[In the following review, Brantley discusses Brian Kullick's Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival production of Timon of Athens. Brantley admires the inventiveness shown by both the director and the designers, but acknowledges a lack of connection between the characters and the audience.]

Now here's a tip for getting rid of unwanted party guests that Amy Vanderbilt probably never gave you: put casters on your dining room table and chairs. When it comes time to unseat your visitors, have your servants wheel them around until they're dizzy, then send them spinning into the air.

Such is the movable feast that the young director Brian Kulick and his imaginative set and costume designer, Mark Wendland, have devised for one unhappy host, the title character of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, which has itself been translated into a sustained visual banquet at the Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival production at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.

This scene, in which the sorely disenchanted Timon (Michael Cumpsty) serves his traitorous friends a meal of stones, is most often presented as an index of its hero's descent from intemperate good will into intemperate misanthropy.

Here, staged with balletic comic precision, it shifts the focus from Timon's anguished rage to the discomfort of his guests. The vignette becomes a wild, gratifying revenge fantasy, and the audience cheers the way it might when Ramses' troops are swallowed by the Red Sea in Cecil B. DeMille's Ten Commandments.

Well, there are ways, and then there are ways, to bring down the house. Mr. Kulick, the associate artistic director of the Trinity Repertory in Providence, R.I., takes the literal approach in his interpretation of Shakespeare's rawest and most cynical tragedy, and the one least often produced. This Timon is a viewer-friendly exercise in deconstruction, setting up rich images of a shallow, materialistic society that are physically dismantled, piece by piece as the play progresses.

The result has the feeling of an allegorical comic strip. It's an antic, often entertaining eyeful, with energy and style to spare, and there's no mistaking its thematic thrust. (It's easy to understand here why Karl Marx liked the play.)

But the bleak moral content of Timon has never been hard to determine. The greater challenge, unmet here, has always been to make psychological sense of Timon himself, an irrationally generous plutocrat who loses his friends when he loses his money and retreats to the wilderness to rage against the ways of man.

This production has the disadvantage of following Michael Langham's haunting take on the play for the National Actors Theater two seasons ago. In it, the great Brian Bedford portrayed Timon as a man who, as the play says, can exist only in extremes, and his rose-colored benevolence and black cosmic anger emerged as flip sides of a compulsive, childlike nature. The performance gave a credible personal center and, more astonishingly, an emotional continuity to a rough-hewn, fragmentary work that its author probably never completed.

Still, as the director Peter Brook has suggested, the tragedy can be either about Timon or about Athens, and it's the latter course that Mr. Kulick has chosen. He stays close to the surface of things, the better to undermine a surface-oriented society in which gold is the measure of the man. What he gives us is a modernist morality play, replete with images of Magritte-ish men in bowler hats and Schoenbergian music (by Mark Bennett) in the background.

As a consequence, it is the director and designers, whose inventiveness is prodigious, who are the stars here, not the actors. Within the fable-like, symbol-driven context of the show, the characters split up pretty evenly into the good and the bad. The wealthy senators and false friends of Timon are comic ducks in a shooting gallery, waiting to be toppled. Timon's servants (nicely led by the ever-serviceable Henry Stram) beam with uncorrupted fidelity.

And Alcibiades (Jack Stehlin), the rebellious Athenian military captain, and the cynical philosopher Apemantus (Sam Tsoutsouvas, looking like the poète maudit Charles Bukowski), are afforded none of the moral ambiguity they had in Mr. Langham's production.

Mr. Kulick has rearranged the text (and in one crucial instance, reassigned a major speech) to give the captain full status as a foe of plutocratic evil and Apemantus the role of a truth-speaking prophet. (When he delivers his tirades against the flattering Athenians, the action onstage is frozen.)

In the center, of course, is Mr. Cumpsty's Timon, who comes across less as a fluid character than a double-edged allegorical poster boy. Mr. Cumpsty, an actor of considerable charisma who suggests a Hirschfeld drawing of a 1920's matinee idol, plays the Timon of the first half as a vain, preening and none-too-bright party guy. (He's the sort of handsome, golden figure whose photograph appears on society pages before he exhausts his trust fund on nightclubs and restaurants.)

His unhappy Timon, on the other hand, emerges as a sort of Mephistopheiean quiz show host, urging those who seek him out in his hermit's lair to take the gold he has found there and employ it toward the destruction of the civilized world.

Throwing a nugget among a trio of squabbling thieves, he's like the evil goddess Eris with the apple of discord. And in one beautifully staged waltz and tango sequence, he dances alternately with Alcibiades and the whore Timandra (Susan Pilar) while delivering the catalogue of martial and venereal woes he wants them to inflict on Athens.

There's no doubt that Mr. Kulick's vision of a dehumanizing universe is artfully carried out, right down to the blocking of the actors, who often emerge onstage as if flung there by some mechanical whirlwind. And Mr. Wendland's set is sublime, with its centerpiece of a long, rectangular box that is wheeled around to reveal a gorgeous, surrealist's triptych of lavishly appointed interiors.

Certain devices, like having the giant, Warholesque portrait of Timon open to reveal a vacant center, are labored. But the ways in which the box is rearranged to suggest different perspectives, with doors opening onto the emptiness of the night beyond, are stunning. So is the first party scene, in which the dancing girls are nothing more than chic-looking dressmaker's dummies, carried on the shoulders of servants.

In that same scene, the ravishing Ms. Pilar delivers an interpolated song that is in fact a setting of one of the poems from “The Passionate Pilgrim” (a Shakespearean collection of doubtful authenticity). It contains phrases like “Words are easy, like the wind; faithful friends are hard to find.”

Yes, that's certainly the lesson of Timon, and Mr. Kulick makes some intriguing points throughout about the corruption of language. But without any real bridge of psychological connection, the play becomes just one long variation on a moral theme, as static, in its way, as the narrative painting by Botticelli reproduced in Timon's dining room.

When Timon begs his servant, “Come, sermon me no further,” you may sympathize with him. On the other hand, when a lecture comes equipped with such dazzling visual aids, it's well worth sitting through.