A buddy story brings the cost of war home

Michael Jorgensen and John Oxenford play two of three Minnesota friends who go to Vietnam. Only one returns.

It's 1966. Three boys are growing up together in Minnesota, playing hockey and trying to find a more promising future than they can see in their small town. All three end up going to Vietnam; only one comes home.

This much we know almost from the beginning of "The Boys of Winter," a thoughtful and thought-provoking play that's making its debut at the Boston Playwrights' Theatre. What we don't know is which boy will survive - and what we can't know, any more than they can, is exactly how the shadow of the war will change the course of their lives.

Despite giving away so much key information up front, "The Boys of Winter" effectively sustains our tense curiosity about how it will play out. We come to know and feel affection for each of the boys: Doug Crockett, played with sweet innocence by Michael Jorgensen; Dwight "Bean" Edwards, given a touching good-boy-trying-to-act-bad sneer by Zachary J. Winston; and Alan "Big Al" Slocum, the quietest but, in John Oxenford's controlled performance, often the most interesting. And we're also drawn to Doug's girlfriend, Cathy, played smart and sensible by Elizabeth Rimar, and to his feisty mother, Sandy, in Sarah Carlin's sturdy performance.

Most intriguing of all, though, is the man who narrates the whole story. We know he's the one of the three who survived, but until the end we don't know his name - a tricky bit of manipulation that works better than such tricks usually do.

Partly that's because John Greiner-Ferris (who also plays Doug's father, the boys' coach, and an Army recruiter) invests the narrator with a gruff, believable forthrightness; we feel as if we know the guy without needing to know his name. And partly it's because the play doesn't waste a lot of effort teasing us about his identity. We know that we don't know, we know that we'll find out eventually, and mostly we're just allowed to be sad that only one of the boys will get to grow up to be this man.

The three playwrights - Barry Brodsky, Eric Small, and Dean B. Kaner - deserve applause for handling this device so adroitly. It's even more remarkable that they did it at a distance: Brodsky is local, but the others live out west, and the three collaborated by e-mail, not around a table. Though the process may have been complicated, it has resulted in a solid, engaging story.

"The Boys of Winter" is still rough around the edges; the dialogue too often devolves into paragraph-long passages of exposition, with the characters filling us in on key information by telling each other things they already know. Judicious trimming would also make them sound more consistently like real people than like ideas in clothing.

But there are enough moments of real feeling, and powerful insights into the complicated ways in which men's vulnerabilities lead them to act invulnerable by heading to war, to make up for these flaws. When our country is embroiled in another conflict born of fear, it feels especially valuable to have a war story like "The Boys of Winter" - a real war story, not a heroic fable - to show us how much fear can cost.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.