The Buddy System : Comic ‘Friends’ has serious bent, exploring personal crisis and relationship of longtime pals.

There have been stories, songs, films and poems about friendship. Everyone knows about it and revels in it; some bemoan the lack of it. Playwright Lee Kalcheim has written a play about it, from a different angle, and with a different purpose.

Kalcheim’s “Friends,” opening tonight at the Little Victory Theatre, has a twist. But in that bending of circumstance, he takes the friendship between two unlikely college chums, who have not seen each other in a couple of years, and gives it a stature beyond pal-ship, beyond a poke in the arm during “Monday Night Football.”

Is this male bonding?

Kalcheim hates the word. “The play has nothing to do with maleness or bonding. I don’t know where that word came from. I always think about bonding with Super Glue. This is a rescue. It’s about a rescue. One person is falling through the ice. Both of these guys have trouble in their lives.”

The friends in question meet over a weekend in a country cabin. They were buddies when they were kids. They toured Europe together. They went to Yale together. They haven’t seen each other in awhile. Mel, the playwright says, is an expatriate New York Jew who never got his act together. At the moment he’s a cartoonist. Okie is a farmer’s son from Oklahoma, a Rhodes scholar, very Clinton-esque and successful, currently an assistant ambassador to the United Nations.

Mel has been trying to get in touch with Okie. He’s in a kind of crisis.

“That’s who you call when you’re in a crisis, your friends,” Kalcheim says.

Classically, the play is a comedy, but Kalcheim says it has a serious core. “I like to think that all comedy is substantive. Good comedy has legs; it’s grounded in reality. That’s the funny thing, just watching people behave.”

Kalcheim has barely had time to watch the preparation of this West Coast premiere of his play. He’s busy as co-executive producer and co-creator of Gene Wilder’s new series, “Something Wilder,” which debuts Oct. 1 on NBC. As a playwright, he’s familiar as author of “Breakfast With Les and Bess.” He knows about comedy, even when it’s serious.

When he began writing “Friends,” Kalcheim says he wasn’t trying to make a statement. “I don’t think I thought that way,” he says. “I just wanted to talk about friendship. I think it’s crucial. Jean-Paul Sartre said that hell is other people. I think hell is the absence of other people.”

The production’s director, Rudy Gaines, was attracted to the play at first by the fact that the protagonists had not seen each other for a period of time.

“People drift apart from each other,” Gaines says. “Nobody gets through life without something happening that kind of stretches a relationship apart. That dynamic appealed to me, that these two guys had to get past this period that had gone by, to reattach immediately. You get to it through being familiar with each other. But it’s a struggle.”

Gaines, with a busy theater background, is writing several development projects for the big screen, including “Ivanhoe” for New Line Cinema.

Someone in “Friends” is looking for help, and Gaines says that “a lot of people don’t realize how difficult it is to actually go to somebody, even a friend, and say, ‘I really need your help.’ The interesting thing in the play is the revelation of the need. It doesn’t just hit you in the face. It’s something one of the characters really needs to figure out. The play is the uncovering, piece by piece, of what the core problem is.”

Gaines is careful to point out that “Friends” is not just a guys’ play. “There’s no howling or chanting or biting chicken heads off,” he says. “It’s about two people, and there’s a lot of insight into not only how men are, but how human beings are and how friends, whether they’re men or women, react to each other. There’s something in it for everyone.”

The ability to tightly focus on the two characters in “Friends,” without the gorgeous scenery and car chases of film and television, is one of the reasons Kalcheim keeps returning to writing for the stage.

“It’s the great challenge,” he explains. “I really like coming from the inside of characters, and pitting interesting people against each other.

“The nice thing about television,” he says with a laugh, “is that it pays. It’s hard to make a living in theater. And more people will see one episode of ‘Something Wilder’ than will probably see all of my plays, in all of their productions, as long as I live. That’s daunting, and quite wonderful.”

WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Friends.”

Location: Little Victory Theatre, 3324 W. Victory Blvd., Burbank.

Hours: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Oct. 30.

Price: $15.

Call: (818) 841-5421.