Stage:

...Sam Water-ston's voice breaks as he speaks Honeyman's lines about hope...

...As so often happens in the theater, happily in this case, the event contradicted the expectation...

...Botvinnik is a veteran of the negotiation wars, a charmer whose ingratiating manner is both a ploy and a reflection of his personality...

...The seed of the play was the celebrated walk in the woods that Paul Nitze and Yuli Kvitsinsky took in Geneva in 1982, during which - away from the constraints of the negotiating table and their hovering staffs - they came up with an agreement that promised progress in the apparently endless arms reduction talks...

...It does not help that the woods here look like nothing so much as a stage set...

...The encounter fascinated Blessing who saw a play in it although, as he told Herbert Mitgang (New York Times, January 21), in one of my least favorite locutions, he "wasn't into writing about a historical event...

...Nor is the 1982 plan presented here...

...It was rejected by their countries, but the walk, if not the aborted plan, remains a symbol of possibility...

...In fact, no plan is - no catalogue of weapons and possible reductions, no avalanche of acronyms to befuddle the audience...

...Although the characters sometimes share scenes, my memory of the play is of each of the performers in her own playing area, separate, whatever the speeches might suggest about attachment...

...Blessing's play is about the process and its effect on the two men...

...The hope and the breaking voice both seem appropriate...

...The positive suggestion at this point is that two men, different in personality as in nationality, can meet on the common ground of their concern for the survival of the earth...

...I do not think that this is intentional since Blessing's lines and McAnuff s own remarks in the second Times interview define the woods as a natural force, a release from the formality of negotiation...

...In the course of the play, Botvinnik breaks through the priggishness of Honeyman and Honeyman circumvents the playfulness of Botvinnik...

...Two interesting characters, impressively played-that is the note of hope in A Walk in the Woods...

...it has since been performed at other regional theaters, although it has not yet reached New York...

...Nor should we...

...Botvinnik's jokes, his talk of friendship, his preoccupation with trivial matters at first seem to Honeyman to be calculated attempts to avoid serious negotiations...

...this is not an assertion of faith but a cry of desperation...

...The contrast in the two performances echoes a surface contrast between the characters which their shared concern belies...

...Robert Prosky's Botvinnik is the diplomat as clown, but he seems to try a bit too hard...

...from the beginning, the actor hints at the unhappy underside of his cheerful character: Waterston, faced with Prosky's effervescent performance and with the fact that the Russian gets most of the funny lines, asserts his presence on stage by allowing both his body and his voice to harden into a professional propriety that is never far from querulousness...

...A Walk in the Woods has now come to Broadway...

...STAGE THE FOREST & THE TREES BLESSING'S 'WALK' My introduction to Lee Blessing's work came in 1986 with the premiere of Eleemosynary at the Philadelphia Festival Theatre of New Plays...

...I like to think that A Walk in the Woods is a little more optimistic than the Reagan-Gorbachev meeting," Blessing told Mitgang, but the play - as it is performed - is much more pessimistic than this declaration suggests...

...It was not a work that interested me very much...

...There are too many conflicting internal pressures in both countries, and the most one can expect are continued talks...

...The Russian agrees to take Honeyman's project to his government...

...Despite the importance of its subject matter, A Walk in the Woods, as a play, is finally less interesting for its political statements than for its depiction of the two men and what negotiations do to them...

...GERALD WEALESALD WEALES...

...Honeyman is a more familiar character - or two characters...

...He is the rigid personality softened into amiability against his better judgment, but he is also the educated innocent, the man destined to learn that good sense and good intentions are not sure winners in a complex world...

...Despite his dark analysis of the game they are playing, Botvinnik, who is resigning, urges Honeyman to stay on and deal with his replacement, and Honeyman insists that he still has hope...

...Des McAnuff, the director, moves the actors so that wherever they come to rest they convey artificiality...

...As I write this, Secretary Shultz and Foreign Minister Shevardnadze have announced first steps toward a treaty on longdistance weapons while some members of the Congress and the Senate are talking about improving (i.e., undercutting) last year's agreement on intermediate- and short-range missiles...

...A plan is offered and accepted onstage and rejected offstage, but what it contains we never know...

...Despite the title, which refers to one character's fondness for words, it is a conventional exploration of differences and allegiances among three generations - grandmother, mother, daughter...

...The actors go beneath that surface by playing physical and vocal variations on their central reading of the character-Waterston's surprising moments of relaxation, Prosky's sudden shifts to an abrupt and businesslike voice...

...Both the Mitgang piece and a later Times group interview (February 21) indicate that the playwright, the director, and the performers are absorbed by the public, the political side of A Walk in the Woods...

...Honeyman is a specialist with a reputation as a successful negotiator at lower levels who for the first time brings his certainty about his skills to top-level meetings...

...When Honeyman's country rejects his own plan (the president tells him not to try too hard), it falls to Botvinnik to explain what he has learned from his years at the table - neither of the superpowers wants an agreement...

...There are some problems with the production...

...When Botvinnik reveals his own sense of emptiness as a way of tempering Honeyman's courage and pain, the play becomes moving both for their shared loss and for their attempt to reassert possibility...

...Little wonder that I failed to build up a head of anticipation at the news that Blessing was at work on a two-character play about arms negotiators...

...Before the play ends, they can be seen as survival devices, for the man not the world - Botvinnik's reaction to his sense that he has been working for years in an arena of predetermined failure...

...These infelicities become unimportant in the face of the two fine performances...

...His characters - John Honeyman and Andrei Botvinnik - are not attempts to depict Nitze and Kvitsinsky...