Journalists-turned-playwrights often write message plays, and the reporter George Packer, whose docudrama “Betrayed” opened at the Culture Project last night, is no exception.

Mr. Packer’s message — that America has systematically failed to protect its Iraqi employees in Baghdad — is bluntly driven home. Yet something rich and diffuse seeps in around the edges. “Betrayed” offers the rare opportunity to spend an evening with three Iraqi civilians, viewing Baghdad and its discontents through their eyes.

Americans are peripheral, if crucial, figures in the lives of Laith, Adnan, and Intisar, three English-speaking interpreters employed by the embassy in Baghdad. (Though based on real people, the characters are fictionalized composites.) Each day, they hide their American-issued ID badges in a shoe and leave their insurgent-riddled neighborhoods, furtively making their way to the Green Zone. Waiting in lengthy lines for the metal detectors just outside the American compound, they are easy targets for the Iraqis who view them as traitors. When they leave at night, they wonder who might be following them.

Such fears, alas, are justified. Bombs go off near the long queues, and as time passes, several Iraqis who work for Americans are threatened, blackmailed, and murdered. Yet when the three interpreters ask their American bosses for protection — a higher-level credential to get through the line faster, an emergency visa to get out of Iraq — the response is shockingly cold and unyielding.

Working from a New Yorker magazine article he published early last year and a stack of fascinating transcripts, Mr. Packer depicts the plight of endangered Iraqi employees in grim, dismaying detail. As expected, the scenes escalate, ferrying their three Iraqi passengers from the first flush of freedom (“I could get hired by Apple or Microsoft!”) to their first death threats.

Though far from expert, Mr. Packer’s dramatization of these events is creditable. The scenes have tension and adrenaline as they build toward the (telegraphed) crisis.

Yet curiously, “Betrayed” resonates most when it temporarily sets aside its message. There are great, meandering conversations between political junkie Laith (Sevan Greene) and philosophy-loving Adnan (Waleed F. Zuaiter), two very different friends bonded as brothers by their shared secret. Adnan confesses he learned a lot of English by reading porn; Laith got some of his from heavy metal bands. Intisar (Aadya Bedi), a frustrated feminist who refuses to wear the hijab, honed her English by rereading “Wuthering Heights.” The office camaraderie among the three interpreters is itself unthinkable outside the Green Zone. One of the achievements of “Betrayed” is that, in watching two Iraqi men and an Iraqi woman use their English, chatting like peers, you can see how much this kind of freedom means to them.

That we come to care deeply for these characters is a testament to the strong and subtle performances of the three leads. Working on a bare-walled stage with minimal furnishings, the director, Pippin Parker, adroitly stages the action. The harsh lighting feels heavy-handed, but Rabiah Troncelliti’s costumes evoke subtle contrasts: the muscles bulging under an American security officer’s polo shirt versus the slim frames of the male interpreters, draped in button-down shirts and belted trousers.

“Betrayed” remains solidly a docudrama, a series of transcripts skillfully reassembled to reinforce a strong moral claim. It may be theater of the moment, but it is good theater about a critical historical moment. This message play gets its urgent message across loud and clear.

Until March 16 (55 Mercer St., between Broome and Grand streets, 212-352-3101).