"Rhinoceros" ought to be provoking. It ought to ram you right in the backside with its brutish hairy horn and hot breath. Its glinting-red piggy eyes ought to make you fearful and angry.

It ought not to be the anemic and academic trained pony that minced out on the Kennedy Theatre main stage last weekend.

Granted, there's a great deal of pressure in certain circles to say one likes absurd drama, or at least to claim an understanding of it. To use the play's imagery, it's as if asking for white wine prevents a thickening of the skin and the beginnings of a horny facial protrusion — early signs that one might be morphing into a bestial philistine.

So I'd like to say that I enjoyed Eugene Ionesco's classic absurdist comedy about conformity, and not confess that it played like a one-note symphony for four scenes in two acts over two hours. But I cannot.

Written in the 1950s and set in a small French town, Ionesco's script has all the characters save one turning into rhinoceroses.

In the 1950s, when it was written, the play was seen as a reaction to the social tides that gave in to Nazism and Fascism prior to World War II. In 1960s America, it spoke to the McCarthy era. And in Glenn Cannon's program notes for the current production, the central image is equally relevant to today's world.

Cannon accordingly sets the play in something like contemporary America, but doesn't otherwise update or politicize the script. It might be fun to characterize the townsfolk as religious fundamentalists or political ultra-conservatives, but what we get are 1950s ideas in the context of a society recovering from the trauma of a global war.

Somehow, that historical place in time lacks contemporary punch.

It also doesn't help the production that the sole holdout against herd mentality comes in the character of Berenger (Christopher Cappelletti) a scruffy everyman, alcoholic and unreliable employee, who stubbornly resists. We follow Berenger, but we really don't root for him and feel he's a bit of an imposter, an alcoholic who orders white wine.

More interesting is John (Savada Gilmore), Berenger's boss and main critic, who begins to literally sprout a horn as the play thumps into its second act. Gilmore also projects a developed sense of style and an awareness of how an important role can accommodate a larger-than-life interpretation. The result is a character with both legs and guts.

The script offers good acting opportunities to a large supporting cast, but the final effort feels controlled rather than experienced, and presented instead of revealed.

It's rather like there might be something to say, but that the production was unsure what it was and that political correctness made it impolite to say it in a big way.

I guess the final message might be that even the thin-skinned and the politically correct travel with a herd mentality.