What would Kip Williams have done without the invention of the smartphone? There was a time in this town when you couldn’t shake a feather duster without hitting a production of Jean Genet’s “The Maids.” The 1947 French proto-camp classic fizzes with class rage and dominance games, and it’s been catnip for adventurous directors: simultaneously cheap to produce — requiring just a bedroom set and three actors — and emotionally feverish.

In the hallucinatory plot, two sisters serve a demanding mistress, while also secretly performing a nightly ritual of mimicry and abuse. When Madame is away, the maids take turns trading their uniforms for their employer’s finery, re-enacting her highhandedness with relish, ratcheting themselves to a homicidal pitch that can sometimes turn erotic. Do they want to murder her? Or become her? Identity fractures as role-play becomes reality becomes quasi-religious ceremony.

For all its psychosexual salaciousness, “The Maids” also contains a strange dignity. Genet — thief and sex-worker, revolutionary and poète maudit — inverts the servants’ desperation into something like a saint’s martyrdom tale. (In French, the title is “Les Bonnes,” which also means “the good.”) Its portrait of obsession has grown pervasive enough that it risks becoming overly familiar. On film, we’ve watched decades of thrillers made under its influence, from “Persona” (1966) and “Single White Female” (1992) to “The Housemaid” (2025). Perhaps that’s why we haven’t seen a major stage production in New York in more than 10 years.

Now the play is at St. Ann’s Warehouse, which has recently become a welcome local stop for productions from London’s Donmar Warehouse. Directed by Kip Williams with hyperbolic, internet-coded frenzy, this is “The Maids” for the Snapchat era. (If you’re thinking that we’re past the Snapchat era, you’ve found one of my problems with it.) In Williams’s unevenly updated version, the deranged Claire (Lydia Wilson) and her needy sister Solange (Phia Saban) exist in a modern-day London, working tantalizingly close to hyperwealth — a Soho House membership, a custom Schiaparelli — and whipped into a covetous froth by it.

That almost-touchable life is all gossamer softness: Rosanna Vize’s set is a sunken, pale-carpeted room, filled with a lounging duvet and vase upon vase of flowers. Triple-height mirrored closet doors form the back wall — they double as screens — and during the first, extraordinary scene, a beautiful ring of white gauze curtains envelops the playing space.

For a show about the interdependence of desire and artifice, those flowers pose a problem. In his 1961 essay “How to Play ‘The Maids,’” Genet insisted that the flowers in Madame’s boudoir be real. A cut blossom is already beginning to rot; beauty and corruption have the same stem. (“You’re my bad smell,” Claire says lovingly to Solange in the original text.) Here, presumably for production reasons, the actors throw fake flowers. I’m sure it would be hard to clean flower-guts out of that carpet, but it’s fundamentally self-defeating to do “The Maids” without the slime.

What Williams uses most pointedly are pixels. Williams directed the more successful “The Picture of Dorian Gray” on Broadway in 2025, and here he revisits many of the same screen-heavy strategies: Massive projections of live iPhone footage, taken by the multitasking performers, dominate the mise-en-scène. (Zakk Hein designed the complex video.) To a pounding mix of girlpop and warped Tchaikovsky, provided by sound designer Dan Balfour, the women also manipulate the 13-foot-tall images of themselves using somewhat dated filters à la Snapchat, becoming cops, or puppies or, when they imitate Madame, pneumatic-lipped approximations of Bratz dolls.

But when Madame (Yerin Ha) finally enters, we see that the maids have not, in fact, been changing their images to seem anything like her. Why? Ha has the thrilling energy of an out-of-control fire hose, but she in no way resembles a Bratz doll: She’s a punky nepo-bully in stompy knee-high mukluks. Madame and her princess-gown-loving servants have totally opposite approaches to glamour. The mismatch is a serious flaw in a play about obsession; this soi disant influencer is not exactly dominating her maids’ psychic space.

So what has all their incessant filming meant beyond “internet=bad”? After the first exciting shock of hyperactivity wears off, a certain late-show aimlessness pulls the production apart. Saban’s Solange screams (with diminishing returns) into her phone’s yawning lens; Wilson, often a hypnotic presence, gets marooned in a computerized green-screen limbo during a breakdown, which only serves to dissipate her magnetic power.

What does feel piquant is the way Williams plays with the mise-en-abyme of mediatized love, in which virtual presence — this Madame has millions of social media followers — generates hunger for in-person contact. The real Yerin Ha broke out in “Bridgerton” last season, and the real Reddit is now full of fans trying to find out whether she’ll appear at the stage door for a selfie. There’s a more radically retooled version of “The Maids” that Williams might have made about the culture of parasocial relationships, and for a moment he teases us with it. But then the show flinches, recoiling from what might have been an awfully interesting bad smell.