The Distance from Here, Almeida Theatre, London

As with a car crash, you cannot help but be appalled and yet fascinated

In the neighbouring room, a tiny baby is bawling its lungs out. The child's scandalously young grandmother, who is minding it for the evening, stays put in front of the television, yawns and declares "'Nother hour, I'm not gonna hear shit". Her own son Darrell (Mark Webber), who looks her junior by roughly a decade, asks if she remembers the forts he used to make as a child on the porch. But she only has the haziest recollections. "As an individual," she admits to this youth, "you never made that big an impression."

Welcome to the world of Neil LaBute, Mormonism's answer to David Mamet. A crass failure to imagine the inner existence of other people is as common as breathing among his characters. His determinedly provocative new play, The Distance From Here, opened last night at the Almeida in a meticulously acted production by David Leveaux that manages to be both wide-screen in configuration and thoroughly oppressive in atmosphere.

For all the baleful pitch-black comedy, watching one of LaBute's works is like being forced to view a studiously detailed replay of an accident. You feel appalled, fascinated, paralysed and – despite yourself – amused.

Not that normally there's anything accidental in the destruction he dramatises. He has specialised in Machiavellian schemers. Recall the cold-blooded student in his last play, The Shape of Things, who tricked an overweight nerd into an affair only so that, like a cross between Tracey Emin and Professor Higgins, she could use him and as the raw material for her art project.

This time, though, LaBute has moved down the social scale to the slackers at Washington High Juniors and their upper white-trash parents. These folk, whose horizons reach as far as the TV set and the mall, are too morally illiterate to qualify as scheming. And that creates a problem.

Undoubtedly, LaBute has a sharp ear for oblivious selfishness and dumb-head bravado. Hearing that his girlfriend (Liesel Matthews) has been seen in someone else's porno home movie, Darrell seeks a revolting form of reassurance: "He hit her? That's all he did. Hit her." And LaBute knows how to tighten the screws of plot. Darrell's revenge on the girlfriend triggers revelations he can't handle. This results in a sickening game of "who'll hold the baby?" and a fate for his little nephew that's scarcely better than that met by the infant who is stoned to death in Edward Bond's Saved.

Uncomfortable in ways that I don't think it has quite bargained for, this play treads a fine line between shocking you out of your received liberal complacencies and just making you feel morally superior to these adroitly pinned-down anthropological specimens.