaste: The seduction is part of a scheme to break off Ellie’s engagement to Boss Mangan (an enjoyably low Bill Camp), the gauche industrialist who has bankrolled Mazzini’s failed business. It’s no wonder Hesione’s sister, Ariadne (Laila Robins, who gets more mileage than usual out of her icy elegance), got out of this house at her earliest convenience; she has returned after 23 years, and the shifting romantic currents inevitably sweep her up, too.

All this happens under the absentminded gaze of the 88-year-old captain, who still runs his home like a ship and who has a hard time deciphering between guests, intruders, and his own flesh and blood. By the end, any number of deceptions will be unmasked and hearts bruised, frequently in unexpected ways and always accompanied by Shaw’s inexhaustible supply of witticisms.

As with any “Heartbreak House,” this production is anchored by the blustering philosopher at its center. Rather than frame Shotover’s ditherings as either the last gasps of clarity or a set of crazy-like-a-fox machinations, the limber Mr. Bosco creates a man whose quest for “the seventh degree of concentration” frequently blinds him to what’s happening right in front of his eyes.

It’s a risky but successful take on a character whose resignation and vague melancholy inspire some of Shaw’s richest musings on old age. (“The happiness that comes as life goes … the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten”). His Act II dialogue with Ellie, in which the two generations reach a sort of spiritual communion, has a poignant lucidity, with ample assistance from Ms. Rabe, who adds still another memorable credit to a very promising stage career, as well as from Mr. Lefevre’s deliberate pacing.

With her Little Miss Sunshine ringlets and her daringly buttoned frocks, Hesione is the most vibrant mantrap this side of Blanche Devereaux. And Ms. Kurtz’s performance, while certainly stylish and diverting, is only slightly more authentic than those scarlet curls. Her Hesione speaks in the swoopy, presentational flourishes of a Restoration comedy heroine, determined to turn even the slightest bit of dialogue into a priceless gem. Mr. Jennings slides into the rhetorical excesses more comfortably as the reluctant popinjay Hector, whose wife refuses to let him shave his rakish mustache or shed his ludicrous Arabian outfits. (Jane Greenwood’s costumes are suitably starchy and/or batty throughout.)

Then there’s the burglar, another in a string of Shaw’s irresistible proles who expose the hypocrisies of “finer” society. His Act II shenanigans, as he wheedles and guilt-trips the guests into forking over their cash, make him a soulmate to the likes of Alfred Doolittle, Snobby Price (from “Major Barbara”), and numerous other Shavian reprobates. When Shaw wrote in his extended preface to the play that “those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying,” he is drawing a clear comparison between the play’s schemers and its idlers; along with Mangan, the burglar is the only other character in “Heartbreak House” to fit the former description.

And who plays this choice character role here? Nobody. Mr. Lefevre understandably decided to hack away at the second act of “Heartbreak House,” but he misjudged when he opted to excise this character altogether. This cut defangs one of Shotover’s best running gags, deprives the dotty servant Nurse Guinness (an enjoyable Jenny Sterlin) of her only real plot thread, and muddles some of Hector’s later behavior. Most inexcusably of all, it makes a huge central swath of “Heartbreak House” not very funny.

The other questionable choice comes from Mr. Lefevre’s low-key approach to the German strafing that ends the play. What thus far had read as droll chattering about love and maturity and providence suddenly takes on a more pathetic tone; the intricate chamber music of Shaw’s dialogue is instantly converted into the ineffectual fiddlings of a house filled with Neros. Ellie may describe heartbreak as “the end of happiness and the beginning of peace,” but those German bombers appear to have other ideas about peace.

Perhaps Mr. Lefevre wished to downplay Shaw’s melodramatic denouement, focusing instead on the upheavals taking place under Shotover’s roof. But for whatever reason, the paltry visual effects and shrugged-off responses are sadly out of whack. At the risk of spilling more ink on the poor fellow than Shaw did, might the ousting of that burglar have something to do with it? The Chekhovian resonances of “Heartbreak House” hinge on an instability threatening the order from all sides. Without that witty threat from below, so to speak, the house somehow seems less vulnerable from above.

Until December 10 (227 W. 42nd St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-719-1300).