STAGE REVIEW : Poetic View of War : Stephen MacDonald’s two-character play, “Not About Heroes,” argues that Wilfred Owen was in the same class as T. S. Eliot.

When there’s a crowd on stage, the small moments are usually lost. In a spare work of chamber theater, the moments suddenly loom large.

In director Michael Holmes’ staging of Ste phen MacDonald’s two-character “Not About Heroes,” at the Chandler Studio in North Hollywood, what begins as a moment becomes a suggestive, repeated effect: Joseph Dean Vachon’s Wilfred Owen and Claus Mory’s Siegfried Sassoon, English poet-soldiers corresponding with each other in World War I, read a page, finish it, then drop the page as it floats to the stage floor like a falling leaf in autumn. Or like a falling young soldier in combat.

This kind of metaphorical reading is encouraged here, partly because Owen’s verse celebrates metaphor (Boston Hertert’s set has a painted scrim that could itself be a metaphor for death or simply a Flanders field).

That isn’t to say that Owen’s work is celebratory; it is grim, hard poetry on the futility of war. At least one critic has argued that had Owen survived the war (he was killed one week before Armistice), T. S. Eliot would have had to share the spotlight with him.

MacDonald’s drama argues that Owen was in Eliot’s class because of the combination of the war’s bloody, terrifying inspiration and the strong encouragement of fellow poet Sassoon. Perhaps the finest quality in Mory’s performance as Sassoon is the almost fatherly patience he lends early on--even though he was of Owen’s generation--followed by his later sense of being eclipsed by the rising artist. You wonder if two, more competitive American poets would have had the same kind of chemistry.

In the intimate, comfortable Chandler Studio, Holmes stages this as a kind of duet, accented by Jesse Rivard’s Dutch Master-inspired lighting (unfortunately marred by too many sloppy light cues). Because Mory and Vachon are always listening to each other, and because the poets’ capacity for a deeper sexual passion is kept as a shimmering possibility, an uncommonly tender simpatico emerges that only reinforces MacDonald’s writing.

Just as the war toughened Owen into a real writer--we’re allowed to wonder in Vachon’s fine performance if peace would have produced the same results--so its background presence prevents “Not About Heroes” from being a precious literary curio. These are men who think of the Greeks during the height of battle, but rather than this seeming like some eccentricity inculcated by private schools, it makes them feel like men of the world, even . . . heroic.

Where and When

What: “Not About Heroes.”

Location: Chandler Studio, 12443 Chandler Blvd., North Hollywood.

Hours: 8 p.m. Fridays through Sundays, indefinitely.

Price: $12.50

Call: (818) 780-6516.