More than any other major New York theater, the Culture Project has carved out an enviable identity in the last few years as a home for tightly conceived, frequently starry pieces of activist theater. Though its intentions have occasionally outpaced its execution, works such as “The Exonerated” and the gripping “Pugilist Specialist” have put to rest audiences’ long-held mistrust toward plays about politics.

Now the Culture Project has harnessed its considerable energies to oversee a sprawling, six-week glut of progressive theater, dance, film, and art, collectively called the Impact Festival. It kicked off with a double dose of star power: playwright Eve Ensler and TV star Dylan McDermott of “The Practice” pairing up on “The Treatment,” a ripped-from-the-headlines play about wartime atrocities. Great things were and still are expected from the festival. They just haven’t arrived yet.

Ms. Ensler’s best-known work, “The Vagina Monologues,” has become so firmly associated with the empowering charity performances it spawned worldwide that the anger at its core has been downplayed a bit. That anger fueled some of the play’s strongest segments, heart-rending pieces about self-image and genital mutilation, and it was even more apparent in Ms. Ensler’s last piece of political fiction, the awkward Bosnia drama “Necessary Targets.” With “The Treatment,” though, lazy polemics and a series of ludicrous plot twists drown out Ms. Ensler’s indignation, leaving little beyond convoluted histrionics in its place.

Ms. Ensler and director Leigh Silverman go to pains to spell out the parallels between the archetypically named Man (Mr. McDermott) and Woman (the mono-monikered Portia). He’s a military interrogator fresh from “the field,” haunted by what he saw and did at an Abu Ghraib-style detention camp. She’s a military counselor who employs a variety of methods to help returning soldiers “get their brains and families back.”

Man is at first an unwilling guest in Woman’s office, a plausibly depressing study in shabby institutional green, courtesy of set designer Richard Hoover. He scoffs at any diagnosis of P.T.S.D., or post-traumatic stress disorder, and thrusts his hand out to ward off any mention of personal affairs. (“I don’t want to talk about my mother,” he blurts out early on, apropos of nothing.) But for all of Man’s boasts about his skill at obtaining information from “detainees,” he falls prey to Woman’s gambits with startling ease.

Ms. Ensler scores a few early chuckles as the two characters, both of whom are accustomed to asking rather than answering questions, engage in a game of verbal pingpong, deflecting each exploratory feint with a query of his or her own. When Woman does begin to break through Man’s defenses, though, it has less to do with her probing intelligence and more to do with her feminine wiles and her unlimited supply of sedatives.

Mr. McDermott, who spends the last two-thirds in (and occasionally out of) a pair of cute puppy-dog pajama bottoms, tricks out his shell-shocked soldier with every jittery, drooling stereotype imaginable. He also engages in some tru-LY odd IN-flections to HIS dia-LOGUE. (“I am sor-RY I in-SULTed YOU,” he intones after one outburst.) Perhaps this is meant to convey synapses shredded by war, but the stronger impression is that of an actor and director trying (not very successfully) to make clichéd dialogue, including the inevitable confession of atrocities, sound less so.

Portia gives a far less flashy performance in a far less flashy role. Her crisp, controlled questions and unblinking evasions are rarely less than professional and occasionally moving, even as her dialogue becomes less and less rooted in any sort of dramatic reality.

For the vast majority of the play, Ms. Ensler shows little interest in exploring the chain of command that might have contributed to Man’s shame; in keeping with “Vagina Monologues,” which uses personal stories to sway the national (and now global) discussion, she seems more interested in probing the personal culpability of this one soldier. This narrow-focus approach doesn’t last, however, and Ms. Ensler tosses in a few late-inning twists that work overtime to draw damning parallels between the two interrogators.

These scenes, which hinge on a plot device that Neil LaBute also employed recently, fail both as political commentary and as effective drama. Lines like “The people at the top do not have nightmares — they sleep at night” make it far too easy for nay-sayers to dismiss the controversial and very real issues churning under Ms. Ensler’s shopworn surface.

A far better bit of dialogue comes after an earlier example of questionable doctor-patient relations: “You don’t kiss like a P.T.S.D. freak,” Woman says. As muddled and manipulative as “The Treatment” may be, at least it includes one heck of a pick-up line.

Until October 22 (45 Bleecker St. at Lafayette Street, 212-307-4100).