Women are mooing aggressively for the camera as part of a performance piece at Studio Theatre these days, but no, it’s not part of some intimate revival of “Rent.” Though just as that landmark musical rebooted a Golden Age opera for the 1990s, the world-premiere play in question is a modern riff on a vintage classic.

Two siblings, one a diligent but unfussy artistic type and one verging on the criminally insane, occupy an older relative’s real estate as the former struggles to finish and sell a project — before personality clashes and the latter’s raw charisma upend the status quo and derail the creative process. If that sounds rather like Sam Shepard’s “True West,” it’s because Julia May Jonas’s “Problems Between Sisters” specifically appreciates and attacks that canonical drama, inverting and interrogating its distinctly toxic hypermasculine energy and reframing its events as a crisis between competitive sisters rather than competitive brothers.

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Competitively pregnant sisters, even, which is how, via a video-art project framing women as breeding animals, we get to the stylized mooing. It’s a surreal moment in a drama rooted almost too firmly in angry American realism — a moment staged viscerally enough in Sivan Battat’s handsome Studio production to set an audience back on its collective heels.

There are a couple of these wildly intense leave-the-body moments in “Problems Between Sisters,” actually, and the loopiest one, involving the sisters’ Aunt Barb, feels like it was written for the beloved Nancy Robinette. An analogue for the distant Mom who arrives just in time to witness the brothers’ cataclysmic final blowup in Shepard’s iconic original, the character joins the warring sisters of “Problems” for an 11 o’clock speech involving a particularly arcane recipe for a home-brew cleaning product. It’s a speech as knotty and eccentric as any this specialist in cross-eyed oddballs has been asked to deliver, and she sails through it, I’m delighted to report, as naturally as lesser mortals would recite a telephone number.

Would that everything about Battat’s staging and Jonas’s admirable experiment — “Problems” is part of a five-play set that re-envisions essential dramas from the Big Man playwrights of American theater, from Miller to Mamet — felt as effortless and on point, but then, first productions often feel a bit like shakedown cruises. A bobbled line or three and a technical miscue or two broke the story’s spell at Sunday afternoon’s press performance, but that sort of thing sorts itself out. I had more trouble with systemic dynamics: enervated physical fights (choreographed by Ashleigh King) for the sisters, and an unbalanced energy between lead actors Stephanie Janssen (as Jess, the play’s urbane visual-artist version of Shepard’s screenwriter character) and Annie Fox (as the near-feral younger interloper Rory). The latter character is the more dangerous and volatile, yes, but Battat and Fox seem to have interpreted that primarily as coarser and louder, which gets draining after a point.

What does come through convincingly is the sense that some incomprehensible connection ties these fractious women together, even during their angriest moments. Jonas understands what strangers siblings divided by a decade in age can grow up to become, how their different experiences of family and parenting can become distancing, even alienating forces. And yet shared roots, shared blood and, yes, shared heritable traits and traumas are powerful bonds, both in the “cementing” and the “restricting” senses of that pungent little word. Shepard’s original and Jonas’s potently feminine/feminist remix derive substantial punch from that eternally complicated truth.

Problems Between Sisters, through June 16 at Studio Theatre in Washington. About 1 hour 40 minutes including intermission. studiotheatre.org.

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