By Robert Avila

THE AFTEREFFECTS OF war are naturally a subject that the powers that start them don't like us to dwell on. That's reason alone to see TheatreFIRST's production of British playwright Robert Holman's Making Noise Quietly. The 1986 triptych examines the reverberations of militarism and state-organized murder as they roil the ground beneath daily life far beyond the battlefields of World War II and the 1982 Falklands (or Malvinas, as Argentines call it) War. Thanks to this underappreciated playwright and the Oakland-based company, the subject receives subtle and artful treatment.

In Being Friends, directed by Clive Chafer and set beside a swimming hole in the English countryside in 1944, a meek-mannered Quaker and conscientious objector (David Koppel) meets a vivacious but semi-invalid artist and writer (Noah James Butler) who invites him to share his lunch. The fight against the invading Germans makes Oliver unsure of his Quaker pacifism. Eric encourages him to follow his feelings, while freely offering up his own personal life to Oliver's homoerotic curiosity.

"It's easy for me to talk to you," Oliver admits. "We hardly know each other." Friendship in its first blush (the sexual flirtation here no doubt makes it especially ruddy) is a kind of starting over. There's a suggestion in the title that this is the ideal, as if friendship means always being able to begin or negotiate afresh, both one's own self as well as one's relation to the other and, by extension, the world. Eric, as the artist open to experience, seems ideally suited to this definition. "I don't believe in absolute fact," he says. "I believe in imagination." At the same time (as in the decision to shed their clothes), friendship implies a willingness to reveal all. In the operative landscape metaphor first introduced here, friendship opens up new vistas to both the body and mind – although not without the intrusion of aerial bombs. The larger world is always part of the picture.

But if imagination is a social affair, it can as easily reinforce as transcend the prevailing system. In Lost, also directed by Chafer, a Falklands/Malvinas War vet (Koppel) arrives unannounced at the working-class home of a slain fellow sailor, coming across the mother (Sue Trigg) in her yard. Geoffrey discovers he's breaking the news of her son's death to May, who had heard nothing from him for five years. May's loss is thus doubled, and she turns – a bit surprisingly – to the stranger for answers to her son's rejection of his parents and past. After Geoffrey reveals her son's remade middle-class life, May insists on imagining his senseless death as something heroic and meaningful.

The title piece, also the strongest, is set in Germany's Black Forest. Directed by Erin Gilley, it opens on another new friendship, the unstable and unlikely grouping of a wealthy German matron, Helene (Milissa Carey), a tightly wound working-class British veteran named Alan (Butler again, whose distinct work in both pieces is exceptionally good), and the soldier's mute and troubled stepson, Sam (Dan Marsh). As in Being Friends (and perhaps to a lesser extent in Lost), the outdoor setting suggests the characters' connection with nature as well as their displacement or alienation from the human, "man-made" environment.

This tension, between the social instincts of human beings and the social world as such, is brought out most dramatically in Making Noise Quietly. In Helene we see a woman whose history leads back to the extermination factories of Auschwitz and Birkenau, but who now sits painting the scenery (another landscape) in the Black Forest as if to emphasize the role her own creative energies play in refashioning and reimagining her world. Alan, in volatile and freighted conversation with Helene, wrestles with his own self-awareness as both a perpetrator of violence (most immediately against Sam) and its victim. Meanwhile Sam, a sort of city-bred Kaspar Hauser, responds to Helene's knowing promptings, as well as his turbulent love for Alan, by moving from cries and grunts back toward the human language he formerly rejected.

It's part of Holman's strength as a playwright that the encounter seems both realistic and slightly fanciful or dreamlike (almost inevitable in those historic and myth-making woods). Something at once ordinary and very special, it appears, is taking place.

If in theater, as in painting, such landscapes are ideals, they're far from static ones but are constantly reworked propositions involving both artist and audience. Making Noise Quietly hints that the larger social reality we inhabit is similar, being the result of many different imaginations in continual negotiation. The simple phrase Sam finally utters marks just another beginning, another proposition, in the larger landscape of the play. But in it we see how, in some out-of-the-way corner of daily life, the basic decency of human instinct reasserts itself and the whole social project is again, quietly, reborn.

'Making Noise Quietly' runs through June 5. Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m., Mills College, Lisser Hall, 5000 MacArthur, Oakland. $18-$22. (510) 436-5085.