On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage NUCLEAR EXCHANGES BY LEO SAUVAGE Two diplomats, an American and a Russian, are discussing terms for mutual arms reduction. Their conversation takes place in the...
...He has been hardened by disappointment, and his wryly cynical tone suggests an underlying hopelessness...
...Andrey Botvinnik (Robert Prosky) is older and more experienced than his interlocutor...
...Indeed, some might be disturbed that Blessing and director Des McAnuff have endowed the Russian official with qualities of subtlety, depth and humor that far surpass those discernible in the American...
...The play manages to teach us something without being the least bit didactic...
...Whether it lasts for years or, because of its unconventional subject, has a more limited run, it will surely rank among the most interesting plays of many a Broadway season...
...It is as though in responding to the challenge of humanizing the unorthodox Soviet diplomat, Blessing and McAnuff got carried away and made his counterpart into a bit of a foil...
...Yet it was evidently not Blessing's intention merely to give a dramatized account of this: His four half-acts see Botvinnik and Honeyman having four different conversations in the glade-one in each season of the year-and the American character is in many ways the antithesis of Nitze...
...The play was inspired by a well-known incident: In the summer of 1982, Yuli A. Kvitsinsky and Paul H. Nitze stepped away from a deadlocked arms reduction session in Geneva for a stroll in a nearby park, and returned with a breakthrough compromise (which ultimately proved unacceptable to hardliners on both sides...
...Their conversation takes place in the traditionally neutral atmosphere of Switzerlandnot across one of the tables usually reserved for this purpose, but "in a pleasant woods on the outskirts of Geneva...
...To avoid giving the impression that I was utterly overcome with pleasure by a Broadway play simply because it was well enough turned out not to require roller skates, let me end by registering a tiny cavil: Why is the winter scene signaled by an unbelievably dense fog that has as little to do with Geneva weather as it does with the clarity of Woods' insight into the minds of the negotiators...
...A Walk in the Woods marks a promising Broadway debut for Blessing, who has an undeniable flair for stage writing...
...The ever hopeful Honeyman stays on in Geneva to deal with his successor...
...Disarmament negotiations tend to be a crabbed and difficult businesshardly an obvious source for show material...
...The way they say it, however, is so gripping, so revealingly and wittily put that A Walk in the Woods can unambiguously be welcomed to New York's Booth Theater...
...McAnuff's direction is admirable, and Robert Prosky turns in one of the most skillful performances of his long career...
...Bill Clarke's stylish set cleverly extends the almost Chekhovian presence of the trees, paths and bench in the foreground by means of a framed painting of woods upstage...
...That is not to say this productionwhich came to New York from the La Jolla Playhouse in California via Yale -is perfect in every respect...
...There is a certain tediousness, moreover, to the strategics involved: Diplomatic teams are perfectly capable of rejecting a provision they agree with and would have liked to have proposed themselves simply because it has been broached by the other side...
...Lest this asymmetry in the two characters be taken as a reflection of political bias, it should be added that Botvinnik-whose disciplined sarcasm does not adequately mask an absence of illusions about his own country-is finally removed from the negotiations by his suspicious bosses...
...Thanks to Blessing's sure touch, we avidly follow the twisting path through the Geneva landscape, smiling all the while...
...Rather than getting lost in a jungle of issues and meanings, he uses the Geneva talks as an occasion for scrutinizing the minds and hearts of the opposed parties, drawing out their shared need to convince and be convinced as well as to prevail...
...He also has supplied enough sharp and shiny lines to give Woods plenty of dramatic drive...
...Paired with the youngish, eager John Honeyman (Sam Waterston), whose impulsive sincerity frequently erupts in fits of righteous shouting, Botvinnik is the one who inevitably fascinates us...
...Happily, the American playwright Lee Blessing has kept the technicalities and convolutions inherent in such exchanges to a minimum...
...What they say can be subjected to various and conflicting political interpretations...
Vol. 71 • March 1988 • No. 5
