Taylor Mac, the multihyphenate fixture of downtown theater who’s said that his preferred pronoun is judy, is the natural choice to star in an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking, gender-bending 1928 novel Orlando. The centuries-spanning story, a kind of love letter to Woolf’s paramour Vita Sackville West, follows its eponymous hero through multiple centuries and genders and makes a satiric case for exploding societal conventions.

Will Davis’s production, which opened at Signature Theatre’s Pershing Square venue Saturday, takes a visually inventive approach to the material, with props and backdrops (by Arnulfo Maldonado) and over-the-top costumes (by Oana Botez) that play like a British panto for grown-ups. While Mac remains a steady, earnest presence in the title role, rolling with the various permutations of Orlando’s gender and the story itself, the rest of the seven-member cast take an altogether broader approach, with mixed results. Standouts include TL Thompson, whose Queen Elizabeth would rival RuPaul for regal hauteur, and Lisa Kron, as an overzealous aristocratic suitor who pops in two time periods (and two different genders).

Still, it’s hard to escape that this is essentially the live reading of a somewhat condensed novel — one of the first theatrical works by the playwright Sarah Ruhl, who since this 1998 adaptation has emerged as one of our most gifted dramatists with plays like Eurydice, The Clean House, and In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play). (While written earlier, the show was first performed in 2010.) Orlando includes hints of her later work, exploring classic and historic material with a modern psychological bent and a willingness to embrace the absurd. Here, though, there’s a talkiness that can be exhausting despite Davis’s efforts to goose the proceedings with vaudevillian bits and visual gambits.