The play follows three brothers, played by Josh Charles, Armie Hammer and Paul Schneider. Their mother, now dead, was determined that her sons grow up without a sense of entitlement. She even retrofitted a game of Monopoly to give them an idea of the advantages they were born into. She called it “Privilege,” and it featured rules like losing money for being white when you passed Go. Of all her sons, Matt (played by Schneider), the oldest and brightest, took her message most to heart. He was his family’s golden boy, who went to Harvard but has chosen to return home to care for his elderly father (Payne) and take a menial job at a community organization.

At dinner, Matt suddenly bursts into tears, which sends his father and brothers into a panic. For all their liberal pieties, we see the full measure of the confusion and disgust with which they view his decisions. Matt is accused of martyring himself to minorities. “All our lives, guys like us have been told to get out of the way so that ‘other’ people can have a chance. Matt’s actually doing what they want!” his brother Jake, a banker, says. “You’re making yourself invisible the way you think we’re supposed to!” Matt stays mostly silent as his family’s arguments crest and crash around him. He responds later, in slightly Bartleby fashion, that he is just trying to find a way “to be useful.”

“Straight White Men” looks like an Arthur Miller play and acts a bit like an Arthur Miller play, with its conflict between fathers and sons, between desire and obligation, between self and community. But it withholds some of the key satisfactions for which we go to Miller (or much of theater): motive, psychology, resolution.

The play is, in fact, so open, so hospitable to interpretations, that every cast and crew member I talked to described a jarringly different production. For Kate Bornstein, the play drives home how all identities are becoming more capacious and can be transgressed: “We’re talking about people who genuinely question their own privilege and do something about it,” she said. “There are heterosexual white males who are fabulous — we’ve got four of them in the play. I wouldn’t call them straight white men.” For Armie Hammer, “this is an inflammatory play. You’re going to have straight white men who go see this and have to be confronted with the reality of their existence.” Paul Schneider had yet another take: “Regardless of race, gender or sexuality, for me all stories boil down to what our parents did or didn’t do to us.”

“Straight White Men” was staged in 2014 at the Public Theater to warm reviews — Charles Isherwood, writing in The Times, called it “mournful and inquisitive.” But Lee worries about its reception today. The play lands in a season when President Trump’s travel ban has just been upheld, immigrant families are being torn apart at the border, reproductive rights are under attack and protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people are being energetically rolled back. The most salient fact about identity politics these days seems less that some straight white men feel diminished by its existence than that the identity politics of some straight white men threaten the existence of so many others.

Lee told me she believes that her very decision to write about the plight of middle-aged, upper-middle-class, straight white men — to “center their experiences,” she said — might be enough to trigger a backlash. Schneider called her one night, wanting to discuss his character, and mentioned that one of his friends, a person of color, had read the play and said it was potentially dangerous. She said that the goal of the play was to spark conversations, which it clearly already has. But she won’t deny that it feels particularly risky to stage it now, when “there is something dangerous about not just clearly demarcating the lines of combat, taking a side and fighting on that side.”

The art that seems to speak most to the mood of the moment has that flavor — of getting in formation, of fighting the power. Take the movie “Sorry to Bother You,” by Boots Riley, the Oakland-based rapper and activist, a science-fiction workplace comedy that’s also a love letter to labor organizing. Or “Nanette,” a new Netflix standup special by Hannah Gadsby, a rousing commentary on the #MeToo movement and the price of silence exacted on women and minorities. “The story is as you have told it — power belongs to you,” Gadsby says, addressing straight white men. Lee allies herself with these conversations (and Riley is a hero of hers), but she stands slightly apart, asking unpopular questions, like what would really change if power were to simply switch hands. “I don’t hope for a future in which our existing structures stay the same, but I am the one on top,” she wrote in a Facebook post about the slogan “The Future Is Female.”