Peter Morris’s “Guardians,” now having its New York premiere at the Culture Project, is exactly the kind of play that you would expect to win an award at the Edinburgh Fringe: political, casually pornographic, and angry. But for all its vitriol, “Guardians,” a series of alternating monologues by two characters who never interact, is a dull, draining business. Listening to its long-winded, preachy lectures gives you the squirmy feeling of being berated by a principal in a stodgy school assembly.

As the author of “Guardians” sees it, the audience members are part of a depraved tabloid culture that prefers sensationalism to truth – even when something big is at stake, like the Iraq war and the Abu Ghraib scandal. The characters take turns scolding the audience for close to two hours, exhorting the crowd to consider the dangers of tabloid journalism and the evils inherent in war. Who exactly do they think is sitting in the theater? Do the kind of people who buy tickets to dreary anti-war plays really need to be taught that war and tabloids are bad?

Apart from its self-righteous tone, “Guardians” has structure and character problems. The alternating-monologue format is no great dramatic device, leading to zero human contact and a number of interminable digressions. Director Jason Moore (“Avenue Q”) does what he can to spruce up the presentation, making effective use of frosted glass screens (by Richard Hoover) to reflect faces and create moods. But dramatically speaking, there’s not much on the menu.

Then there are the characters. The young American woman is quite explicitly based on Lynndie England, the Army private from West Virginia who posed in several of the infamous Abu Ghraib torture photos. The 30-something Englishman is a fictional London tabloid journalist who is made out to be so vile and repulsive that you actually prefer Lynndie England to him.

With these two delightful companions we embark, heading straight for Important Themes. The Lynndie character, who gets punched in the breasts during sex by her Army boyfriend, is a submissive who can be used by others, including the American government. The tabloid journalist, who has stomach-curdling, violent sex with a boy submissive, gets off on workplace power trips. Eventually we’re meant to see that the entire world – sex, jobs, foreign policy – is run on the same principle: Screw or be screwed. World domination, prison torture, falsified news photos all bubble up from our warped libidos.

The only thing that makes “Guardians” watchable is its performers. Katherine Moennig (“The L Word”),in her off-Broadway debut, fully inhabits Lynndie England, from her West Virginia accent down to her alert, fidgety eyes. Her character’s entire way of being is an appeal to the audience (whom she addresses directly): Like me, like me.

And in spite of what she’s done – torturing prisoners and snapping gleeful photos of it – we do like her at moments. The character seems like she came from a hardscrabble background and got in with the wrong crowd. Her main virtues as a character are her history of disadvantage and her shoot-from-the-hip sincerity, and Ms. Moennig makes the most of them, persuading you that she really is a screwed-up girl from dirt-poor West Virginia, and that even if she’s committed crimes, she hasn’t shirked her punishment.

Lee Pace is tasked with playing the journalist, a part which requires him to wax philosophical about the nature of truth, pound the table in simulation of a rough bout of sex, and get across (to an American crowd) innumerable confusing Britishisms. Mr. Pace takes it on with relish, descending deep into the character’s slavering depravity while always retaining his debonair, flippant exterior. It’s a brave thing to do – to make an audience loathe you when you’re addressing them one on one – but Mr. Pace doesn’t hesitate.

“Guardians” brings to mind an entire small army of Iraq-related plays that have populated New York stages over the past several years. Perhaps they have made some producers, actors, and theatergoers feel that they are standing up to injustice, but these polemics have produced scant illumination and precious little entertainment. “Guardians” turns its back on the very aspects of theater that might have brought its story to life. In the theater the Abu Ghraib story could work as a tragedy, a horror story, a mystery – but never as a harangue.

Until May 25 (45 Bleecker Street, #E48, at Lafayette Street, 212-307-4100).