Frank Wedekind's "Lulu" is a bloody, messy play about sex. Yet the production at Washington's Kennedy Center is far more unsettling than scandalous. "Nothing's shocking any longer," a character says in the first scene, and without downplaying the script's violence or sexuality, director Jonathan Kent's production reinforces that statement. And that's one of the most unsettling things about it. Although Wedekind's 1894 script spawned at least five silent movies (most notably G.W. Pabst's 1928 masterpiece, "Pandora's Box," starring Louise Brooks) and Alban Berg's 1937 opera, it's a play with a checkered history. Its German author, who dubbed it a "gruesome tragedy," never saw "Lulu" produced as he wrote it. Frustrated, he rewrote it in several forms, including dividing it into two plays, a division especially evident in Kent's staging of Nicholas Wright's new adaptation.

"Lulu" is largely a character study, and in the first half, Anna Friel plays her with girlish allure, her gestures fluttery and her body language uninhibited. Wedekind has created a woman at once innocent and sexually experienced, a combination that works because he believed Lulu's innocence resided in her free spirit. Friel luxuriates in this role, portraying Lulu as a pure hedonist. When her husbands die (which they do with alarming frequency), she simply forges ahead, wide-eyed, into the next chapter of a life focused entirely on pleasure.

After intermission, there's a pronounced change in the production's tone, look and in Lulu's character, which becomes hardened. Although no time periods are specified, designer Rob Howell's costumes and scenic details seem to jump ahead to the present. Lulu's spirit is no longer free. Blackmailers pursue her with evidence that she murdered her third husband, and men, including her own father, try to force her into a life of prostitution. Lulu has repeatedly said, "I don't know what I am," but the men around her are convinced they know. Turning her into a mere commodity, they bring about her destruction.

Along with Friel's sure handling of the title role, the production features several fine performances, but none as mesmerizing as Alan Howard's Machiavellian depiction of Lulu's third husband, Dr. Schoning. In many ways the Pygmalion to Lulu's Galatea, Howard's Schoning is the supreme manipulator who has shaped Lulu for his own purposes, which conveniently coincided with her instincts. In the second half, when Schoning is out of the picture, Lulu's world falls apart, and no subsequent connection on stage is as charged. In addition to the sudden updating (Lulu wears a black leather miniskirt in the final scene, and the props include a radio), director Kent relies on various touches throughout the evening that are too overt, even for a play that deals graphically and unabashedly (but never titillatingly) with sex.

The most prominent features of Howell's set are its smoky glass-panelled walls, one of which descends at the start of each scene. We see Lulu through this divider, but the blotched panels suggest that no one sees her clearly. In the end, when the panels are stripped away, metal stanchions remain, suggesting prison bars. However, the most heavy-handed touch is positioning Peter Sullivan (as Lulu's final client, Jack the Ripper) on the side of the stage as an observer/fate figure. He might as well be dressed as the Grim Reaper.

Produced by London's acclaimed Almeida Theatre Company, "Lulu" is the final play in the Kennedy Center's British festival. The three productions - "Lulu"; the 18th-century comedy "A Servant to Two Masters" and an adaptation of George Eliot's novel, "The Mill on the Floss" - couldn't have been more different. The result has showcased the range of some of Britain's finest theater companies. Though "Lulu" is in many ways a troubled interpretation of a troubling play, it also is an arresting production whose haunting images and characterizations prompt the kind of visceral response that only live theater can evoke.