CRISIS TRAINING Girten rehearses good hostage behavior with Usman Ally.

When England’s literary polemicist Harold Pinter picked up his Nobel Prize in 2005, he used the platform as a soapbox to excoriate the Bush administration, and en route, offered the following advice regarding the craftsmanship of political theater: “Sermonizing has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine them to satisfy his own prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives [and] give them the freedom to go which way they will.”

If it seems disproportionate to apply the theories of a hotheaded arts giant to a modest new play in a Chicago hole-in-the-wall, forgive us. But what Brett Neveu has set up in his latest work not only adheres to this model, but also evokes unapologetically Pinter’s spare and queer interrogative conversation.

And though it’s not Chicago theater’s definitive response to post–September 11 paranoia and Bush-era bourgeois hedonism (Bruce Norris’s acidy satires come closest), there’s no mandate for it to be such. Neveu’s stirring, confounding drama is one of  2007’s only new plays to engage in intelligent discussion with our cultural moment, and, as a bonus, it’s a cheek-to-jowl acting storm that could make a theater lover out of a neophyte.

Written in an 80-minute ellipse of coffee-shop chatter and torture-room confrontations, Weapon examines three American middle-class businesswomen participating in corporate training for overseas travel in an age of (American-targeted) terrorism. They’re paired off in teams, taught how to spot plainclothes interlopers who might be trailing them, and finally tied to a chair and walked through the kidnappee procedural of addressing a camera to plead for release.

Kate from New Mexico believes herself to be a seasoned, continental globe-trotter; she’s eager to show off her pictures of Mayan ruins and tell you all about the beautiful peasants. Sylvia’s a church mouse from the Chicago suburbs who’s never been abroad; she can barely speak above a whisper, and when she does, it’s to comply with whomever’s addressing her. Gina’s just plain vulgar, a foul-mouthed Kansas City broad who’ll tell any stranger about her mom’s grisly murder or trash-talk her tours of inferior countries. (German food? Gag.)

Yet “ugly American” Gina might be Neveu’s favorite (and stealthy Engstrom has a beer blast playing her); she’s the only one of the trio with any survival instincts. As the three reveal themselves in staccatoed, Pinteresque dialogue, we realize that ironically, her rare, authentic candor might make her the best ambassador of the three.

Neveu has been criticized in the past for not writing larger. That is, his relatively short works tend not to have the panoramic scope of standard-bearing classics. While this complaint is cockamamie, another one of Neveu’s habits—“natural” conversation about minutiae that dilutes his characters more than it reveals—has held back works like 4 Murders and even his successfully creepy Harmless. But with Weapon the dialogue is rounder and pointed, and if it’s occasionally generic, it serves a dynamic purpose: When on autopilot, Neveu’s women show us the blandness of a falsely secure American life.

But the playwright and director don’t ask us to judge them, merely to observe them as they navigate the terrain. Where Sobel’s direction of Neveu’s work has been languid in the past, here it has focus and heat. Blustery Fitzgerald never draws a breath as Kate, lest someone else get a conversational toehold. Meanwhile, Girten and Engstrom, two of the city’s most underutilized talents, make music out of an excruciatingly awkward café exchange that illustrates with careful banality everything scared-shitless Americans are too terrified to speak of.

Neveu’s mock hostage interrogations are less convincing than his domestic scenes, but they do contain the play’s most frightening element. As the women introduce themselves to the camera like actors slating for an audition, they name  portentously their companies of employ. It’s a deft, subtle acknowledgement that when we travel, we’re no longer Americans; we’re corporate interests.

Toward the end of his Nobel speech, Pinter warned, “The anxiety and fear we see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.” That anxiety courses quietly throughout Weapon, but not so quietly that it won’t haunt you indefinitely.