NEW YORK, NY.- At the start of “Woolf Works,” a three-act ballet by British choreographer Wayne McGregor based on novels by Virginia Woolf, we hear part of what is reportedly the only extant recording of Woolf’s voice. It is a writer’s loving complaint about her materials: words. Used by everyone, they are full of echoes and associations, she says. A writer can invent new ones but can’t use them in an old language like English, because words hang together.

By beginning like this, is McGregor identifying with Woolf and admitting the difficulty inherent in his materials, steps in the old language called ballet? Or is this a smug assertion of difference — that he, as a choreographer, can invent?

“Woolf Works” is certainly ambitious. When the Royal Ballet debuted it in 2015, it was hailed as a breakthrough. But when American Ballet Theater gave the work its New York premiere on Tuesday as part of its season at the Metropolitan Opera House, “Woolf Works” turned out to be a big, flashy, dull disappointment.

When choreographers turn to writers, it is usually for character and story, as in several other works in Ballet Theater’s season: “Onegin,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Like Water for Chocolate,” which drowns in plot. But for Woolf’s novels, synopsis is trivial. A modernist, she discarded much of the genre’s furniture to get inside the minds of her characters and jump from one to the next, playing with form, memory and sudden illumination. The staid model of story ballets could certainly benefit from such formal play, and sudden illumination is something dance does especially well.

Not in “Woolf Works,” alas. Hobbled by Max Richter’s hackneyed score, it is notably unmemorable; apart from its scenic effects, the ballet slips right through the mind. Noting its divergences from Woolf’s works is necessary. But more important are the many ways it falls short as dance. (And for the record, dance already had a Virginia Woolf, long ago. Her name was Martha Graham.)

The first section, “I now, I then,” based on “Mrs. Dalloway,” borrows characters from the novel, with Clarissa (Mrs. Dalloway), doubling as Woolf. (The role was originated by Alessandra Ferri, who returned to it on Tuesday, at 61.) Monumental and mobile set pieces like giant bookends say “abstraction” and serve as screens for footage of Edwardian London. After dancing with her husband, the heroine watches and dances with her young self and past lovers, male and female.

I now, I then: McGregor’s choreography can show this. Older characters can move slowly as younger ones gambol; women can kiss. The sound of Big Ben can toll the passing of time. But for the novel’s perspectival shifts, McGregor has only the transitional device — flogged throughout “Woolf Works” — of one dancer suddenly coming up behind another. Mostly, as in many story ballets, it’s just a series of duets.

The strongest moment involves Septimus, a shellshocked war veteran. It’s not his angularly anguished solo, or his tortured and buckling interactions with his worried wife and dead trench mate, but his duet with the Woolf-Clarissa character — something that doesn’t happen in the novel. He places her in ballet poses and she keeps collapsing.

Along with ruminative walking, collapsing is the only language that McGregor has for suicidal depression, but the expression of an identification between novelist and character is at least interesting.

The second section, “Becomings,” diverges much more from its source: “Orlando.” From that novel’s parodic tour through the history of England and English literature, all that remains are some Elizabethan accents in the costumes and a feeble idea of fluid gender: same-sex partnering, men wearing tutus. The novel’s delightful comedy is conspicuously absent.

Instead, McGregor gives us lasers, wax-museum figures and an unleashing of his signature style of sleek, sharp, hyperextended ballet. The acceleration is initially startling, but the undulant noodling quickly becomes as soporific as the previous section’s restraint. I find these machinations as soulless as artificial intelligence, but whatever you feel about McGregor’s derivations from late-20th-century William Forsythe, they only pretend to be new. And while the lighting designer, Lucy Carter, is a wizard, a light show set to music fit for a nature documentary’s sweep across glaciers does not a breakthrough in ballet make.

The final section, “Tuesday,” is based on “The Waves,” as you can tell from the projection of waves crashing in super-slow motion. In place of the novel’s innovative form of collective biography, McGregor substitutes some of Woolf’s own history, starting with a recorded recitation (by Gillian Anderson) of her suicide letter, written on a Tuesday in 1941.

Even front loaded with such poignancy and the addition of child dancers, the work fails to sustain much emotion. McGregor does provide waves, though, rows of dancers cresting. Richter’s formula — slow crescendo to quick crash into quiet — matches this well, and mass effects disguise and compensate for the expressive poverty of McGregor’s choreography. When the Woolf character disappears in the wavelike motion, it’s a little bit touching, and the closest McGregor gets to Woolf’s ideal of combining old words in a new order to create beauty and truth.

In any case, the person playing that role on Tuesday was the best feature of the evening. Still lithe and pliant, Ferri has an older dancer’s dignity and self-possession, and her natural smiles occasionally broke through the work’s self-seriousness. Aptly, she seemed somewhat apart from the others, both in and out of the game, watching and wondering at it, like a writer in the world or one mingling with her characters. She was almost Woolf-like.

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‘Woolf Works’

Through Saturday at the Metropolitan Opera House; abt.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.