The Kennedy Theatre production of "Battle of Will" gives the University of Hawai'i's theater season a shot in the arm  or maybe a hard punch to its solar plexus.

Written by young French playwright Laurent Gaude, with translation by David Greig, "Battle of Will" is an almost allegorical tale of corrupt power and violence. Directed by Markus Wessendorf, new to the UH faculty, the play has a lean, hungry look and tension that pulls you away from your seat.

Sleazy criminals deliver film-noir-style clipped, direct dialogue, and the tone is shadowy, ominous and foreboding.

The action unrolls in a bleak, barren urban landscape, alternating between a coldly modern apartment in the Avalon Hotel and the desolate, wasteland graveyard behind it. The central characters are Boss, an underworld lord who murders his opposition seemingly at will, and Killer, a young man seeking revenge for the Boss-ordered gangland murder of his family.

Act 1 ends with a plot twist: Boss wants Killer to become his son and carry on his legacy of terror  something of an insurance policy enabling Boss to maintain his grip even after his death. The play's title derives from the struggle that results when Boss and Killer lock horns.

The spare plot is enriched by character soliloquies and voice-overs that reflect on the personal impact of such a violent struggle, and by the observations of a couple of pairs of bodyguards and gravediggers.

Boss has his victims' bodies bound hand and foot before burial to prevent them from clawing their way to the surface. To cement their new relationship, he insists that Killer enjoy a prostitute as soon as Boss has finished with her. Murders are business deals driven by market costs, and winning in all things is the paramount goal.

But it's the production style and not its philosophy that holds our attention. Gunshots are single sharp cracks that make the audience collectively flinch. Deaths are staged in slow motion, freeze-frame style, with black-hooded stagehands manipulating bodies through their death throes. Scenes are stopped to rearrange the spare scenery and to view continuing action from a reverse perspective.

Wessendorf pulls fresh, intense performances from everyone in the cast. Alexander Jacob Hubbard is immediately likable as the fixed but nervous Killer. Peter T. Ruocco is crisply amoral as Boss. Travis Rose and Andrew Valentine neatly articulate limited views as the Bodyguards, and Savada J. Gilmore and Nina Buck add comic commentary as the Gravediggers. R. David Wyllie, Maryann L. Peterson, Maxwell Smart and Lisa Anne Nilsen turn in solid performances in supporting roles.