YELLOW JOURNALIST Pace gets a scoop on the Iraq War.

Inspired by the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal and a newspaper hoax in London, Guardians is full of sex—none of it the erotic or titillating kind. Instead, Peter Morris’s charged political shocker equates sexuality and violence, serving up explicit tales of sadomasochistic role-playing, rough foreplay and pornography in fascinating ways. In it, a Lynndie England–type grunt (Moennig) relates how she went from unworldly Appalachian virgin to horny sadist, while the transfixing Lee Pace exudes considerable charm as an amoral British journalist whose interest in S&M clubs leads him to stage an elaborate Iraq War scam.

Structured as two separate but thematically intertwined monologues, Guardians comes to the Culture Project after a lauded run at last August’s Edinburgh Fringe festival. Now, it’s an article of faith that if your play even slightly bashes American politics or culture, you’ll have a hit in the U.K., but Morris’s highly literate, barbed-wire script avoids pat potshots at Yanks. In fact, Moennig’s sensitive performance and soul-baring speeches make her come across as most sympathetic, even when offering a lame class critique to justify torturing Iraqi prisoners. Pace’s arch, silken hack comes off as viler, a man who wants to attack authority while amassing his own media power. Morris’s themes—the limits of empathy for another’s pain, the appetite for control and the fact that everyone gets “bitched” by someone higher up—could have registered as nihilistic punditry, but through witty, acidic writing, he renders them taut, stinging and sexy.—David Cote