By Robert Avila

WAR, UP close and personal: A smashed-up boy (Leah Kaplan) lies quivering in the throes of an early death. Three soldiers (Christian Haines, Matt Socha, Andi C. Trindle Walker) stand around bored. One of the soldiers, a fresh recruit, grows agitated by the boy's pleas. His comrades send him climbing onto the small body with a knife. "Pick him a banana and put it in his mouth," one of them says. At this point the boy's father (Bruce Moody) arrives looking for his child. The father is Palestinian. The soldiers are Israeli. The soldiers would have killed the old man too, except that a messenger arrives in time to inform them that the government has declared peace. They shake the old man's hand instead, call him brother and father, and discuss among themselves where they'll eat lunch. Three years later the grieving father takes revenge on a pair of newlyweds (Leon Goertzen and Ellery Schaar) in their first (and last) connubial embrace. Several years after that the couple's family joins a mob pouncing on a harmless Arab Peeping Tom (Neal Bishop).

Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin's Murder has something in it to offend almost everyone. It wasn't for nothing that armed guards occupied the front row at its Tel Aviv premiere in 1997. His moral repugnance in the face of injustice, cruelty, and war was always uncompromising, his mode ferociously sardonic and scathingly satirical, bawdy, scatological, and macabre. But his brilliance through it all made him, before his death in 1999, one of Israel's most acclaimed playwrights and directors.

The fact that Levin remains little known in this country makes Second Wind's uneven but still compelling Bay Area premiere all the more welcome. The 60-minute allegory joins three related scenes and an epilogue, spread out over 10 years, in a widening pattern of dehumanizing rage that shocks as much by its ordinariness as by its wanton force. And Levin, equally in debt to Brecht and Beckett, suffuses it all with a poetic sensibility and dark but buoyant humor that makes unusually palpable both the tragedy and absurdity of a life where murder is normal, where war and hatred engender a cycle of violence with a murderous life of its own.

Written not long before the second intifada, Murder proved just as prescient as Levin's first work, You and Me and the Next War (1968), a satirical cabaret performed in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, which began Israel's ongoing military occupation of Palestinian land. (A poem with the same title as the earlier play appears in Murder as a child's rhyme set to a game of hopscotch.) But being allegorical in nature, the details of the conflict depicted here remain purposefully vague. It could be any war, including one generally more present in the minds of Americans. The father wears a kaffiyeh, but he and the soldiers speak in uninflected American accents. And to drive the point further home, director Ian Walker has a soldier in the first scene watching BBC coverage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

On the same soldier's TV, as well as on a large video screen, the country's leader (Bishop) alternately declares peace and war, giving justification to heinous acts by simply taking apart and reassembling the same words and phrases. Nothing changes, and everything changes. The father points to the irrefutable fact of his son's death. A soldier explains how "the circumstances were different" (after quietly reflecting, "Landed all of a sudden, sooner than we thought, grabbed us by the balls, that peace"). And the ghost of the dead boy admonishes, "Dear father, when you stand over my grave / Old and tired and forlorn here, / And you see how they bury my body in the earth – / Then you beg my pardon, father dear."

Meanwhile, on another stage, the Democratic Party papers over its candidate's past opposition to state-sanctioned murder in Vietnam as if it were a dirty little secret (which, in the upside-down world of this country's macho jingoist politics, I guess it is). Instead, the John Kerry campaign pushes his gung-ho warrior side against George W. Bush's gung-ho war-making, much seemlier in the current context, even if 90 percent of the party's own delegates oppose the war. (New Democrats are not unlike Donald Rumsfeld's New Europe: they take orders from above rather than below, and never mind what "democracy" has to do with it.) As Levin demonstrates in no uncertain terms, before 9/11, when "everything changed," it was exactly the same. Back then Leonard Cohen didn't need a crystal ball either to sing, "I've seen the future, brother. It is murder."

'Murder' runs through Aug. 15. Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m., Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason, S.F. $10-$20. (415) 820-1460, www.secondwind.musictoday.com.