Director/choreographer Martha Clarke made her name with a danced drama inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s symbolism-heavy 16th century masterpiece “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” It’s no surprise that she would be drawn to the similarly obsessive work of the early-20th-century outsider artist Henry Darger, a Chicago hospital janitor who gained posthumous fame for his Boschian watercolors and drawings — particularly a 15,000-page illustrated novel about a revolt by child slaves on a fantastical planet.

Clarke’s resulting play, Bughouse, is a visually evocative but dramatically inert performance piece that touches on Darger’s troubled personal story, his penchant for self-isolation, and his fixations on Catholicism and threats to childhood innocence (which he often depicted with graphic violence and nudity). But the script by Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart) consists mostly of an undiagnosed schizophrenic’s stream of consciousness rants, interrupted by the occasional aural hallucination (mostly the voices of nuns and young girls).

The broad outlines of Darger’s life and work are laid out in a program note, as well as in a series of posters placed in the lobby of the Vineyard Theatre. But despite John Kelly’s carefully mannered fever dream of a performance, Bughouse neither expands our understanding of Darger nor fully dramatizes the events in his life or work. We get only snippets of Darger’s magnum opus, a text about heroic but creepily eroticized schoolgirls titled The Story of the Vivian Girls in What is Known as the Realm of the Unreal. But there’s not nearly enough to understand either Darger’s character or his artistry — or the way that he anticipated the QAnon movement and other cultural obsessions rooted in flawed, misguided reasoning.

Clarke’s main achievement is visual. John Narun’s video projections and Ruth Lingford’s animation bring some of Darger’s interior visions to life on the protagonist’s evocatively cluttered and dimly lit apartment (designed by Neil Patel and lit by Chirstopher Akerlind). Bughouse offers a peek into one troubled creator’s mental state but fails to get to the heart of his isolation or his output. ★★☆☆☆

BUGHOUSE
Vineyard Theatre, Off Broadway
Running time: 70 minutes (with no intermission)
Tickets on sale through April 3 for $44 to $119