There’s caffeine in the samovar in the Huntington Theatre Company production of A Month in the Country. Between Irish playwright Brian Friel’s 1991 adaptation and Nicholas Martin’s lively staging, Ivan Turgenev’s poignant 1850 comedy, a precursor to the plays of Anton Chekhov, has had the languor squeezed from it like juice from a lemon. Something’s lost and something’s gained, in a gorgeously accoutered production where even Russian boredom has an edge and the play’s heroine, Natalya Petrovna, exudes a sexual excitement that cuts through her indolence like electricity. Unrequited love is in the summer air like mosquito fog in Turgenev’s portrait of the Russian gentry, but here the atmosphere doesn’t so much congeal as bristle.

What Martin does with A Month in the Country is not unlike what he did with Hedda Gabler, which took him to Broadway. That is, start with a classic with the potential to be turgid, resort to a brisk adaptation, punch up the comedy, and simultaneously humanize and heat up the trapped woman at its center. Jennifer Van Dyck (who played Thea Elvsted in Hedda), like Kate Burton’s Hedda, looks way too exquisite to be wasted on the company around her and is the smartest, if not the funniest, person in the room. (The funniest would be joker toady Dr. Shpigelsky, nicely played by Jeremiah Kissel as a cross between a teddy bear and a snake.) Just as Harris Yulin was a bloodless if dangerous Judge Brack to Burton’s bursting-with-life Hedda, so James Joseph O’Neil’s Rakitin, the family friend who is Natalya’s soul mate and " lap dog, " seems curiously dispassionate, as if he suffered less from love than from pique. Turgenev spent a lifetime in romantic thrall to French opera singer Pauline Viardot, the wife of his French translator, and he poured the anguish into Rakitin’s declaration that love’s a calamity. Here, Turgenev’s alter ego, if not his Muse (who’s embodied in Natalya Petrovna), is upstaged by his other creations.

The beauteous Natalya is the wife of adoring, rich, absent-minded landowner and " dam enthusiast " Arkady. He’s not a problem. But as A Month in the Country begins, Rakitin, Natalya’s confidante, finds himself marginalized by her sudden, agitated passion for her 10-year-old son’s 21-year-old tutor. Aleksey, for his part, is in awe of Natalya but more at ease with Natalya’s pretty 17-year-old ward, Vera. As servants Matvei and Katya carry on their own dalliance and Shpigelsky bluntly courts Lizaveta, the spinster companion of Arkady’s elderly mother, the triangle turned quadrangle does not so much explode as pop, leaking suffering and decorum all about the place. The goings on are more overt and less psychological in Friel’s adaptation than in the original, which turns on a metaphor about the delicacy of lace making. Friel also plays down, without ignoring, the implicit politics of the piece, which depicts a feudal hierarchy that, by Chekhov’s time, would be in its death throes.

At the Huntington, the idling aristocracy are turned out in slightly peeling splendor on Alexander Dodge’s curving, rotating set, which tucks both sitting room and garden porch into a lush romantic landscape. Michael Krass’s costumes, especially for Natalya, are unstintingly fine. And the music, from the John Field piano nocturnes played by Vera off stage to the snippet of Rossini’s Otello from Pauline Viardot’s repertoire, contributes to the hothouse tone, even amid the broad comic shenanigans, including Mark Setlock’s as the leering-Hun version of Mrs. Malaprop, German tutor Herr Schaaf.

Van Dyck is a ripe spider of a Natalya, her social manipulations polished, her nervous laughter a hair’s breadth from hysteria. Between Martin’s choreography and Van Dyck’s execution, Natalya’s careful, voluptuous movements are studied yet not contrived. O’Neil’s Rakitin may be so refined as to fade into the shadow of the other, more energetic characters. But he has a nice petulance, and he rises to the occasion of his self-contemptuous warning against enslaving love. Jessica Dickey is a wistful if slightly worn Vera whose cavorting with Ben Fox’s convincingly naive Aleksey exudes a childlike chemistry that’s distorted by Natalya.

Tom Bloom’s confused Arkady, continually " astonished " by his wife, is older than Turgenev envisions but affectingly openhearted. Alice Duffy gives off a pinched, gentle wisdom as Arkady’s mother, whom Friel arms with personal knowledge of " love without reservation. " As her high-strung companion, who’s trying to hold on to her pretensions while getting a husband with no use for them, Melinda Lopez utilizes a wonderful little sucking laugh and makes the most of a hanky-dropping moment. But Kissel runs off with the evening as country doc and chafing peasant Shpigelsky, an affably crude, admirably frank hanger-on who, if his self-denigrated medical skills are as bad as his jokes, is lucky to precede not only Chekhov but the age of malpractice suits.