Sarah Gancher’s ripped-from-the-headlines satire Russian Troll Farm is a fractured workplace comedy in the mold of The Office in a very un-Dunder Mifflin-like locale. The setting is an anonymous-looking conference room in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2016 where five employees of the real-life Internet Research Agency are tasked with infiltrating U.S. social media and sowing confusion, dissension and support for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. “I mean, traditional cultures all over the world are under attack by liberals, democrats, capitalists — we must fight back or Russian culture will be lost forever,” explains a constitutionally trollish IRA staffer named Steve (John Lavelle, with the blustery energy of Jack Black) who naturally gravitates toward producing Nazi-related content until ordered to stop.

His co-workers include a quietly withdrawn geek (Haskell King, persuasively recessive), an earnest former journalist who’s new to the team (Renata Friedman, wonderfully wistful), a family-man unit chief (Hadi Tabbal), and the no-nonsense boss, a much senior survivor of various regimes played with seen-it-all sharpness by Christine Lahti. Together, they work to craft memes and tweets and hashtags — many lifted from the IRA’s actual work — that mimic Americans’ actual ambivalence about democracy. They link Hillary Clinton to a pedophile ring trafficking children in tunnels beneath Disneyland, adding fake news links as “evidence” — and then pose as other users to comment on their own posts to boost engagement. The absurdity of their online claims stands in contrast to our knowledge that similar trolling actually did persuade some of our citizens to swallow outrageous lies.

Gancher leans into the disconnect between the sitcommy office politics and the deadly serious work that this group actually performed — and the resulting tension initially proves stimulating. But she has a hard time sustaining a balanced tone over the 100-minute running time, particularly as the characters start turning on each other in the second half.

One problem here is Gancher’s ambition. She promises a play in four sections, each focused on a different character and in a different style. That’s an idea that might have worked better when the show was first produced in the fall of 2020 as a livestreamed theater piece where Zoom windows could be overlaid with text and video and online memes. But on the stage of the Vineyard Theatre, where director Darko Tresnjak’s production opened on Thursday, there are not enough visual and theatrical clues to the shifts in style — and some of the sections go by in a blink. Indeed, the sections sometimes seem to clash with each other — particularly a long, well-delivered monologue from Lahti’s Ljuba late in the play that unfolds like a sadder, Soviet version of the opening of the Pixar movie Up that could form the core of an entirely different play.

Still, you have to admire everything that Gancher has achieved here — including, against all odds, making some of the biggest recent threats to American democracy into characters who are not only recognizable but almost endearing.