More than that, the appearance of this play suggests that the current political moment, for all its miseries and depredations, offers new opportunities for the avant-garde, which has suffered from a lack of taboos worth breaking. New York audiences might be inured to artistic shock, but BANG's show still manages to create a frisson of giddy anxiety. At one point, when the actors apparently prank-call the White House on an audience member's cellphone, the audience is led in shouts of, "I'M GOING TO KILL THE PRESIDENT," and there's a tastelessly joyous sense of release in screaming out those six criminal words.

"It seems clear to me that protest art is going to be the next thing," says BANG, a 26-year-old who looks like a more intense version of Gene Wilder. "It seems like every artist should be seizing on this. I just don't understand why everyone isn't jumping onboard like it was the Summer of Love or something. I can't fathom being an artist who isn't outraged and, as an artist, not feeling like you need to respond to it somehow."

BANG himself, who's gotten conflicting advice on the legality of his play, isn't exactly sure how perilous his project is. "We have to see what the climate is and we have to push the envelope," he says. "We have to be as outrageous from the left as the stuff we have to put up with coming from the right to create any sort of balance."

The politics of the play itself, as opposed to the larger experience of it, are outrageous but also incoherent. The plot, such as it is, centers around Skip, a revolutionary who's bereaved after his girlfriend, Bess, handcuffs herself to a Southern senator and sets off a suicide bomb in a posh Washington restaurant. (When he objects, she cries, "Don't go Gandhi on me now!") He's played by an amazingly quick, dolefully funny actor whose name, like everyone else's in the show, is redacted in the program.

Dejected and on the lam, Skip meets NYU student Fifi at an Identity Fair, where she's shopping for a new persona. Alternately sarcastic and bubbleheaded, she coos, "I've never met a real revolutionary before," to which he responds, "Well, it's a word used only in advertising, and even then incorrectly."

Soon, she's signed on to his plan to kidnap the president, igniting so much chaos in the country that the United Nations, also known as the Superfriends, will be forced to intervene and install a "puppet democracy," as it has in various other nations troubled by "corrupt regimes" and "screwy elections."

Skip and Fifi set off on an insurrectionary picaresque, meeting a violent, armless veteran of Gulf War I, a group of activists driven to sectarian meltdown by the challenges of ordering a pizza, Fifi's "edgy, arty" ex-boyfriend, and Ralph Nader. They are dogged by a feral green sleeping bag that attacks the politically uncommitted, turning them into reactionary zombies, and by the Man, who tries to steal Fifi's heart with fantasies of bourgeois comfort.

Threaded throughout are all kinds of genius low-tech gags and humor that alternates between bleak deadpan and manic physical comedy. There's a tour-de-force three-way phone call between a cop, the dean of NYU and the head of Homeland Security in which BANG plays all the parts and, toward the end, a repeat of an early scene entirely in French. Like the bastard child of Valerie Solanas and Mel Brooks, BANG combines an astonishing talent for fleet-footed physical humor and rapid-fire repartee with a kamikaze downtown nihilism.

That nihilism means it's better not to take the play's politics too literally, since they sometimes devolve into radical-chic juvenilia. At one point, BANG plays a sleazy, trench-coat-wearing purveyor of traditional politics, selling Democrats out of one side of his coat and Republicans out of the other -- the kind of thinking that gave us Nader's 2000 candidacy and, by extension, President Bush.

Later, playing the Man, he makes his unctuous come-on to Fifi by arguing that, for all its faults, America is the freest country on earth, saying, "Ask some poor wretch living in a tin shack in some democracy-forsaking corner of the world." The statement is meant to be self-evidently vulgar and hypocritical. If you agree with it even a little -- as many who've spent time in the shantytowns of corrupt Third World countries do -- the scene leaves you feeling like one of the priggish targets of BANG's lacerations.

Not that revolutionaries get off easy, either. There's a hilarious scene in which Skip's agrarian free-love utopia is enacted with cardboard puppets. Still, he's clearly the hero of the piece, saving Fifi from a life of moderate mediocrity, while the less ardent are devoured by the sleeping-bag Borg.

But the offensiveness of this is, in a way, part of the play's delight -- it jackhammers both broader American pieties and the sensitivities of the well-meaning liberals likely to attend it, even as it leaves them doubled over with laughter.

As you leave the theater, it's not entirely clear whether you've participated in something illegal. "I'd like there to be that doubt: 'Am I really now going on some list in some database?'" says BANG. The sign of the times isn't the play itself, uproarious as it is. It's the fact that one might have to worry about having seen it.

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