For Cassavetes that meant chipping away at Hollywood storytelling and pushing actors to get to some kind of emotional truth — the uglier the better, it often seemed. (As a director, he’s a Method actor.)

For Ms. Mirescu, who conceived, designed and directed “John Cassavetes’ Husbands,” that means making theater in which storytelling is just one component in an immersive multimedia experience.

In “Husbands” (1970), which was partly improvised, Cassavetes tells a story-that’s-not-quite-a-story about three middle-aged suburban men, Gus, Archie and Harry, who go on an extended bender after a friend’s death. They drink and vomit; howl, shout and roughhouse; sing and badger women; and then fly to London and do it all some more. They are husbands avoiding wives — we see only one, Harry’s, and he smacks her around — men raging against the dying of joy and spontaneity.

At almost two and a half hours, Cassavetes’s film is long and about equal parts fascinating, irritating and punishing. Ms. Mirescu’s play — at times it resembles installation art more than a theater piece — is even longer (three hours) and more interesting to think about than to sit through.

Her actors perform the dialogue and scenes of Cassavetes’s movie with multimedia embellishments. Men with video cameras record the actors, creating a movie that resembles “Husbands,” as well as a stream of images taken from the set (a dial phone, the cover of Frank Sinatra’s album “A Swingin’ Affair!”). There is nearly constant music, played on electric guitar by Anders Nilsson; it is sometimes delicate, often loud and cacophonous.

The stage is busy with the quotidian doings of life. In the three glassed-in rooms that make up the handsome set, actors read magazines, lounge on couches and watch John Cassavetes on television; others wander aimlessly outside the rooms.

Only the charismatic Florin Penisoara, who plays Gus, is a strong enough actor to compete with Ms. Mirescu’s barrage of pictures and sound. Archie (Anthony LaForgia) and Harry (Francis Oberle) often seem like boys wearing their fathers’ suits, enacting rituals they don’t fully understand. When Harry beats his wife, yelling, “I could kill ya!” there’s an eerie abstraction to the scene. Ms. Mirescu was born in Romania and as a child fled with her family to Switzerland. She brings an outsider’s eye to the America of “Husbands” and, unsurprisingly, seems most concerned with visual cues and with observation. Almost nothing happens onstage that isn’t caught by a camera and reproduced, or viewed through windows, as if life could be taken in only at a remove, on a screen or in a box.

That’s a potent enough idea for (and about) theater. But Ms. Mirescu’s method is chaotic, and her show full of longueurs. Still, she does make you think, even as you stifle a yawn.