Friendships can be tricky enough when you’re an adult. For young children they can be mystifying and infuriating things where someone is your best friend one moment and someone you’re not speaking to the next. Eden Lee Murray, education director at Hawaii Theatre, says that “Noodle Doodle Box,” a play about two bickering clowns, captures the dynamics of childhood friendship in ways that kids can identify with.

“Noodle Doodle Box” opens March 5 for three performances at Hawaii Theatre.

“Our audience is going to see themselves on stage,” Murray explained. “The story mirrors childhood friendship dynamics. It’s like ‘Do this or I won’t be your friend,’ and then it flips and the other person is in power. The thing that makes it so charming is that they switch back and forth between who’s in control.”

“They” are clowns named Zacharias and Pepper. Zacharias and Pepper each own a box — their own private space — that they love to show off but refuse to share. Kids who have siblings might see their own lives writ large as Zacharias and Pepper squabble and compete. Zacharias is bigger and stronger — the older sibling, if you will — but Pepper is nobody’s doormat, and there are times when he deliberately provokes Zacharias. But despite all the bickering, their friendship is stable and predictable until an outsider, the Drum Major, comes into the neighborhood.

Ben Moffat and Nathaniel Niemy star as Zacharias and Pepper, with Walter Gaines as the Drum Major. Mark Branner is the show’s director.

“The cast was hand-picked by Mark, who is himself a superlative clown,” Murray continued. Branner trained as a clown with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown Circus and then toured for a season as a professional circus clown before he enrolled at UCLA and earned a degree in theater. He subsequently studied the Chinese clown tradition in China. Moffat and Niemy also have had formal training in clowning, while Gaines has significant credits as a stage and television actor.

Murray has enjoyed watching them in rehearsal.

“To watch the three of them try and sort out ‘where’s the funny?’ has just been brilliant. It’s all the stuff that happens between the lines.”

“The clowns establish this relationship, and then into this relationship comes this sort of bully-clown drum major. He bangs his drum, and he seizes immediately on the dysfunction in their relationship. He upsets the balance in their relationship to his own advantage.”

Murray suggests that adults might also relate to the clowns’ experiences. After all, adults can enjoy Dr. Seuss and Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges as much as kids do. Some adults might see in Zacharias and Pepper something of the enigmatic relationship between Vladimir and Estragon in “Waiting for Godot.”

She says children will “get it” immediately on a personal level.

“‘How do you make a friend? How do you lose a friend? What do you do to get a friend back when you’ve hurt their feelings?’ I’m hoping its going to provoke discussion in the car on the way home, and between siblings, because they live this.”