Echoes

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

A courtly Soviet diplomat is explaining to his earnest, rumpled American counterpart why the Kremlin must reject what both sides agree is a fair and useful arms-control plan. They are standing in the one place they can be candid, a small stretch of forest near the villas where, with grave and formal ceremony, they daily meet. Shared frustration has made them intimates, if still not quite friends, so the answer is blunt: "We don't trust you." Long years at the table have persuaded the Soviet that neither government will actually reduce armaments; neither side can afford the risky belief that the other is acting in good faith. The value of talks, the Soviet continues, is the fact of talking rather than readying for war. "Our time together," he says, "has been a very great failure. But -- a successful one."

That poignant valedictory, like almost everything else in A Walk in the Woods, has the ring of political truth. Playwright Lee Blessing apparently was inspired by a real-life walk in the woods, between U.S. Negotiator Paul Nitze and Soviet Delegate Yuli Kvitsinsky, during arms-control talks in Geneva in 1983. His wry and engaging new work at the Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, Conn., persuasively imagines the human fabric of a similar fictional enterprise. Blessing's conceit is that the Soviet negotiator, far from a stereotypical xenophobe, is worldly, glib and cynical, while the American newcomer is stuffy, dogged, socially inept but passionately idealistic about averting a nuclear horror. This divergence triggers a very funny opening scene: the Soviet makes friendly overtures -- "Formality is simply anger with its hair combed" -- while the American priggishly resists and snaps, "I am disappointed by this. I thought you were more professional."

Blessing's best previous work has been about families: War of the Roses (1985), a knock-down, drag-out marital combat, and Eleemosynary (1986), a dark comedy about how parents live through their children. Walk, by contrast, features provocative political notions: that deadly arsenals are essential to being a superpower ("Without nuclear weapons, America is Canada, only with more people") and that the prospect of Armageddon is titillating to much of mankind ("The most exciting thing in the world is to know we can destroy the world. Like that!")

Yet Walk is no mere docudrama or soapbox spiel. Like Shaw, who might have written this play, Blessing evokes his characters as men and not just mouthpieces. He is greatly aided by Director Des McAnuff's understated staging, fine performances from Josef Sommer as the Soviet and Kenneth Welsh as the American, and Bill Clarke's remarkable set: a soil-capped hillside, 29 tree trunks shooting straight up into the skies and, on the far back wall, a framed picture of yet another woods, a reminder that these conversations will echo around the world.