Arts Correspondent

The great majority of Americans experience war from a distance. They watch the news and analysis on CBS and CNN, read firsthand accounts from AP and Reuters in the daily newspapers and then go about their daily lives. When America goes to war, most Americans don't have a personal stake in it.

Theater J's world premiere Honey Brown Eyes, with its harrowing look at how war ravages the lives of innocent civilians and soldiers alike, brings the Bosnian War stateside. The result: chilling.

That Theater J is addressing this ugly and complex war in the Balkans isn't surprising. War has been a subject or setting of productions in prior seasons -- from the excellent portrayal of an apocalyptic buildup of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Motti Lerner's 2007 Pangs of the Messiah to that season's chilling expose of the Nazi-engineered killing machine in Thomas Keneally's Either Or.

But this time, Jews and Israel are neither the target nor the subject. It's Serb versus Croat; Christian against Muslim; Sarajevo or Visegrad, in the difficult landscape of the Bosnian War, fought from 1992 to 1995.

Playwright Stephanie Zadravec, a District native raised in Chevy Chase, hones in on the personal, rather than the political or military, to lift the shroud on the everyday tragedies of living -- and dying -- in a war zone. Honey Brown Eyes -- the title is a sweet teenage nickname for one of the characters -- takes place away from the blare of news reports and morning paper's headlines, lending the work a keener sense of reality and brutality.

Director Jessica Lefkow's superb cast includes rising D.C. star Alexander Strain, an artistic associate in residence this year at Theater J, as Dragon, a Serbian soldier on a mission to clean out a Muslim neighborhood. As tightly wound as the ammo belt strapped menacingly around his waist, he's antsy and ruthlessly brutal in facing his untenable choice. Ultimately, though we, and he, never know if his actions are as friend or foe.

The two-act drama unfolds in two kitchens (designer James Kronzer's excellent work), one in Visegrad, the other in Sarajevo, the harsh sound of chilling gunfire and the uneasy television laugh track of Matt Nielson's sound design providing the backgrounds. The parallels in the play's two acts, along with the far-beyond coincidental social connections among the characters -- Serbs and Bosnians, Christians and Muslims -- get to the root of Zadravec's moral: War fought house to house is personal and it touches enemies and friends, neighbors and co-workers equally but differently.

Zadravec's plot contrivances demonstrate just how personal war becomes when house-by-house arrests and evacuations pit neighbor against neighbor, friend against acquaintance, soldier against civilian in their efforts to carry out draconian measures in the face of ethnic cleansing orders. That Dragon, the perpetrator, meets and finds connection with his victims, but not the courage of common understanding, becomes the dramatic plot twist as this suspenseful, turbulent and realistically violent drama unfolds. The playwright gives us a soldier with a stunted conscience, aware of his options, unable to make the moral decision in the face of his comrades.

In Act 1, Maia DeSanti plays Dragon's victim admirably, halting and careful, yet with an undercurrent of defiance in the face of mortal danger. In Act 2, Barbara Rappaport, in her bare-cupboard Sarajevo kitchen, is a rueful yet wise woman of a certain age. She's survived war and want before. Left behind by her daughter and grandson, who fled the violence, she befriends a runaway Bosnian resistance fighter.

A Bosnian Serb, she takes little stock in the politicized identity of her intruder, offering soup and sympathy; Rappaport's performance is masterful and underplayed for all the right reasons. Joel Reuben Ganz, as the resistance fighter, battles personal demons wrought by the tragedy of war. Finally, 11-year-old Taylor Dawson's role triggers the most devastating terrors of war as it's inflicted on the youngest victims, powerless in the face of organized military actions against them.

For all its horror, onstage and suggested, Honey Brown Eyes is not without humor, and the laugh track of late 1980s American sitcoms and MTV numbers provide the loopy soundtrack of the play, from Alf to The Cosby Show to American and Serbian New Wave bands. The background noise of war, accompanying the muffled screams and gunfire from house-to-house combat, is innocuously insipid and American, suggesting the global reach of pop culture, but the inadequacy of politics to reach a solution.

Honey Brown Eyes faces up to the ravages of war on civilians -- women, children, families torn apart. Most repulsive is the undertone of where the victims will be taken: rape camps. That Theater J has committed itself to producing a work that parallels past Jewish tragedies -- suggestions of the Holocaust and ramifications of the Arab-Israeli conflict are unassailable -- speaks of the company's dedication to dealing unstintingly and directly with the difficult political tragedies writ large, past and present.

Zadravec's portrait provides no pat solutions, leaving those up to others.

Honey Brown Eyes is onstage through Nov. 30 at the WDCJCC, in the District. Tickets, $30-$55, are available by calling 800-494-TIXS or at www.boxofficetickets.com.