The title of Anders Lustgarten's new play is double-edged: in post-September 11 America does freedom endure? Or has it been requisitioned for the War on Terror and turned into a blood-stained carte blanche for dubious government decisions? Lustgarten attacks his subject-matter with blunt-edged gusto, but he adds little that's new to the debate, and dramatically his writing, though ringing with political conviction, tends towards the crude.

On Vanessa Hawkins's black-and-white, Stars-and-Stripes set a New Jersey couple struggle to come to terms with the death of their son as the dust begins to settle at Ground Zero. But when they receive all that remains of him - a quarter-sized fragment of bone - their grief and guilt begin to rip apart their marriage. Susan seeks solace in assertions of all-American heroism. Her husband Tom sees lies, propaganda and political opportunism in the outpourings of patriotism. Meanwhile, Hanna, widowed by the attack, recoils from the violence in the mouths and minds of her devastated fellow Americans and searches for a healing process to equip her for an uncertain future.

Lustgarten throws in a couple of colourful cameos for additional texture. An ageing radio shock-jock snarlingly voices the view of the bigoted extreme Right. And an insensitive British tourist also makes a couple of uncomfortably sharp points when she criticises the tragedy's commercialisation by the selling of photographs of the attack, and foresees Blair's eager support of the Bush Administration's bellicosity. But Roland Jaquarello's production is stiff and stagy. A hard-working, largely multi-role-playing cast, led by Lisa Eichhorn as Susan and Vincent Riotta as Tom, cannot quite make Lustgarten's contrived, polemical dialogue sing. There is some interest in the ideas here; the execution, though, is inert.

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