Annie Baker’s “Body Awareness,” at Theater J, is a lighthearted play that manages to touch on some serious philosophical and sociological subjects. It catches a mother, Joyce (MaryBeth Wise), and her 21-year-old son, Jared (Adi Stein), in an unending mother-son clash, but as it waits for Jared and Joyce to reconcile, “Body Awareness” takes hilarious aim at political correctness, sexual politics, pedantry, feminism, the male ego and what some would call the fine line between art and pornography.

The setting is Vermont’s fictional Shirley State College, where a five-day conference on body awareness is being called into session by one of its organizers, psychology professor Phyllis (Susan Lynskey), who also happens to be Joyce’s partner. Although Phyllis has high hopes for her conferees being able to see themselves in a new way, freed from controlling, manipulative eyes, she is soon unmasked as a fraud: She is condescending to Joyce and insensitive. Throughout the play, Phyllis and Joyce try to convince the socially clumsy Jared that he has Asperger’s syndrome, in an effort to make him agree to undergo therapy. Jared, who is nobody’s fool, refuses. Into this psychological maelstrom steps a character who is designed to make things worse: Frank Bonitatibus (Michael Kramer), an artist whose photographs of nude women are on display during the conference. Phyllis sets up a hue and cry.