Middle-class siblings Matt, Jake and Drew were raised to be wary of their own privilege. In fact, their mother renamed a Monopoly game "Privilege" and jiggered the rules: If you used the iron token, you got an "undervalued domestic labor bonus."

Now, as slightly damaged adults, they are home for a Midwestern Christmas with their father (Austin Pendleton, whose warm and crotchety portrayal of a dad is right out of Frank Capra). They play video games and snack on Costco-sized barrels of pretzels. On Christmas Eve, they eat Chinese. 

Playwright and director Young Jean Lee is a downtown theater darling known for her surprising, deconstructionist looks at race, identity, gender and class. "Straight White Men" is an unusual work for her because it's so naturalistic, from David Evans Morris's rec room basement (complete with abandoned exercycle) to its theater tripe of a family gathering for holiday strife with their pie. There's no dancing, as there is in much of her other work. It feels like a play, instead of performance art.

But in a sense, it's not naturalistic at all. The characters are barely sketched in. Though they perfectly capture the good-natured ribbing and physical horseplay of guys hanging out, the four men are really just stand-ins for Lee's very intriguing idea.

And that idea is this: If you're a straight, white guy who is sensitive to issues of justice and equality, how do you not exert your straight, white, male privilege to the detriment of minorities and women? 

Each son has found their own solution. Jake (Gary Wilmes), the middle child, gave up trying. He's a divorced banker who tells racist jokes at work. The youngest, Drew (Pete Simpson), is in therapy and is seeking self-actualization and his own happiness.

But Matt (James Stanley), the oldest, is still struggling. A lefty radical all his life (he once got a drama teacher fired for casting only white students in "Oklahoma") and a Harvard graduate, he has returned home, caring for his widowed dad and working as a temp for a non-profit. While his brothers roughhouse, he takes on traditionally feminine tasks like baking and vacuuming. Worse — he starts crying over dinner. 

His brothers and father are at first sympathetic, but then they figure out that he has decided to just get out of the way of minorities by squashing his own ambitions. After all, any prestigious job he could get would be a job that someone else — a woman, a lesbian, an African American man — couldn't. 

Whatever Matt does, he can't win. He either must bow to the social pressure of those who have been treated unfairly, or bow to the social pressure (no matter how well-meaning) of his fellow white men.

This idea needs more fleshing out (why do such un-macho, supposedly progressive guys care if their brother vacuums?) but it's novel and intriguing and will keep you talking long after you've left the theater.