Most directors tremble at the prospect of doing Chekhov. But Pierre van der Spuy, on the other hand, has simultaneously attempted to write a Chekhovian play about Anton Chekhov’s life, direct it, and – moreover – play Chekhov in it. Such misguided heroics could be chalked up to Mr. van der Spuy’s harmless earnestness. (He came to theater late, after careers in medicine and management consulting.) But his “Anton” (apparently, he’s on a first-name basis) is so flawed – and so unforgivably long – that its hubris becomes insufferable.

“Anton” spans the four years immediately preceding Chekhov’s death from tuberculosis in 1904 at the age of 44. It is the period after the triumphant Stanislavsky revival of “The Seagull,” during which he wrote “Uncle Vanya,” “The Three Sisters,” and “The Cherry Orchard.” It’s hard to understand how the man wrote anything, given Mr. van der Spuy’s account, since “Anton” appears to have been endlessly henpecked by his wife, mother, and sister – not to mention his obnoxious houseguest, his loudmouthed maid, and a meddlesome doctor. This unlucky group is crammed into a parlor in Yalta, where they plod through an ungodly amount of stage business. People are forever making tea and hanging up portraits, rising and sitting. In the midst of all this, they dissect their unhappy relationships and childhoods.

Mr. van der Spuy displays scant understanding of the qualities that make Chekhov’s plays work – in particular, their use of language. Chekhov’s characters speak as if in an echo chamber of the imagination. (This is why his plays are so often better to read than to see.) One would scarcely expect the drawing room conversations of his life to resemble those in his plays; his dialogue is much closer to poetry than prose. Yet Mr. van der Spuy’s “Anton”asks us to believe that Chekhov’s life resembled a bad imitation of a Chekhov play.

It is not easy, after all, to get a big metaphor off the ground, as Chekhov did with his dead seagull. Mr. van der Spuy fails outright with his flowers that won’t blossom and butterflies that turn into caterpillars. In place of Chekhov’s shrewd insights, Mr. van der Spuy substitutes platitudes: not merely “I never said goodbye,” but also “He never shed a tear in 10 years,” and “You and I both know that if you walk out that door, it’ll be the last time I see you.” Mr. van der Spuy doesn’t have the ability to seamlessly locate the audience (as Chekhov could) at the center of a web of interconnected characters; it takes him an act to get all his personages sorted. And he can’t transport the action to a Russian country house – not by a long shot. The tiny black box theater puts the actors within a foot of the front row, like the studio audience of a television soap opera.

“Anton” opens with two longish acts, followed by a 15-minute intermission and two more acts. On top of this, there is an ill-advised epilogue, where the actors sheepishly recite their characters’ fates. Worse still is the “Epilogue II” sheet passed to the audience on the way out, which proudly proclaims that the early years of life are decisive in emotional development – as if this were somehow in doubt, and as if it had any relevance to “Anton,” which says virtually nothing about Chekhov’s childhood in its three bloated hours.

After expending so much effort to explicate what he calls his hero’s “search for love and happiness,” Mr. van der Spuy turns around and plays him as a flat, exhausted martyr. The better moments come when the protagonist is offstage, and we see his sister’s pain or his wife’s fear. But such occasions are too few and too brief. Ultimately, “Anton” succeeds in just one thing: sharpening one’s sense of the vast distance between Chekhov and his would-be imitators.

Until January 29 (547 Greenwich Street, between Houston and Spring Streets, 212-352-3101).