Brazil’s reputation has taken a few hits in recent months: A few outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease haven’t helped, nor has “Miracle Brothers,” the irritating dolphin musical at the Vineyard. But if ersatz capoeira and dodgy beef have soured you on Brazil, check out “The Asphalt Kiss” to renew your love of all things Rio.

A thoughtful, disorienting piece about the ugliness of public interest, “Kiss” feels both contemporary and deliciously nostalgic. Nelson Rodrigues wrote it in the mid-century – it was a time when women were women and men wore hats. So despite a plot that could have been ripped from today’s more prurient headlines, “The Asphalt Kiss” crackles like Dashiell Hammett with some gender confusion over the femme fatale.

When a bus mows down an anonymous man, passer-by Arandir (James Martinez) kisses him, saluting a departing soul. Amado (Joe Capozzi), a sleazy newspaperman, sees the kiss and knows he has the makings of a salacious story. The people hunger for scandal, so Amado, with the help of a repulsive policeman (Paul de Sousa), turns the kiss into front-page news. Arandir’s father-in-law, Aprigio (Charles Turner), carries the tale back to his daughter Selminha (Jessica Kaye), but he can’t shake the girl’s security in her husband’s love. Once the rags run free with the innuendo, though, Selminha begins to doubt.

Rodrigues’s work shows its close ties to the experiments happening in Europe: the sense of weird menace from Ionesco, the repetitive, droning patter from Harold Pinter. Director Sarah Sunde uses Alex Ladd’s translation, which goes out of its way to play up these similarities.

It’s a tone that requires tightly choreographed, rigorously stylized performances, and Ms. Sunde doesn’t get enough of them. Best at it are Mr. Capozzi and Mr. de Sousa, who snarl and snap their fedoras at each other. Between them, Mr. Martinez looks like a lamb in a den of psychotic wolves. But the stumbling Mr. Turner, who should loom the most, doesn’t. As the father over-invested in his daughter’s marriage, he should be accelerating tension, rather than slowing things down.

Ms. Sunde does clearly have an eye for expressionist drama. Helped immeasurably by Lauren Halpern’s creepy, Escher-esque set, the whole piece seems dangerously off-balance. Running up and down the stairs, the actors nearly capture Rodrigues’s sense of momentum. A cast of slightly higher caliber might have delivered the text like machine-gun fire, rather than in the steady, monotonous blasts of this production. But for a piece and a playwright we see too rarely, it’s still a shot worth taking.

Until October 29 (59 E. 59th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, 212-279-4200).