Can Chopin be played with one finger? An absorbing question. Can “The Glass Menagerie” be performed by under-equipped Hollywood actors on a clumsy set with ineffectual direction? A less absorbing question, except that someone has actually tried it.

There is no very good reason to see the revival that opened last night at the Ethel Barrymore, unless you happen to think that Tennessee Williams was an aimless, purple, nonsensical hack, and are looking for confirmation of that view. Me, I tend to think Williams may be our greatest playwright, a belief that has somehow withstood the battering he’s taken on Broadway in the last few seasons. When I recall what Anthony Page did to “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” two years ago, and what David Leveaux has done here (the mistreatments are awfully similar), I risk turning into a pompous, enraged, nonsensical hack. So let us take deep breaths and proceed.

“Because of its considerably delicate or tenuous material, atmospheric touches and subtleties of direction play a particularly important part,” wrote Williams in his production notes in 1944. “Delicate,” “atmospheric,” and “subtlety” are not words that float instantly to mind when I remember this telling of the Wingfield family story. Tenuous, though: This production has tenuous written all over it.

The fun begins when Tom Wingfield, our narrator, explains that what we are about to see is “a memory play,” his painful recollection of a crucial episode in his life. His mother, Amanda, wants to marry off his crippled sister, Laura, to a Gentleman Caller; Tom wants to flee. As Tom, Christian Slater may not have much of a voice, but he’s poised onstage and unaffected: He knows where to put his hands and smokes authoritatively. What he’s not, not at any moment that I could detect, is Tom Wingfield. He’s emotionally opaque and too crude to be believed as an anguished man who reads D.H. Lawrence, spends nights “at the movies” (if you know what he means), and gets fired from his warehouse job for writing poems on company time. Passing dirty limericks to the secretaries, maybe.

Tom calls into existence the tiny apartment he used to share with his mother and sister. It is at the rear of a tenement, where entrances and exits are only possible by way of a fire escape. A dreamlike scene is what Williams had in mind, including “the lightest, most delicate music in the world and perhaps the saddest.” Adopting the kind of more-is-more aesthetic familiar to undergraduate directing programs everywhere, Mr. Leveaux loads the stage with trickery.

Tom Pye has designed a fire escape that goes up (not down) and wraps around the rear of the apartment. The curtain that divides the room – open, shut, open, shut, all night – makes the least dreamy rattle in home-furnishing history. There’s no particular rhythm among the play’s scenes, and the vaguely sci-fi noises that divide them are jarring. The really special features are two rings of dingy fluorescent lights, one above the playing area, one just below it. It’s not just that they’re ugly, they’re wrong. They may be the least poetic pieces of stagecraft I have ever seen.

Do these complaints sound pedantic? Maybe they are, a little. But their basis is less academic than emotional. Mr. Leveaux or any other director is welcome to do whatever he wants to Tennessee Williams’s writing, provided we get out of it what Williams put into it. Done right, “The Glass Menagerie” is heartbreaking, disturbing, a chamber piece full of sadness. To leave the Barrymore unmoved – worse than ummoved, actually bored – suggests clumsy mistreatment of a fragile, precious play. And, as in the case of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” the squandering of a cultural treasure.

Bringing a Tennessee Williams heroine to life is hard work. In playing Amanda, Jessica Lange shows us where every bit of effort goes. She strikes many of the right notes, Ms. Lange does – lost in reverie when Amanda is lost in reverie, domineering when Amanda is domineering – but never finds much of a melody. It’s hard to make much emotional investment in her: in a Williams play, a sure sign that something’s wrong.

To be sure, it’s not fair to lay all the blame on Ms. Lange. It doesn’t appear that her co-stars are giving her much to work with, that she’s nearly acting in a vacuum. Maybe this explains why Ms. Lange’s best moments aren’t the dreamy reminiscences or the charm she lavishes on the Gentleman Caller, but the fierce bits: when Amanda forces her views on her children, and the actors playing them have to engage with her. In a better production, Ms. Lange would be a better Amanda.

Today we’d call Laura Wingfield agoraphobic and anxiety-riddled; in the 1930s, she was just shy. Sarah Paulson has charm and an affecting vulnerability, like a puppy braced for the next kick. When the precious pieces in her menagerie of glass animals are harmed, she reacts with genuine alarm. But Ms. Paulson, most of whose credits are in stage and film, doesn’t have the voice to put Laura across. There’s no variety: She plucks the same despairing string all night.

Yet Ms. Paulson still contributes to the one scene that actually works. When the Gentleman Caller finally arrives, and Tom and Amanda leave him alone with the girl, some emotional depth finally accrues. For a moment, Mr. Leveaux’s exciting stagecraft grows quiet and dim enough to be forgotten. It’s true that Josh Lucas – another easy-on-the-eyes screen personality – digs no deeper into Jim O’Connor than Ms. Paulson manages to burrow into Laura. But there’s a plainspoken honesty about the scene. When the actors are quiet, Laura’s helplessness and the almost idealized promise of salvation represented by Jim create a tableau of heartache. Ms. Paulson and Mr. Lucas may not make the text sing, but for once, they give you an inkling of what all the fuss over the Southern playwright with the funny name has been about. Now would someone please mount a revival worthy of him?

Until July 17 (243 W. 47th Street, 212-239-6200).