Three stories intertwine on the multitiered set: a distilled bio of the 17th-century French writer and soldier; Rostand bottling his one enduring bolt of creative lightning in late-19th-century Paris; and American poet Brian Hooker translating Rostand’s drama into English blank verse in Roaring Twenties New York. Onto this, Filip-Tibble layers parallel love stories: Cyrano’s actual platonic relationship with his cousin, Madeleine Robineau-Neuvillette (Rostand’s inspiration for Roxane), and presumed vitriolic gay liaison with fellow writer Charles Coypeau d’Assoucy; the decline of Rostand’s marriage along with his professional fortunes; and, superfluously, a fabricated flirtation between Hooker and a British woman who’s inherited Cyrano’s little-known proto–sci-fi novels and enlists him to translate them, too.

A third play-within-a-play layer involves the actors who portrayed Cyrano in Paris and on Broadway; for good measure, Filip-Tibble has the latter (Ronald Keaton, who nails the coffin shut by looking and sounding like a late-career Mickey Rooney) enact Rostand’s entire revelatory death scene.

There are as many costume changes as plot threads in Cyrano: Translated, all the better to suit Filip-Tibble’s predilection for florid romance-novel dialogue. But she gets it right with the real Cyrano, played by Jonathan French in the evening’s most competent performance. Cyrano: Unedited is more like it.