Something seems not quite right when you enter the theater at St. Ann’s Warehouse for “Major Bang.” The show may be about to start, but the bleachers stand empty, the sound booth above looks deserted, and the audience member in front of you is just disappearing through a door in the back. It feels a little like a trap.

Relax: All is revealed once you reach the real space, a cozier, steeper, improvised stage in one of the Warehouse’s many nooks and crannies. But just for a minute, the “Bang” gang has made you believe something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. And that’s the point.

In playwright Kirk Lynn’s mind, vaudeville and Homeland Security aren’t so terribly far apart (and that’s even without John Ashcroft warbling “The Eagle Soars”). In his “Major Bang or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Dirty Bomb,” two actors, playing fast and loose with the fourth wall, make a little soft-shoe out of color-coded Alert Levels, the various uses of plastic sheeting, and post-September 11 paranoia.

But what sets “Major Bang” apart from other politically minded snark attacks is that it never shies away from how scared we actually are. Even in the zaniest situation (the scene with the samurai sword and Soviet panties comes to mind), the company grapples with the gap between how we understand the reasons for our fear and how it swamps us anyway.

Underneath blinking marquee lights, Steve Cuiffo and Maggie Hoffman wait to entertain us. Ms. Hoffman has a whole passel of gear – a soundboard, several semaphore flags, a wig, and, naturally, a Geiger counter. Mr. Cuiffo has his own “booth,” a baize covered table with pivoting mirror above it, and a pack of oversize cards. Of the two of them, Mr. Cuiffo pulls more focus – he does Lenny Bruce routines, magic tricks, and sticks pens up his nose. But Ms. Hoffman has to MC the little sideshow, and somehow tie all their hijinks back to Mr. Lynn’s explosive, central conceit.

Ms. Hoffman tells the audience that she’s the sort of actress who never arrives on time. So when an abandoned backpack brings her train to a halt, she throws caution under the wheels and opens the bag. Deciding she will use whatever she finds to make a play, she risks the explosion and finds her show.

A coffee cup creates Frank, a harried father who works at a food irradiation plant. A diet Coke creates his boss and crush object, Rachel. And a scout handbook turns into Frank’s brilliant but misguided son, now under the dangerous sway of his Cub master, Major Bang. Mr. Cuiffo, setting a land-speed record for costume changes, plays all the male characters, while Ms. Hoffman plays Rachel, runs the board, and narrates.

Speaking of dangerous sway, director Paul Lazar drives his mad actors into complete physical insanity. Hauling around noisy vacuum cleaners, or racing about in increasing states of dishevelment, his cast looks to be getting a nice aerobic workout with their performances. When Frank’s son decides to steal a gram of radioactive material for a scouting experiment, the actors go into spasms of ferocious activity.

Since Mr. Lynn (and fellow conceivers Melanie Joseph and Mr. Cuiffo) are literally using the grab-bag approach to theater making, it’s no surprise that some bits seem a touch gratuitous. Surely someone needs to tackle inaccuracies in the Whitney Houston movie “The Bodyguard,” but did we need to see a whole five-minute scene from it? (There are sacrifices we make in the name of theater, but that’s a long time with Kevin Costner.)

Still, laughing at atrocity is this show’s raison d’etre; Mr. Lynn reasons that only by tipping a sacred cow can we get it down to a manageable size. It’s a weird way to have a good time, but it does seem better to go “bang” than to whimper.

Until February 19 (38 Water Street, Brooklyn, 718-254-8779).