After his satire “Prophet” opened at P.S. 122 a year ago, the young playwright Thomas Bradshaw was applauded by some for daring to shock and unnerve his audience. (In “Prophet,” a white widower heard God telling him to re-enslave a “Negress” and responded by putting a black woman in chains.) Now the 26-year-old Mr. Bradshaw has returned to P.S. 122 with a profoundly disturbing play called “Purity.”

But while “Purity” may make you flinch, it won’t make you think. The play may be marketed as an incendiary look at race in America by an African-American playwright, but Mr. Bradshaw couldn’t have put much thought into his characters’ trite, utterly stereotyped views on race.

Far more detailed — and disturbingly specific — are the play’s many simulated sex scenes. Clearly, the playwright channeled his psychic energy into these deeply upsetting, pornographic sequences — not into the play’s boilerplate treatment of race in America.

Ultimately, the hatred that comes through strongest in “Purity” is not racial hatred, but the hatred of men for women. In the final analysis, the play amounts to a sustained exercise in brute sadism.

As the play opens, two cocaine-fueled English professors, Vernon (James Scruggs) and Dave (Daniel Manley) are plotting the molestation of a young girl. (Vernon, who is black, and Dave, who is white, have been friends since their privileged childhood in Short Hills, New Jersey.) After lying to their wives, the men head to Ecuador to find a girl. Though the 9-year-old girl is played by an adult (Jenny Seastone Stern), the rape scenes are nonetheless vicious and harrowing. The gratuitous detail of this extended sequence is almost unbearable.

The young girl’s rape is so profoundly painful that one expects the playwright to have some reason for subjecting the actors and the audience to it. Yet no reason ever emerges.

The girl is raped and cries. The men high-five each other and go home to their wives — high-earning professionals who support the couples’ shared cocaine habit. The men sell pictures of the rape on the Internet. They snort more cocaine together. Vernon talks about adopting the little girl from Ecuador — until a new black professor arrives at the university, and Vernon’s energies are redirected into fearing that his colleague will seduce his own (white) wife.

For the most part, the horrifying action is treated realistically by Mr. Bradshaw — and by his unflinching director, Yehuda Duenyas (“Pastoralia”). If “Purity” is supposed to be satire, it doesn’t work, at least not consistently.

There are moments — as when Vernon chillingly high-fives the front row of the audience after the rape — when it appears that “Purity” might have some purpose in manipulating its audience. But over time, it becomes clear that there is no design behind Mr. Bradshaw’s button pushing.

Ultimately, “Purity” makes no particular point about any of its inflammatory topics. It’s an incoherent rant, raging at blacks who assimilate and blacks who don’t, along with slave owners, contemporary whites, and women (and girls).

It’s hard to make drama out of pure venom, especially when you have weak, unconvincing characters. The “college professors” talk about books as if they were students in English 101, and the female characters are no more than caricatures.

Is there a metaphor intended here, for America the powerful raping a small South American country and attacking the man who rises up from its own underclass? If so, it’s poorly executed. “Purity” doesn’t make you hate privilege — it makes you hate its rapist protagonists. And it makes you question why a playwright would take an audience on such a cruel, feckless journey.

Until January 14 (150 First Ave. at 9th Street, 212-352-3101).