The conscious effort to mainstream the alt-right movement in the Trump era has, of course, troubled many Americans deeply. So it’s understandable that New Yiddish Rep would want to stage Romanian playwright Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (at the Castillo Theatre in Manhattan) just now. Although first performed in 1959, the play—about a society in which hordes of humans morph into rhinoceroses—has traditionally been viewed as an analogy for the rise of fascism in Europe in the years preceding World War II. An argument can be made that the French-language play comments in a more general way on the human tendency to conform. But European audiences (and Parisian audiences in particular) would have had Hitler and Mussolini on their minds when watching this drama’s premiere nearly 60 years ago.

In this new staging, which uses the new Yiddish translation of the play, by Eli Rosen (accompanied by English supertitles), there is a late scene in which one character goes rhino and is seen goose-stepping and, finally, giving a Nazi salute. So, clearly, we know what director Moshe Yassur was aiming for. (At another point, one of the supertitles uses the term “fake news.”)

Ionesco’s scenario focuses on an everyman character named Berenger (Luzer Twersky), his pontificating friend/mentor Jean (Rosen), and his romantic interest, Daisy (Malky Goldman). When fellow villagers start switching species, Berenger grows understandably concerned. Soon Jean makes the beastly transition. Then Daisy succumbs. Can Berenger himself be far behind?

I wish I could report that this Rhinoceros provides valuable insight on America’s current, tempest-tossed political life. My hopes for the show were certainly high. Yassur and New Yiddish Rep’s recent renditions of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman were more than just satisfying. They were occasions for celebration. Hearing the dialogue from those plays presented in Yiddish cadences helped even viewers not fluent in the language (in other words, practically everybody) appreciate the texts in a new and slightly different key. But Rhinoceros is a different story.

Part of the problem may be that Ionesco’s play itself doesn’t quite mesh with a 2017 American dramaturgical sensibility. The play’s premise doesn’t seem so outlandish to generations that have grown used to savage and surreal social and political satire. Also, Ionesco stretches his analogy out in scenes that can seem repetitive and, frankly, tedious.

Notes in the program quote Ionesco as saying of the play, “Although it is a farce, it is above all a tragedy.” This version of Rhinoceros is neither. Yassur’s direction seems slack, with characters sometimes moving about the stage for no discernible reason. A farce calls for speed and energy, but here the effect is often slow and enervating (and I’ve seldom if ever seen such a drawn-out curtain call). The scene in which Jean turns rhino before Berenger’s eyes should be audacious, frightening, delightfully weird. Zero Mostel won a Tony Award for playing Jean in the 1961 Broadway production, and, when he died, in 1977, The New York Times wrote that he’d “created the illusion of changing himself from a man into a rhinoceros with such realism that theatergoers gasped.” True, Mostels aren’t everywhere to be found. But nothing remotely approaching that excitement level happens in this treatment of Jean’s metamorphosis.

The actor coming closest to capturing the dark-cartoonish style the play needs is Caraid O’Brien, in her small role as Mrs. Ox. This character has a paroxysm of tears when her husband transitions to quadruped, but she soon charges off after him, following in his hoof-steps. It’s a turn that is both over-the-top yet fully believable. If only the rest of the cast could match her commitment to fully enacting the mayhem in the material, this could be a Rhinoceros worth catching.