Let me begin at the end.

Place: Central Park. Time: almost 11:45 p.m. Play: Hamlet. Spirits: low.

Fortinbras and his army have entered Denmark at last, signaling the end. Hamlet has just died—poisoned in the duel scene—and is probably glad to be out of it. The king, the queen, Laertes, Ophelia, Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—all now dead. Only decent Horatio survives—someone, according to W. H. Auden, who’s “not too bright, though he has read a lot and can repeat it.”

Oskar Eustis’ disappointingly literal production had been an uphill slog, and I mistakenly assumed the director would end in the conventional way: At Fortinbras’ command, four captains bear the body of Hamlet away like a soldier. (“The soldiers’ music, and the rites of war/ Speak loudly for him.”) They exit carrying Hamlet in stately procession as a volley of gunshots is fired in ritual tribute. (“Go, bid the soldiers shoot.”) Sometimes, funereal drums are heard instead. Then the curtain comes down, the actors take their well-deserved bow, and we all go home.

But Mr. Eustis changes the end—and belatedly gives the evening its single imaginative flourish. Hamlet’s body isn’t carried off. Instead, on Fortinbras’ last line, “Go, bid the soldiers shoot,” good Horatio is shot, his blood spattering on the wall behind him like a slasher movie. And … curtain!

The sensational ending reverses the meaning of Shakespeare’s text: The gunshots are clearly intended as a salute to Hamlet, a traditional mark of military honor. When Ingmar Bergman’s admired, experimental Hamlet (1986) first changed the ending by having Horatio shot, the legendary Bergman had re-thought the entire play. He had transformed Hamlet into a modern parable: The Prince of Denmark wore black leather and sunglasses; a deranged Ophelia hovered in every scene; and the nightmare appearance of Fortinbras at the 11th hour represented the murderous precipice of a totalitarian future. His army blasted everyone away to deafening hard rock music, the corpses were tossed into a pit and the preening despot used the horrific scene as a photo-op.

In Mr. Eustis’ plodding production, however, nothing prepares us for his borrowed ending. Until then, the director—who’s also artistic director of the Public Theater—had studiously tried to avoid the conceptual tricks that invariably mar productions of Shakespeare in the Park. But in honorably doing so, he’s ended up staging an awfully pedestrian Hamlet. This is basically a flat, straightforward reading, except for the Basil Twist puppets sawing the air in the players scene. The Fortinbras moment isn’t earned: Mr. Eustis has tacked onto the play a empty political statement.

HOW CAN ANY director bring anything new to Hamlet: That is the question. Why Mr. Eustis chose to stage it today is another; how many times we can see it is still another. (And if you haven’t yet seen it, do not pass go and proceed directly to jail.)

Which Hamlet is Mr. Eustis directing? Jacobean revenge drama, tragedy of love, ghost story, philosophical and political discourse, morality play, lethal game of playacting, prototypical Oedipal analysis, cosmic statement about the ultimate meaninglessness of existence—or all of the above?

And who—or what—is Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, but an unsolvable mystery and unconquered Everest for every actor—even the greatest—who dares to play him?

Hamlet must be a poet and a prince, a philosopher and a scholar, a quicksilver genius, a brooding public figure in trauma, a horribly indecisive private man, an actor who cannot act, a neurotic adolescent, a university student driven to madness who feigns madness, a tender and cruel melancholic, a potential suicide who sees through the rottenness of the world and is consumed by it, a man born to play a princely role miscast by fate as the avenging murderer.

We might conclude that the impossible role is unactable in its entirety—certainly uncapturable—and that the play is ultimately unknowable. That is to say, only the most audacious, or the most foolhardy, would take the great, inexhaustible play on.

OSKAR EUSTIS' PREDECESSOR at the Public, George C. Wolfe, is a natural director rather than producer; Mr. Eustis is a natural producer rather than director. His choice of Hamlet for only his second directorial assignment at the Public, after a mediocre debut with Rinne Groff’s The Ruby Sunrise, appears immodest. At any rate, he’s overreached with Hamlet.

He begins his production on an uninspiring interpretive note that sends a predictable message: The figure of a brooding Hamlet is seen kneeling by a memorial flame—for his murdered father, we assume.

The Prince is in modern dress, though the sense of any specific period isn’t consistent (it never is at the Public). Gertrude is costumed like a perfectly coiffed 1950s Douglas Sirk heroine, whereas the bemedaled ghost of the king is Gilbert and Sullivan or from the mythical kingdom of Ruritania.

The featureless steel set behind Hamlet is a cold eyesore. It vaguely represents either the facade of an anonymous ship or a postmodern prison with a forecourt of gray slate. When Michael Stuhlbarg’s Hamlet speaks the line “Denmark’s a prison,” he tips us off by tapping the wall of the set.

“Who’s there?” are the key first words of Hamlet, yet they’re delivered by the castle sentinel Barnardo with no particular sense of urgency—least of all of terror. For two consecutive nights he’s seen the ghost of the murdered king!

Midnight has just struck. But as the production opens, it’s still light (the natural, soon fading, light of Central Park). Mr. Eustice’s grasp of mise-en-scène looks ominously shaky: He’s forgotten to establish darkness and the spookiness that accompanies it. Even darkness must be staged and “performed.”

Then the ghost is seen by Marcellus. (“Look, where it comes again!”) But it doesn’t actually appear. Then it eventually appears in full military regalia in a token puff of smoke to speak to Hamlet. It stands, for some reason, behind him—leaving the son to address the ghost of his father clumsily over his shoulder. Later, Hamlet turns his back on the audience to face the ghost. (Claudius and Gertrude also turn their backs when watching the “mousetrap” scene.) These are elementary mistakes and bewilderingly unnatural moves, cutting us off from any emotional connection.

There are more lapses, alas. This is a production that emphasizes the obvious—the pedant Polonius lecturing everyone at a lectern; the obviously nuts and disheveled Hamlet cavorting barefoot in a clownish replica of his dad’s military uniform. Mr. Eustis all but puts a red nose on him.

Michael Stuhlbarg is unquestionably one of our finest actors, and I regret to report that his Prince of Denmark is mostly frenetic. Hamlet the tragic hero isn’t for him. His tenor voice lacks lyrical range over the long haul; his foot-stamping, hyperactive Prince is too much the adolescent throwing a temper tantrum. On three occasions, words literally fail this enraged Hamlet when Mr. Stuhlbarg blows raspberries at no one in particular. (Better to leave the raspberries to me.)

Mr. Stuhlbarg is at his most convincing in self-loathing sexual frenzy during his later scenes with abused Ophelia. (The violent molestation of Gertrude in the bedchamber scene is more pro-forma stuff.) But Margaret Colin’s Queen Gertrude has no impact or definition, and the Claudius of Andre Braugher is all bluster.

Among the few consolations, there’s Lauren Ambrose’s Ophelia, muted early on in her mortally wounded innocence and more effective and convincing in her mad scene, though she’s been transformed into a neo-punk in oversize army boots. Sam Waterston’s pompous old bore Polonius not only manages to land dead on Gertrude’s bed, but steals the show. Worse, we miss him when he’s gone.

Let me end at the urgent beginning: “Who’s there?”

We are! William Hazlitt, for one, had the answer: “It is we who are Hamlet.”

But not, I’m sorry to say, this unworthy time.

jheilpern@observer.com