A serious mis-step for the usually excellent 2nd Story Theater

It literally pains me to write this as I like to be an advocate for local theater companies in all venues and we have a damn good one here on the East Bay, 2nd Story Theater, but the show we saw there last night in previews is just dreadful, a major mis-step for a company that has been consistently top-shelf in all the shows I've seen there over the years. So what went wrong? First, Joe Orton may have been right on the cutting edge circa 1965 and his reputation has lived on based most only 2 plays (Loot, What the Butler Saw) and the tawdry and sensational aspects of his short life and violent death. Can't say anything about those two shows, but why would anyone want to revive Entertaining Mr. Sloane. As Ed Shea, the director, noted, it was written nearly contemporaneously w/ Virginia Woolf, and yes it has some of the biting satire and toxic family dynamics of that play - but whether Woolf holds up today or not, and I think it does, Sloane surely does not: the jokes seem stale, misogynist to put it mildly, and cheap. The plot, though promising as a premise - lonely widow takes in teenage ne'er do well (Sloane) as potential boarder and seduces him, her elderly and somewhat doddering father knows that Sloane has committed a murder, her wealthy homosexual brother becomes a rival for Sloane's affections - all building up to a killing on stage that each character, for reasons of his or her own, wants to cover up. Well, it's hardly a well-made play, and it requires an extraordinary suspension of disbelief to accept these coincidences and happenstances - which I would gladly grant if I cared a whit about any of the characters - but each one seems ill-tempered, nasty, and selfish. As to the particulars of this production, Shea always gets good performances out of his ensemble, and that's true here to a degree, but the young man playing Sloane seems to be seriously miscast or misconceived: he never for a second seems like a 17-year-old hustler; from the opening scene, with the woman is showing him her apartment, he seemed to me like a young businessman new to town who'd been seeking "lodging." He's far too clean cut, well-dressed, and polished for the role. Also, quite oddly, Shea seems ill at ease with the stage dimensions - most or all of the other shows I've seen there have been "in the round" and Shea keeps the actors moving and using all dimensions of the set; in this show, the character consistently are addressing the audience rather than one another - they almost never make eye contact w/ one another, which only adds to the abstraction and alienation of the program - the characters don't believe in one another and neither do we.