To Survive, Just Keep Talking A WALK IN THE WOODS

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Nuclear-arms negotiation does not sound like a promising topic for a play, particularly not for a comedy. Visions come to mind of tables thumped and warheads somberly debated, of apocalypse incurred by accident or satirized with Dr. Strangelove glee. The pop-culture memory remains cluttered with the tendentious alarmism of the 1960s and with more recent, ham-fisted TV mega- epics such as World War III and The Day After. It is hard to see how any narrative on the subject could avoid being either dogged and dull or archly ironic and malicious. But Playwright Lee Blessing has brought it off. His A Walk in the Woods is a work of passion and power with the ring of political truth. It is not only the best of the few dramas to reach Broadway this season, it is also the funniest comedy.

Blessing's jumping-off point is the real-life chat between U.S. Negotiator Paul Nitze and Soviet Delegate Yuli Kvitsinsky, as they strolled in private during arms-control talks in Geneva in 1982. At the time, a legion of reporters speculated about what Nitze and Kvitsinsky said in their confab. Blessing clearly felt the higher calling was to evoke what they should have said. His Soviet negotiator, far from a typical xenophobe, is worldly, urbane and cynical. His American diplomat is stuffy, didactic, socially inept but fervently idealistic about averting a nuclear horror. The two grow close, if not quite friendly, in their occasional walks between formal negotiations. The Soviet is able to be blunt when he explains to the American why the Kremlin must reject what both sides agree is a fair and useful arms-control plan: "We don't trust you."

A Walk in the Woods debuted a year ago at the Yale Repertory Theater, then went on to the La Jolla Playhouse, near San Diego. Very little of the language has changed during its development. The biggest changes have come in what used to be the stateliest speeches, which the author has made more spontaneous. Director Des McAnuff and Set Designer Bill Clarke have been involved throughout. But the two-character show has had three casts, and the nuances of performance and even physiognomy have strikingly altered the play's political impact.

The Yale production stressed the dichotomy between Old World awareness of the burdens of the past and New World faith in the perfectibility of man. This is downplayed by the Broadway cast. So is the Soviet's seductive charm in comparison with his American colleague's priggishness. Sam Waterston makes the U.S. delegate appealing even when he is obsessive. This gifted but erratic actor hits a career high with a scene in which he reveals the personal strain of feeling responsible for the fate of mankind. As the Soviet, Robert Prosky has most of the more poetic speeches, but he looks lumpishly like Khrushchev and erupts in rage just often enough to arouse an onlooker's caution.

In this production the characters' differences remain vivid, but their common fate is more clear. Each has a conscience; each devotes his life to the paramount issue of survival; yet neither can feel any sense of accomplishment, or any hope of guiding his country out of the woods of Mutual Assured Destruction. Their highest achievement is to keep talking. As the Soviet says in a poignant valedictory, "Our time together has been a very great failure. But -- a successful one."