As several of the characters in "Back of the Throat" point out, anybody can look suspicious if you want to see him that way.

By the time you're 20 minutes into this tense drama at St. Louis Actors' Studio, you may find yourself mentally reviewing your own desk or bedroom or medicine cabinet. What conclusions could people draw if they went through your things? What if they already had something they were looking to prove?

That's just the situation confronting struggling writer Khaled (Alan David), who gets a surprise visit from two Homeland Security officers (Kevin Byer and John Pierson). Khaled is a U.S. citizen; he is also an immigrant and a Muslim. It's some time after the 9/11 attacks — probably soon after, though it's hard to be sure. This isn't likely to go well.

The three actors make a dynamic trio as the mood gradually shifts from genial formality to something much more alarming. David, trembling with anxiety, strives to appear calmer than he feels; Byer and Pierson evoke the effortless, intimidating authority familiar to anyone who's ever been pulled over but doesn't know why. Of course, the stakes are much, much higher.

Under David Wassilak's direction, Khaled's small, slovenly apartment encompasses the "real" action but opens up to include all kinds of other places that he, or they, have been. (Or have they?) It also allows for more characters. Julie Layton delivers a terrific triple-turn as Khaled's American ex-girlfriend, a thoughtful librarian and an exceptionally patriotic stripper; Joseph Garner plays a terrorist.

Playwright Yussef El Guindi is heading for a predictable point: Trampling civil liberties can encourage what it hopes to stop, that being the spread of a terrorist viewpoint. But he leavens his message with surprising humor; that stripper, for example, certainly alters the mood. El Guindi knows what he's doing. By changing the emotional context around his extremely serious subject, he catches his audience off guard and encourages us to try an unfamiliar point of view.

Just what is in that desk drawer, anyhow?