Rules of the Duel: When Facing Near-Certain Death, Employ an Impostor

Silly voices should be used sparingly in the theater, as they generally are in other realms of entertainment. There is a reason why the men of Monty Python and the various gagmeisters from “Saturday Night Live” deploy their comedy in sketch-sized doses. After listening to the shrill, artificial falsetto employed by Jeremy Strong in the title role of the new play “The Coward” for more than two hours, my ears were starved for silence. I felt as if I’d been listening to a musically challenged youngster in a long and unpromising first encounter with the flute.

Then again, it is not hard to imagine why Mr. Strong and his director, the talented Sam Gold (“The Aliens,” “Tigers Be Still”), chose to saddle his character, a jelly-kneed fop in 18th-century England, with the voice of a tone-deaf castrato. “The Coward,” a comedy by Nick Jones that opened on Monday night at the Duke on 42nd Street, needs all the goosing it can get. Although Mr. Jones mimics the language and boisterous style of British playwriting of the era, truly inspired humor is doled out in stingy doses in this labored and overlong play, the latest from Lincoln Center Theater’s LCT3 program.

Mr. Strong’s Lucidus Culling is a tender-hearted young nobleman who would like nothing better than to be left alone to his entomological studies and the dedicated consumption of tea. He has the misfortune of being the last surviving son of a father, Nathaniel (Richard Poe), with inflexible if not obsessive ideas about manliness and how it is expressed by members of their class.

Nathaniel is aghast when he learns that Lucidus has taken an insult from a gentleman without retaliating by offering a formal challenge to duel. “I would never let anyone call my horse fat,” Lucidus sullenly responds, denying the charge.

But his father’s disappointment cuts deeply into his sensitivities, and through a convoluted series of incidents Lucidus finds himself facing the prospect of an actual duel. This news exults his father but throws Lucidus into a state of trembling horror, little leavened by the unsympathetic responses of his equally foppish friends Gavin (Stephen Ellis) and Robert (Steven Boyer).