The herd mentality—that need to follow the pack—drives many aspects of our lives, from who we vote for and what we wear to what we see at the theater. Social scientists study it, marketers push trends derived from it, and commentators bemoan our choices. But what if those choices result in becoming an animal that actually runs in a herd?

That is the absurd notion central to Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, his freewheeling 1959 comedy in which the citizens of a small French town have their complacency forever changed as they are transformed into rhinoceroses at an alarming rate for no discernible reason. It is a funny, wacky comedy until it isn’t, and it is hard to pull off without becoming a cartoon or a polemic. Happily, that is not the case at the American Repertory Theater, where a starry production headed by John Turturro, Paul Giamatti, and Tatiana Maslany and expertly directed by Diane Paulus runs through September 27. Superbly acted and hugely entertaining, it resonates in ways that go beyond its one-joke premise.

Surprisingly, this is the first time in A.R.T.’s long history that Rhinoceros is being staged on the Loeb’s main stage. It is also the first Ionesco the company has produced, which may seem a bit odd considering his prominence among postwar playwrights. But while Ionesco helped define what became known as the theater of the absurd, his techniques were absorbed by succeeding playwrights, from Harold Pinter and Edward Albee to Tom Stoppard and, especially, Christopher Durang. In the process, Ionesco’s own plays gradually fell out of fashion.

This production came about when Turturro approached Paulus and asked if she was interested in staging the play. She had been thinking the same thing; together, with the permission of the Ionesco estate, they took Derek Prouse’s translation and turned it inside out, finding ways in the process to make it more relevant.

And they do so without updating it or transferring it to an American setting, remaining true to Ionesco’s vision of a small French town a generation ago suddenly under siege by rhinos. Nor does Paulus revert to more current stage techniques: there are no oversized puppets, no LED screens with rampaging beasts, nor are prosthetics and makeup used in the physical transformations. These rhinos are heard, menacingly, in Fitz Patton’s ear-shattering sound design, but not seen. Riccardo Hernández’s set design is also minimal, with simple pieces representing various locales around town and a dollhouse-styled white church suggesting stability and order in the background, only to be seen sitting on its side and pushed away in the final scene. This descent into chaos is augmented by Jen Schriever’s lighting, which moves from the bright, sunlit Sunday morning of the first scene to the foreboding darkness of its final moments. Anita Yavich’s costumes are period-appropriate and, in the case of Giamatti’s green pajamas, slyly reference the rhino’s color.

Though written at the end of the 1950s, Ionesco was not inspired by that decade of great conformity, but by his experiences as a college student in Bucharest some 20 years earlier. There he witnessed the disturbing trend of his well-educated peers, goaded by some faculty members, joining the fascist Iron Guard, a homegrown nationalist movement not unlike the Nazi brownshirts. (They were even known as the Greenshirts, which Ionesco references with mentions of the rhinos’ green skin.) Having spent much of his childhood in France before moving to Romania as a teenager, Ionesco was somewhat immune to the Iron Guard’s strident nationalism. He was nonetheless astonished by the appeal of such a racist, anti-democratic movement among the intelligentsia. Rather than explain why they succumbed, Rhinoceros turns the ease with which they did so into metaphor. The rhinos simply take charge, and as their numbers grow, so does their appeal.

Reviving the play today immediately brings to mind the current political climate, but the staging shrewdly avoids contemporary references. And it works on many levels: a rambunctious comedy, a commentary on the nature of conformity, a romance and, in its final moments, a call for resistance. That comes from the most unlikely of heroes, Berenger, played with all the nervous energy John Turturro can muster (and it is considerable). At the outset, though, he’s a bit of a slug, nursing a bottle of brandy and wallowing in his sad-sack persona. He works a boring office job, drinks too much on the weekends, and is sweet on his co-worker Daisy (Tatiana Maslany), but sees himself outflanked by the handsome and ambitious Dudard (Alex Ross, excellent). His life has been downhill since he was 15, he laments.

He meets up with Jean (Paul Giamatti), who takes pride in his physical and emotional strengths and chastises Berenger for his lack of any. But their conversation is interrupted when a rhinoceros thunders through the town square. Jean is alarmed, but Berenger is more concerned that Daisy might see him in his disheveled state. A second rhino thunders by, killing a cat owned by a society matron. Jean notes that this rhino had two horns, not one—a distinction that becomes important in the following scene, set in Berenger’s office, where the report of the cat’s death and the existence of rhinos running through the small town are debated among the workers. All this ends when their absent co-worker turns up as a rhino, along with his wife, played by the brilliant Kristine Nielsen, whose unhinged outbursts ratchet up both the absurdity and the chilling nature of the bizarre turn of events. She also makes a spectacular exit, riding her husband bareback in shadowy outline.

Paulus carefully modulates the play’s outsized reality, which becomes stranger and stranger as it progresses, bringing the audience in for what is both a fun ride and a thrilling drama. It is not surprising that Hitchcock’s The Birds, released not long after this play premiered, comes to mind as the play moves toward its final act. As in that film, an ordinary community is under inexplicable siege, with terror arising less from explanation than from the unnerving fact that nature has stopped behaving according to familiar rules.

But before that comes the play’s inspired sequence in which Jean, to his shock, is transformed into a rhinoceros. At first, Giamatti sits in bed in green pajamas complaining of being unwell, but in a matter of minutes he begins snorting, then charges about the stage while still attempting to maintain a conversation with the understandably alarmed Berenger. He strips off his pajamas and, at one point, inexplicably begins humping the bewildered Turturro. What makes this remarkable is how Giamatti succeeds through gesture, sound, and movement without makeup or prosthetics, ending the first half with a brilliant comic tour de force.

The mood turns considerably darker in the second half, set in Berenger’s room, with the rhinos noisily gathered outside. “We must move with the times,” says Dudard to the shell-shocked Berenger. He rejects this as they are joined by Daisy, who, it turns out, also has a soft spot for him. After Dudard joins the herd, Berenger and Daisy play out a short but sweet romance. But Daisy begins to hear something seductive in the rhinos’ calls and eventually joins them. Maslany, who has been a bit of a mystery up to this point, is poignant in her exit, making Daisy’s surrender feel less like coercion than a choice to go where everyone else has already gone.

Early on, Berenger says he’s uncomfortable in his own skin, which it would seem make him most willing to change it if given the opportunity. Yet he fights back every step of the way only to be the last man standing, finding strength in his outsider status and his steadfast belief that what is happening is wrong. Standing alone with a huge rhinoceros eye over his shoulder, Berenger rages on, and in that moment Turturro is one with his character, which is the essence of great acting.

Rhinoceros continues through September 27 at the Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA. For more information, visit the ART website.