Individuals, families and nations -- all have lives, though the first two are more frequently dramatized. At least that's where American theater conventionally puts the focus, probably because it's easier to get them on stage but also because we seem to be more wary of the large political canvas than, say, European playwrights.

		'Jonathan' Where: Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company, 542 Penn Ave., Downtown. When: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday. Tickets: $7.50-$15. 412-288-0358.

That's what's remarkable about "Jonathan," the awkward but interesting first full-length play by Pittsburgher Judy Meiksin, now being given its premiere by Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre. It deals with the title character's obsessive search for the truth about his parents. But it does so in the city of Haifa in 1947 and 1948 -- dates that bracket the founding of the modern state of Israel, born out of the British protectorate of Palestine by vote of the U.N. general assembly.

Unsurprisingly, then, Jonathan's family story is bound up in the Holocaust. He is what they call a "new Jew," raised in Palestine by surrogate parents, to distinguish him from the refugees from European carnage who flock to the new/old promised land. But his parents were from that great Polish-Russian eastern European Jewish heartland, and it is their epic struggle to save his life, mysteriously hinted at in surviving letters, that he wants to understand.

So Jonathan's individual life is richly paralleled in that of the new state. He searches for his own family roots while the state suffers the pangs of its birth amid guerrilla war, both being born out of tragedy and struggling toward hope.

There is also the matter of his name, which doesn't make a very gripping play title but alerts us to the fabled history of the Jews in the time of the moody King Saul and his son, Jonathan, beloved of David. Meiksin clearly intends this deep parallel, since Saul is the name she gives to Jonathan's paternal uncle, who is his moody surrogate (or is it adoptive?) father. This Saul's wife is named Rachel (she who weeps for her children and for whom Jacob labored 14 years), and this Jonathan's beloved is Miriam (sister of Moses).

Whether all these potent biblical allusions knit together into a coherent allegory, I'm not able to say. It may simply be that any traditional Jewish name, like any Near-Eastern location, inevitably ties into millennia of history and legend.

And the fact is that the struggles of statehood in Meiksin's play, conveyed in bits of radio broadcast and sounds of celebration and fighting in the streets, really just form an instructive background. The history is interesting, but it's the family the play is about.

The conflict is between Jonathan's drive to know about his parents and the determination of the others, especially Saul, to "protect" him against the tragic truth. Miriam, too, is protecting him (or herself) against acknowledgment of the role she played in the French Resistance, which has left her, a composer and musician, unable to perform for soldiers.

So the main conflict is over things not said, which results in a lot of glum silence and Jonathan's having to pout and whine. It's a dramaturgical difficulty that would trouble a playwright more skilled than Meiksin. Of course, the emotional solution is clear enough to us today, with our pop self-help gospel of redemption through confession.

I recognize that there are legitimate historic inhibitions, like the Holocaust repression of later years. But the refusal to help Jonathan's quest seems quixotic, even arbitrarily imposed by the playwright. Don't they see it deprives him of the very stability they seek to protect? The play is only 97 minutes, including intermission -- the characters could use more development.

This awkwardness impacts most on Jeff Simpson's Jonathan, who has to kvetch to the point of self-indulgence. J.P. Patrick's Saul has a similar problem -- his impassioned defenses aside, his silence is often unbelievable. Such withholding is better motivated in Bridget Carey's Miriam, but it does force a non-dramatic taciturnity on her, too.

All three provide earnest acting, especially Carey, who also gets to show flashes of poetry in her composing and lyrics. Pat Samreny is a believably sympathetic Rachel, but Charlotte Sonne struggles with the artificial role of a Crazy Woman who is not, of course of course, really crazy at all.

Eileen J. Morris directs. She is black, which is relevant because in other projects, Pittsburgh Playwrights has a policy of assigning black playwrights to white plays and vice versa. In this case, the experienced Morris was probably just the best person for the job. Ditto the actors, who may or may not (mainly not) be Jewish but who manage what sound to me like convincing accents, although why they use accents at all is a larger issue for another time.

The point is that Pittsburgh Playwrights, led by Mark Southers, cares about ethnic collaboration, providing another parallel to Meiksin's play, set in an area riven with ethnic conflict, which it is hoped recalls collaboration among Jews, Britons and Arabs.